Mothers and the complicated relationships we have with them — especially once they’re gone — are a bottomless well that writers have drunk from since the first scrawls across cave walls. In theater, many of the most famous examples of motherhood tend to go the route of Amanda Wingfield from “The Glass Menagerie”: an opportunity for the playwright to work out some lingering bitterness from childhood, as Tennessee Williams did.
(Interestingly, decades later, “Menagerie” would inspire Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel to grapple empathetically with her own mom’s deeply flawed humanity in this year’s Tony-nominated “Mother Play.”)
It’s that storied tradition that makes the abundance of tenderness in actor/writer/director Colman Domingo’s ode to his late mother — “Wild with Happy” at Horizon Theatre through Sept. 15 — an interesting outlier. That gentle fondness in Domingo’s writing also gives the show its most affecting moments.
Protagonist Gil (Enoch King) is a 40-year-old struggling actor who spends the play wrestling with the legacy of his larger-than-life mother, Adelaide, who has died after a period of illness. Left to handle arrangements mostly on his own, Gil bears a mix of financial, emotional and existential burdens and fluctuates between self-shielding cynicism, sorrow and impulsivity. We bounce back and forth between Gil’s specific memories of Adelaide when she was alive and her haunting presence over his life now after death.
In the role of Adelaide, we get the treat of watching a phenomenal Tonia Jackson, who was wonderful as the titular character in Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s” at Theatrical Outfit earlier this year. Jackson never makes Gil’s mother, even in all her quirky glory, seem cartoonish. She’s a character — but she’s the kind of character most of us will recognize from our real lives.
“Wild with Happy” premiered in 2012 at the Public Theater in New York six years after the Tony- and Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning Domingo lost his mom, Edith Bowles, with whom he was extremely close. (Edith Productions, the company Domingo and his husband Raul run, is named for her.)
Showing up in the production are biographical details about Domingo’s mother-son relationship — like how Bowles wrote to Oprah multiple times when her son was still trying to land his big break in New York. It’s those specific moments that have the most strength and poignancy. (In a touching twist, Oprah played Adelaide in the Audible version of the play, released this summer.)
Credit: Photo by Shannel J. Resto
Credit: Photo by Shannel J. Resto
We see Gil’s experience with his mother as sometimes embarrassing, sometimes confounding, but always warm and real and loving. “Are you OK?” he asks her over the phone at one point. “Why — what did you hear?” she snaps.
Later in that conversation, he’s sharing that he has an audition for a Craisins commercial, and she mishears him and yells excitedly, “Oh! A Raisin in the Sun!?” After which he must sheepishly correct her. Every scene between Jackson and King has easy, lived-in chemistry, to the point that their repartee practically glows.
Structurally, the play flows from one point in time to another, like memories drenched in grief. At one jump, we’re in a surreal, over-the-top church service Gil experienced as a child — a scene bubbling with hammy religious satire and the Ohio Players — and, in another, decades later, a shopping trip for her casket.
Jackson gets more time to shine and display her impeccable comic timing in a dual role as Gil’s outspoken force of nature, Aunt Glo. If, for no other reason, you should go see this show just for the scene where Aunt Glo is picking her late sister’s closet clean by literally donning more and more wardrobe items (eventually, she’s got at least three hats on her head). The more clothes that go on, the more indignant and self-righteous she gets about her nephew’s choice to have his mother cremated rather than buried, as she thinks tradition mandates.
Credit: Photo by Shannel J. Resto
Credit: Photo by Shannel J. Resto
Jackson plays the scene like a maestro conducting an orchestra of laughter. At one point, she puts on a pair of her dead sister’s pumps and crouches down, saying, “She would want me to have these!”
As Gil’s best friend, Mo, stage veteran Brad Raymond also showcases comedic chops, garnering a guffaw with just a flick of his brightly colored bangs. (One highlight is his long rant about Disney princesses.) In the central role of Gil, which provides the more grounded and less showy throughline, King delivers a moving portrait of a son trying to find his way through guilt, uncertainty and grief.
The traditions that surround death and the incomprehensibility of death and loss are absurd, and Domingo mines a lot of nice humorous moments. The writing is clever, vulnerable and often very funny.
Granted, some scenes worked better than others. The meet-cute between Gil and his new romantic interest, Terry (Markell Williams), who happens to be the funeral director, treads over well-worn material with its funeral-industrial complex satire, recognizable from the early aughts HBO classic “Six Feet Under” or even that “modestly priced receptacle” line from “The Big Lebowski.”
At the opening night performance, the first act took a while to take shape and gain momentum, as if the play were a new shoe the cast was trying on and they needed to walk around a few more laps to truly wear it in. But by the second act, that shoe began to fit snugly; pacing and transitions moved along more easily.
Aided by confident direction from Thomas W. Jones II, simple but well-utilized scenic design from Isabel and Moriah Curley-Clay and some creative sound and projection design by Matt Reynolds, we are transported from a funeral home and cherished apartment in Philly to roadside gas stations along the East Coast, and, finally, all the way to Disney World, as if by magic. It’s professional make-believe worthy of Adelaide herself.
As Domingo once said of his mother who inspired the play, “She believed in magic and lottery tickets and was very much a romantic.” This play tells us that there’s something brave about having big, impossible dreams — even if those dreams are as fragile as a prized porcelain.
THEATER REVIEW
“Wild with Happy”
Through Sept. 15 at Horizon Theatre. 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 5 p.m. Sundays. Tickets start at $30 on Wednesdays and Thursdays, $35 Friday and Saturday nights and weekend matinees. 1083 Austin Ave. NE, Atlanta. 404-584-7450, horizontheatre.com
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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