Review: In "Mater Familias," the More Things Change, the More a Family Stays the Same

Mater Familias

Written by Pier Lorenzo Pisano

Translated by Carlotta Brentan

Directed by Emma Denson

Presented by Kairos Italy Theater in collaboration with The Tank at The Tank

312 W 36th St., Manhattan, NYC

May 4-18, 2025

Early in Mater Familias, by Pier Lorenzo Pisano, one character describes the nose of a buried woman as sticking out of the earth like a mushroom on a rainy day. Mushrooms, of course, are linked to one another and to the roots of trees by extensive underground networks of mycelium in relationships that are mostly beneficial but in some cases are parasitic. Roots in Mater Familias act as a symbol for family history and relationships, simultaneously representing connection and entrapment. A visual image of roots even appears, at a pivotal moment, on the set's CRT television, which at other points shows static or a test pattern and on and next to which sit VHS tapes from Blockbuster, all in themselves signs of pastness, and perhaps of a type of archiving. The play, in an atmospheric production at The Tank, illuminates its central, small-town family's present by moving backward through its past, engrossingly tracing long arcs of desire and frustration, repetition and stasis, over generations. Mater Familias won the Mario Fratti Award, now the In Scena! Playwright Award, in 2015, and the current production is the result of its being chosen for the first edition of In Scena!'s Emerging Directors' Mentorship Program, in which an emerging director selects an In Scena! Playwright Award-winning play to direct in conjunction with the mentorship of a veteran director. The inaugural selection for director is Emma Denson, Associate Director at Origin Theatre Company and director of a recent bilingual dance-theatre adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew for Theatre Turnings in Milan, Italy, and her mentor is Debora Balardini, co-founder and Executive Director of Group Dot BR, New York’s only Brazilian theater company. The In Scena! Italian Theater Festival of which this production is a part runs from May 5th through 18th, with performances in all five boroughs that–with the exception of Mater Familias, which is ticketed–are free with an RSVP.

Audience members are encouraged to explore the set, the walls of which feature numerous artifacts such as pictures, frames, and children's artwork, before sitting down, while the sounds of rain and thunder and periodic flashes of lightning suffuse the performance space. When the play proper begins, it is 2015, and one mater is recently dead, while a second, Maria (Becca Berlind), disagrees with her son, Damiano (Richard Diamond), about feelings of guilt and freedom in connection to this death, especially as they plan to keep it a secret to continue collecting the deceased's pension checks. From this starting point, the play begins to move back in time with each scene–to 2012, when we meet the unemployed Damiano's father, Stefano (Samuel T Cini), divorced from Maria but wanting to reconnect with his son; to 2007, when we are introduced to Maria's mother, Elena (Te'ena Klein), strong-willed and an inveterate smoker despite literal heart issues to go with any of the more figurative variety, as well as family friend Moses (Prentice Miles), and we witness sexual fantasy repeatedly derailed by worries over and talk of aging; and so on into the past, also meeting Moses's wife, Berenice (Tiffani Grace). When we reach 1975, Elena's husband, Antonio (Maxwell Marlowe), an alcoholic construction manager, enters the scene, and as the play continues back to 1964 as both its starting point and endpoint, it adds more threads to an ever-growing network of hopes and jealousies and infidelities that culminate in a wonderfully staged final moment that brings us abruptly, strikingly, even hauntingly full circle.

In addition to anxieties about time and (the fear of) death, the play also examines the causes and effects of thwarted dreams (multiple characters, in different generations, wanted to be artists or actors), including the questions of what one should risk for such dreams and why, and of how much choice one really has in the direction that one's life takes. The play's reverse chronology makes more potent the realization that the characters have occupied the same house, Antonio's father's house, over the five decades that Mater Familias spans, passed down like both a sanctuary and a prison. Moses's skepticism of Antonio's plans for big changes in the house when he first moves in prove to be not only well founded but also thematically resonant. In another resonant touch, the cast all perform barefoot, in more direct contact, perhaps, with those roots and with the land that several of the characters want to leave but never do; and the actors ably balance distinction with continuity as their characters age in reverse. Marlowe's Antonio, for instance, is more expressive and more lively in affect the younger he is, but the less sympathetic aspects of his personality, more prominent as he ages, occasionally peek through. Cini too finds points of pathos in his portrayal of a flawed father, while Miles often expresses Moses's struggles with love and money using effective restraint, and Grace strikes some poignant notes as a woman often caught between other characters. Berlind's Maria artfully echoes the formidable Klein's increasingly intransigent Elena in her scenes with a terrific Diamond, as she echoes Diamond in scenes with Klein of Maria's younger days. Given the chance, Mater Familias will take root in your mind and, like Maria and Damiano in the patriarchal-turned-matriarchal family home, will stay there.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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