Paula Vogel’s new play Mother Play will premiere on Broadway this spring and the cast leading the Tina Landau-directed production has been announced.
Tony Award winner Celia Keenan-Bolger, Academy Award, Emmy Award, and Tony Award winner Jessica Lange, and Emmy Award, Golden Globe Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award winner Jim Parsons will star in the world premiere of Mother Play. Part of Second Stage’s 45th Anniversary Season, it will begin previews at the Hayes Theater on April 3, 2024, with an opening date set for April 25, 2024.
Keenan-Bolger’s most recent Broadway outing was in To Kill a Mockingbird, for which her performance as Scout Finch earned her a Tony Award. Lange, known on the screen most recently for TV performances in American Horror Story and Feud, as well as for her Academy Award-winning turns in Blue Sky and Tootsie, was last on Broadway in A Long Day’s Journey into Night, winning the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Play. Parsons, who starred as Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory for 12 seasons, was seen last Off-Broadway in Classic Stage Company’s 2022 production of A Man of No Importance and on Broadway in the 2018 Tony Award-winning revival of The Boys in the Band.
From Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) comes Mother Play, a bitingly funny and unflinchingly honest new play about the hold our family has over us and the surprises we find when we unpack the past.
It’s 1962, just outside of D.C., and matriarch Phyllis (Jessica Lange) is supervising her teenage children, Carl (Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger), as they move into a new apartment. Phyllis has strong ideas about what her children need to do and be to succeed, and woe be the child who finds their own path. Bolstered by gin and cigarettes, the family endures — or survives — the changing world around them. Blending flares of imaginative theatricality, surreal farce, and deep tenderness, this beautiful rollercoaster ride reveals timeless truths of love, family, and forgiveness.
Mother Play will feature scenic design by David Zinn, costume design by Toni-Leslie James, lighting design by Jen Schriever, and sound design by Jill BC Du Boff. Casting is by The Telsey Office.