'Night Mother gives audience heavy emotional experience

Director hopes to offer inspiring message from a bleak story line

In a kitchen, two people talk: a mother and her middle-aged daughter. The daughter goes to the attic and returns with a gun. "I'm going to kill myself, mother," she announces.

From this point a night unfolds, a night filled up with a long, final conversation in which these two people tell the truths they never could before. The secrets of a lifetime are revealed in casual conversation as an audience watches, feeling increasingly uncomfortable with their voyeurism.

This is 'Night, Mother, a play by Marsha Norman.

Make no mistake about it - this is not exactly a happy theater going experience. One comes out of it wondering what it would be like if a close friend had cancer (not that cancer was mentioned in the play, only epilepsy). It's that kind of production.

Specifically, it's an OSTA production directed by sophomore Lauren Jacobs and starring sophomore Dana Kotler as the daughter, Jessie, and senior Emily Harville as Mama. And while generally good, the play is not exactly perfect.

As previously mentioned, there are a few minutes of normal conversation before the statement that drives the rest of the play. Unfortunately, the actors don't take their time in this segment, rushing through it, and in the process, skim over some information that will be important later on. We also don't get much chance to see the characters as normal people before they are thrown into this abnormal situation. Furthermore, the line is tossed off conversationally, and the ensuing lines are played this way, too.

From there, though, the actors warm up and settle into their characters. They are best when conversing normally, and often have trouble hitting the extremes. Harville in particular has trouble producing the emotions Mama must emit - the shock, sorrow, and anger. When she tries to entice Jessie with pleasant alternatives, her delivery is not much different from when she is talking about her (unloved) dead husband. It's a tough role, though, much tougher than the angsty Jessie.

Generally, we are often aware that the actors have a script - they tend to anticipate what's going to happen. But as the play progresses, we feel ourselves drawn in by two people who are undeniably real. At first this sense of the ordinary is distracting, but as the actors connect with each other and roll the lines off each other, the play begins to become wholly engrossing.

The only other distracting thing is the movement. Set designer sophomore Mary Ellen Wedick has produced a dead-on representation of a rural kitchen, complete with cramped stove and orange wallpaper, with a central table where the characters sit and talk. However, they don't do this nearly enough; while the actors can hardly be expected to sit still during a play, normally people sit still and just talk while having very serious conversations like this. The instances when they get up and walk around to break the tension are well handled, but there are far too many of them.

"I hope this play inspires the audience to live life to the fullest," director Jacobs said. It is, perhaps, an odd conclusion to draw from such a dark play, but one that the actors try to push. Kotler's rendition of Jessie speaks of her death as an inevitability, one motivated not by present sorrow but by the pressing of 50 yearsâ pain, and the final regret of a life unlived. Her mother tries to pull her back from it because in her daughter, she sees much of herself, and the bravery to face the death she is so frightened of. Mama is so tired of life that she cannot quite muster the strength to pull her daughter back from its ending. But by this point , there was really little hope for her salvation, and that is precisely why Jessie does what she does.

'Night Mother shows tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m., and 2 p.m. Saturday in Wilder Main.

Weary and on edge: Sophomore Dana Kotler as a woman confronting sorrow, pain and death in 'Night Mother. (photo by Laren Rusin)