Mama Metal
Reviewed by Stephen Fife
IAMA Theatre Company
Through June 23
RECOMMENDED
At the opening of Sigrid Gilmer’s play Mama Metal, the lights come up on the playwright’s alter ego, Sterling Milburn (Courtney Sauls), who addresses the audience very directly — one might almost say confrontationally.
“You are all going to die,” she says. “Most of the shit you do in your lives will not matter.”
Regarding her play, she says, “There will be no takeaways. There will be no catharsis. It will be messy, complicated, flawed, and always beautiful. Just like life.”
This has all been pronounced with great seriousness, with the implicit accusation that the audience has been drawn here by a bourgeois notion of “entertainment.” But a moment later Sauls breaks into a big smile and says, “Hey, I’m just an actor.”
It is this dichotomy of deep rage and even deeper insecurity that gives Gilmer’s daughter-mother play its effectiveness, even its charm. It derives its power from a sense of emotional pain that is too large to deal with — so large in fact that the play isn’t able to contain it. The pain keeps spilling over the form that the playwright attempts to give it, like a huge wave that keeps sinking her vessel. Yet each time this happens, she binds together some floating planks and sets out again. Just like in life.
Branding her play a “Mama Drama” in that opening speech, Sterling invokes the two greatest American examples of that genre — Long Days Journey into Night and The Glass Menagerie — and then takes on those vaunted playwrights. “I hate Eugene O’Neill’s work,” Sterling says as O’Neill (Graham Sibley) enters. “Well, I hate your play,” O’Neill retorts, claiming that his drama is “universal” whereas hers is just a jumble of scenes thrown together in no particular order. “I love Tennessee Williams,” Sterling gushes when Tennessee (Jamie Wollrab) makes an appearance. “And I love you too, sugar-pie,” Tennessee declares, while also heaping praise on her work.
The setup of Mama Metal is deceptively simple. After years of frustration, disappointment and heartbreak brought on by her mother’s unstable lifestyle and parenting, Sterling finds the tables turned when she becomes her guardian. Her mom, Louise/Belle (Lee Sherman), has been confined to hospice care with a terminal disease. It is hard for Sterling to accept that this broken, wheelchair-bound husk of a woman is her mercurial parent, whose personality was almost too big for her life to contain. As she attempts to deal with her mother’s impending death, she conjures up a mix of memories of her mother’s life — both from her own experience and from stories that Louise/Belle has told her — along with fantasies of conversations they were never able to have. Yet even in memory/fantasy, her mother refuses to be pinned down, and Sterling feels a mounting pressure to come to terms with this incomprehensible loss.
IAMA Theatre, under the direction of Deena Selenow, has given Mama Metal a brilliantly tactile production. Each performer displays a deep commitment to bringing Gilmer’s vision to life, including Christian Telesmar and Cesar Cipriano who, as Sterling’s fantasy men, spend most of the play stripped to their boxer shorts. Courtney Sauls and Lee Sherman deliver spectacular performances. All the production designers have done excellent work too, with R.S. Buck’s moody lighting and sound designer Jeff Gardner’s heavy metal soundtrack being particular standouts.
It’s clear from the many times that Gilmer references both Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Glass Menagerie that these seminal plays were her guideposts, and that O’Neill’s play — which Sterling claims at the outset to hate — may have had the greater influence, with its dramatic fireworks and cries of despair. In this same vein, I side more with “O’Neill’s” take on Gilmer’s play than “Williams’.” While there is so much to admire here — especially the unflinching honesty with which Gilmer examines Sterling’s untenable situation — the play does indeed often seem like a jumble of scenes crashing into each other in a somewhat arbitrary manner. Nevertheless, it’s clear that here is a writer to keep track of, one who will likely write better plays in the future. For now, we have Mama Metal, and there’s a lot to be thankful for in that.
Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through Jun. 23. (323) 380-8843 or www.iamatheatre.com. Running time: 90 minutes with no intermission.
