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Janet Kenney’s My Heart and My Flesh
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
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They say there’s a match for everyone, but what happens when Mom, who sacrificed so much to raise you, doesn’t approve of him? That’s the question at the core of Janet Kenney’s touching yet humorous My Heart and My Flesh, which is in its world premiere at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (through May 14). Ma, played by Karen MacDonald as a weather-beaten but hard-boiled matriarchal supremacist, works at a doughnut shop and raises Emily, same as she’s done for 30 years. Call it the anti–Glass Menagerie, as Ma is not inclined to take to any gentleman calling on her developmentally challenged daughter. Parents are often overprotective gatekeepers, but Ma is more like a personal bodyguard with a tightly wound, zany side. Then when Emily is fired from her job, her dimwitted but earnest co-worker, Lamar (Richard Arum), arrives with a head full of rosy ideas about marriage, child rearing, and the responsibilities of "real men." He proposes, gets Emily pregnant, and shacks up in the cramped apartment in a time-lapse sequence, and Ma boils like a lover scorned. The first 20 minutes do suggest you’re in for just another clash of wills in the living room, but Emily, played by Helen McElwain with a vacant look and childlike candidness, puts a distinct kink in the family fabric, and once her disability comes into focus, the actors start to knit their characters’ psychological tapestries. As the wooing unfolds with playground sensibility and the tension between Ma and Lamar develops, Kenney shows herself a shrewd anatomist of the dynamics of relationships and the process of transference of care — a particularly sticky procedure given Emily’s deficiencies and resulting nonchalance toward her pregnancy, Lamar’s naive earnestness, and Ma’s heavy-duty bond with her daughter. Kenney’s love triangle is pressured three ways by black humor and chilling seriousness. I hope that this production, a joint enterprise of Kenney’s own Bud Productions and Coyote Theatre, will reinvigorate the dormant Coyote, whose artistic director, Courtney O’Connor, is at the helm. She plays lightly with the script, engineering laughs at unexpected moments, coaxing intensity from her actors, and unearthing evidence that even matches that ignite passion can cause injury and damage — especially when supervised.
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