Mother/SON

Theatre is never easy, and theatre with only one performer is even more difficult to pull off. However Jeffrey Solomon, writer and sole performer of Mother/SON, accomplishes this difficult feat with flying (rainbow) colours.

Playing both a young gay man, Bradley, and Bradley’s Brooklyn-dwelling Jewish mother Minnie, Solomon charts the fraught emotional journey of both characters as Bradley comes clean to Minnie about his homosexuality. Despite playing two such drastically different roles, Solomon eschews costume changes, preferring to communicate to the audience who he is portraying through some choice visual cues and, of course, his own impressive acting ability.

In aiding the audience to connect with both Bradley and his devoted mother, Solomon deserves unabashed praise. He plays Bradley with ease, welcoming the viewer into the difficulties of trying to navigate familial love and the need for honesty within it. However, he absolutely shines as Minnie – everything, from the perfect Brooklyn accent to the way he clutches a handbag offers the audience access to this marvelous, conflicted character. Most importantly, his grasp of these two differing personas is so good that he is able to communicate to the audience which one he is portraying seamlessly, through movements as small as a sigh.

It would be easy to get lost in the specificities of the scenario depicted in Mother/SON; and to be sure, many audience members enjoyed a knowing chuckle as the characters of Bradley and Minnie desperately searched for middle ground when confronted with the reality of homosexuality.

What is so impressively elegant about Mother/SON, however, is the skill with which Solomon cuts through the specificities of coming out, and instead explores the trauma and triumph of parents and children becoming friends with one another. It’s a concept possibly not explored enough in cultural avenues – too often, offspring and their parents are seemingly pitted against each other on opposite sides of an insurmountable generational divide.

Instead, Mother/SON explores, with disarming tenderness, a love that grows only more, not less, and in the process provides a lovely reflection for anyone who has ever been a parent or a child. It’s a beautiful meditation on the effect a child’s emotional upheavals can have on a parent – and vice versa – even long after the offspring have “left the nest”.

Mother/SON is an elegant, emotional piece of theatre, beautifully written and skillfully performed. Solomon takes his audience on a true journey, walking them through moments both hilarious and heart-wrenching as Bradley and Minnie try their best to understand life, love and their irrevocably changed relationship.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Men At Work/Midsumma Festival present
Mother/SON
Written and performed by Jeffrey Solomon

Theatreworks, St Kilda
January 11th–January 21st, 2012
Bookings: www.theatreworks.org.au