My Mother's Funeral: The Show
Directed by Charlotte Bennett
15 Vandam Street, Manhattan, NYC
January 4-25, 2024
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| Debra Baker and Nicole Sawyerr. Photo by Nicola Young |
Death is commonly said to be the great leveler, Hamlet's "fine revolution" of fortunes. But are all of us really born astride the same grave? What if we can't even afford one? In
My Mother's Funeral: The Show, a socially and psychologically incisive new play from London-based playwright and performer Kelly Jones, Abigail (Nicole Sawyerr), who is, like Jones, a working-class playwright, must confront not only the emotional but also the financial cost of her mother Linda's (Debra Baker) death, both of which are considerable. The marvelous production of
My Mother's Funeral currently at SoHo Playhouse is part of the venue's 2025 International Fringe Encore Theater Series, which runs from January 2nd through March 2nd and provides extended runs to shows from "
emerging artists who show exceptional talent at each season’s Fringe Festivals."
Abigail herself has demonstrated such talent, judging by her commission to write a new play for a company represented by an unnamed director (Samuel Armfield). The problem, though, as soon becomes clear, is that the director is not interested in Abigail's queer sci-fi work in progress, asserting that what audiences really want is something gritty and authentic. Of course, his–and his audiences'–idea of working-class authenticity may not align all that well with what Abigail wants to say, a disconnect neatly established in the play's opening moments when the director interrupts Abigail as she is about to speak for the first time into a microphone on a raised platform at center stage that will be cleverly employed at later points to dramatize Abigail's writing process. At the same time that Abigail looks to be losing a major source of income, she is learning how many thousands of pounds a funeral (itself a type of show) and burial for her recently deceased mother would cost. The sum is far more than Abigail has or can get access to, and, while she is staunchly resistant to the idea of having her beloved mother buried by the council (the local government) in a shared grave, she has only two weeks to claim the body before exactly that happens.
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| Samuel Armfield and Nicole Sawyerr. Photo by Nicola Young |
A solution to this dilemma seems to present itself: Abigail can write the sort of "real" story from "real people" that the director wants by writing about her mother's death. However, as the process moves along, it becomes clear that Abigail's actual experience, which she has not revealed to be the basis for this newest play, is not offering what the director and his audiences want: poverty porn that allows its paying customers virtuous discomfort from a safe, insulated vantage point and reinforces their views of the working classes. Pointedly, those involved find Abigail's new work unrealistic; and her attempts to give them enough of what they want for her to be able to give her deceased mother the kind of funeral and burial that Abigail thinks that her mother would have wanted lead to a number of cuttingly funny moments, such as, to take two brief examples among many, when we see her trying on a stereotypical tough, street voice that is clearly not her own or when a set designer (Debra Baker) equates dirt with working-class realism. Another thread that takes up disjunctive perceptions involves Abigail's brother, Darren (Samuel Armfield), who, like Abigail, is far from a working-class stereotype. Abigail admires if not idealizes her mother, but Darren, while supportive of his sister, maintains that he had a very different and much less rosy experience of growing up as Linda's child, a divergence that causes some friction between the siblings. As it knits these threads together,
My Mother's Funeral compellingly raises questions including who theater is for, how much an artist should compromise to get something produced–not to mention to get paid–and whether the burial for which Abigail is potentially willing to cede her artistic voice is even what Linda would have wanted.
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| Nicole Sawyerr. Photo by Nicola Young |
Armfield and Baker are superb in their multiple roles, whether as, respectively, the obliviously classist director and actor playing the fictionalized version of Abigail's mother or Darren (practical and sensitive) and Linda (warm and jocular). Sawyerr renders Abigail's loss and desperation as palpable as her love and integrity, and makes all of it captivating. The sound design, by Asaf Zohar, uses snatches of feedback to excellent effect, marking moments of strong anxiety for Abigail, especially times when she gets close to saying the word "died" aloud in reference to her mother; and the sound and Joshua Gadsby's lighting design are fundamental to a great late scene in which Abigail's stressors come overwhelmingly together. Wonderfully paced and staged,
My Mother's Funeral presents a funny, emotionally powerful intersectional critique of classism. Its subtitle,
The Show, gestures to the performance's layers of metatheatricality and (un)reality, and its beguiling closing image, involving paper snow that links us to Abigail's memories and echoes the paper food made by Darren's daughter, reminds us of the unreliability of what we think to be true and the power, both positive and negative, of (theatrical) illusion.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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