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The MOMologues is baby food for thought
BY SALLY CRAGIN
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The MOMologues
By Lisa Rafferty, Stefanie Cloutier, and Sheila Eppolito. Directed by Lisa Rafferty. Lighting by Ken Elliott. Costumes by Kimmerie Jones. With Jennifer Burke, Stefanie Cloutier, Charlotte Dietz, Cinda Donovan, Lisa Caron Driscoll, Jane Eyler, Joanna Perry, Lea Renay, Ellen Stone, Holly Vanasse, and Maria Wardwell. At the Stuart Street Playhouse 2nd Stage through May 9.
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The road from here to maternity is seldom smooth. An infrequently amusing new revue, The MOMologues (first produced at the ICA Theatre in 2002), suggests that no matter how reliable one’s support system is, women who reproduce are On Their Own. This two-act collection of sketches and narrative fragments presents a rotating cast of four female performers describing the travails of getting and staying pregnant, the allegedly unspeakable agony of labor, the incandescent delight of seeing the little one, and the hell of getting through the day (and night) with a newborn. Whether this is your experience or not, it’s an ambitious agenda. "One of the most surreal parts of becoming a mother is that every cliché you ever heard comes true," writes co-author/director Lisa Rafferty in the program notes. Unfortunately, though the clichés she and her collaborators, Stefanie Cloutier and Sheila Eppolito, focus on are occasionally comic, they’re also neurotically downbeat. Act one presents the four performers (on the night I attended, Cloutier, Jennifer Burke, Cinda Donovan, and Ellen Stone) exploring pregnancy/birth themes; act two focuses on the multi-child family as a sort of sine qua non. This show presumes that maternity takes place within the boundaries of a secure, heterosexual marriage with enough financial stability so that mommy stays home with the little one and then bitterly resents the limitations and the lack of intellectual stimulation that ensue. The pleasures are invariably outweighed by the deprivations, which are numerous, relentless, and ultimately monotonous. Also monotonous are the production and the pacing. The Stuart Street Playhouse 2nd Stage in the Radisson Hotel is merely a platform at one end of a function room, with café tables and chairs — the kind of casual set-up that requires enormous charisma and energy from the cast. And a cast that ranges from amateurish to competent isn’t helped by the scattered story structure. Each character describes being pregnant and occasionally comes "on stage" with one of those strap-on pillows beneath her shirt (she may then return without it), but there’s little to distinguish their individual stories. There’s also very little continuity — the kind one might expect if a phenomenon as linear as pregnancy is going to be explored. As the new mother of a thoroughly engaging and endlessly amusing eight-month old, I went to The MOMologues hoping to hear aspects of my own experience explored. And there were eerie moments of synchronicity. When Ellen Stone described bowdlerizing the words to "Rockabye Baby" because that "bough breaks" part was just too fraught for her over-stimulated emotions, I was delighted — I’d done my own version of censorship the very night before. And I could definitely identify with a hardcore treatise delivered by Cinda Donovan on the advantages of breast feeding, even as, I’m sure, other moms in the audience found the pro-formula argument compelling. But for the most part, the show not only reinforces gender stereotypes (pregnant women are emotional and hate the way they look) but also gives no credit to partners, helpmeets, or co-parents. And that oversight seems more strained than the stuff in Gerber’s Stage 2 baby-food jars. Where The MOMologues shows a spark is in the occasional playwriting moment. The four performers deliver an amusing litany of the inevitable unwanted advice all pregnant women receive, and they cap off the scene by reciting in treacly unison: "It’s the toughest job you’ll ever love." Also enjoyable are the observation that all children’s songs can be reduced to two tunes and an ensemble scene patching together the well-worn lines from the best-known children’s books. More of that kind of thing and there’d be a show instead of a martyr-thon.
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