Character Breakdown: MOTHER PLAY Cast Unpacks Their Roles

I mean she hits about every note you can imagine on the scale

We cover four decades of time, which in itself is very challenging and exciting to discover

And the character, you know, there are certain things that resonate as far as what you know

about your own personal experience. And then there are things that are so outside your wheelhouse that to try to imagine how

something like that happens is, you know, opens up a whole other vista

So it's a play about a family and Jessica Blain is the mother and Jim Parsons is my

brother and I'm the daughter and it spans all the way from, we start the play in 1964

and so we cover a lot of ground. And you know Paula has talked a lot about how many family plays there are in the sort

of American canon. We have Glass Menagerie, Long Day's Journey into Night, but very few of these family plays

were written by women, maybe Lorraine Hansberry, she's sort of the exception

But Paula wanted to write a play and she also felt like so many of these family plays are

about mothers and sons and she felt that it would be interesting to tackle a play about

mothers and daughters. And there's, we have a difficult mother, she's a complex and powerful woman but she's tough

And so I think being a mother myself, I certainly have a lot of empathy for her but I also have

a lot of complicated feelings. I kind of get chills thinking about it

Carl is based on her, Paula's real life brother Carl and also Carl is the same Carl that was

in Baltimore Walls and he was her best friend, he was her older brother, he was probably

the most important influence in her life, certainly in a creative way

He died in his 30s from AIDS and that's why she wrote Baltimore Walls for him

And oh gosh, I will say this, going back to your first question was why I remember now

I was the most nervous. Carl is so much more cultured than I am, I didn't know how to pronounce half the things

he was talking about and I was like, what is, huh? There's still like pieces of music like, Virginie de Angelis, I'm like, oh, oh, Carl, you're

so smart, you're so well-read. And he's just playful and creative and he's fun and he's so adoring and protective of

his younger sister and as someone myself who has a younger sister, that's been very special

to get to go through this journey with Celia on that, yeah