Three Broadway Shows Put Motherhood in the Spotlight

If Vogel had ended her play there, with Phyllis shouting, “You have five minutes to pack up and get out,” then “Mother Play” would be another monster drama. Instead, Vogel tracks Phyllis’s strange, magnetic effect on her children and theirs on her. A lovely, if fleeting, rapprochement comes in 1978, when Martha coaxes her mother out to a gay club with her and Carl and then the family dances together. Tiny, pugnacious Keenan-Bolger plays Martha like a jackhammer, carrying the tension of her upbringing in her shoulders; Parsons fills up the space with huge looping gestures. Of the three actors, though, the only one who can actually get down on the dance floor is Lange. You learn a great deal about Phyllis’s frustrations and capacities by watching her groove to “Disco Inferno.”