Gretchen Mol manages to rise above it all in the New Group’s THE GOOD MOTHER (photo by Monique Carboni)
Acorn Theatre, Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through December 22, $61.25
212-244-3380 ext305
www.thenewgroup.org
On the hit HBO series Boardwalk Empire, Gretchen Mol plays an extremely devoted mother — which includes having an unnatural sexual attraction for her son (Michael Pitt). The mother of two young children in real life, the forty-year-old Mol (Celebrity, The Notorious Bettie Page) is currently starring as the title character in the world premiere of the New Group’s The Good Mother, running through December 22 at Theatre Row. Mol plays Larissa, a thirty-three-year-old Mount Vernon woman with a deeply troubled past. As the play opens, Larissa is making sure goth college student Angus (Eric Nelsen) understands his responsibilities as he prepares to babysit for her four-year-old daughter, who is autistic and can communicate only through physical gestures. Larissa is going on her first date in a long time, with a trucker named Jonathan (Darren Goldstein) she met in a bar the night before. Angus later walks in on Larissa and Jonathan getting hot and heavy on the couch, and after she checks in on her daughter, she thinks Angus has done something seriously wrong to the young girl, leading to a barrage of accusations and revelations that slowly — ridiculously slowly — come to the surface as Larissa also meets with her former mentor, recovering alcoholic Joel (Mark Blum), who is Angus’s father, and her old boyfriend, Buddy (Afredo Narciso), who is about to become the local police lieutenant. In The Good Mother, playwright Francine Volpe (The Given) and director Scott Elliott (the New Group’s founding artistic director) have teamed up for an incredibly frustrating experience, giving out tiny tidbits of information and disinformation as the story progresses, leaving the audience in the dark — literally, as scenes end with the lights going out, the next scene beginning with the characters talking through the blackness before Jason Lyons’s lighting comes back on. Volpe and Elliott go out of their way to keep critical facts and details just out of reach, preventing the audience from knowing who’s who, how they’re related, and, basically, what’s really going on. All plays provide some level of necessary mystery, but The Good Mother goes way over the top in its obvious manipulation; Elliott even has Blum and Nelsen mumble most of their dialogue at such low volumes that it’s hard to simply hear what they’re saying, forget about what it actually means. But through it all, Mol, in Cynthia Rowley clothing, manages to give a fine performance, combining a tender vulnerability with a lurking danger that’s liable to burst out at any moment. Unfortunately, that’s not nearly enough to sustain what is being billed as a “psychological thriller” but turns out to be a series of tiresome mind games the writer and director lord over the audience, who knows when they’re being toyed with.