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shoulders, he hugs her. He holds her for a
long while. Her arms finally reach out to
embrace him back.”
Andre’s Mother
was written at the dark-
est moment in the AIDS epidemic as the
death count climbed precipitously, public dialogue grew ca-
cophonous, and no hope lay on the horizon. In
Mothers and
Sons
, McNally alters the chronology slightly by movingAndre’s
death from 1988 to 1993—just a few years before protease in-
hibitors made HIV a manageable condition and AIDS began to
disappear fromAmerican public discourse. Otherwise, his char-
acters seem to have aged naturally: Katharine is still a hand-
some woman in her mid-sixties. Cal—who has been living for
twelve years with his 35-year-old partner, Will Ogden, with
whom he’s raising a six-year-old son, Bud—is approaching
fifty. To drive his new plot, how-
ever, McNally has imagined an ac-
tion not dramatized in the earlier
play. Some time after the memorial
service, Cal mailed to Mrs. Gerard
her son’s diary in order that she
might know the man that Andre had
become after leaving his parents’
home in Dallas and moving to New
York City some ten years before he
died. Now, twenty years later, her-
self a widow, she has come to Cal
and Will’s condominium on Central
Park West to return the diary (still
unread, she claims).
Mothers and Sons
describes the
sea-change in American gay life
from 1993 to 2013. The socially
conservative Mrs. Girard is taken
aback to learn that Cal and Will are
legally married, a state that Cal
somewhat sarcastically contrasts
with the more open sexual relation-
ship that he and Andre enjoyed in
the 1980s: “Of course we’d never
taken marriages vows. We weren’t
allowed to then. Our relationships
weren’t supposed to last. We didn’t
deserve the dignity of marriage.
Maybe that’s why AIDS hap-
pened.” The fifteen year age differ-
ence between Cal and Will—the
latter having come of age after the threat was largely under con-
trol—guarantees a conflict in expectations and values within
their marriage. For example, Cal confides to Katharine that
being a father comes more naturally to Will: “I think it’s gener-
ational. I never expected to be a father. He never expected not
to be one.” And whereas Cal still struggles to find the right word
to describe their relationship—“Andre and I were boyfriends, I
guess. Or partners. Lovers was another word people used. We
didn’t like any of them. Boyfriends sounded like teenagers, part-
ners sounded like a law firm and lovers sounded illicit”—Will
confidently stares down Mrs. Gerard’s contumely by identify-
ing himself as “Cal’s first husband.”
Perhaps most troubling to Katharine is
the new sort of family that she witnesses in
the Ogden-Porter household. Cal and Will
conceived their six-year-old son Bud by
mixing Will’s sperm with a female donor’s
eggs, which were then implanted in the womb of an obliging
lesbian friend. “What are you going to tell him” about his
parentage when Bud is old enough to understand, Mrs. Gerard
asks pointedly. But Bud himself indirectly answers her question
when, innocently prattling, he asks her if she would be his
grandmother, as both Cal’s and Will’s mothers are deceased.
Objecting that he doesn’t know her well enough to consider her
a close relation, she’s taken aback when Bud reasons that he
meets “lots of aunts and uncles and godfathers and godmoth-
ers” whom he didn’t know he had, some of whom “I don’t even
like.” The boy happily accepts that
“families just grow.” For McNally,
family is not a concrete, indissolu-
ble entity but a living organism that
shifts shape to meet our needs: we
choose our family members as
much as we inherit them or have
them thrust upon us.
Indeed, choice and change prove
the twin poles of McNally’s play.
Cal acknowledges to Katharine that
he “almost bolted” when Will first
made it clear that he wanted to
have children, but eventually com-
plied with his younger partner’s de-
mand because “I was afraid he’d
leave me.” His willingness to ac-
cept Will’s very different idea of
what a gay relationship can be has
had a radical consequence for Cal.
“Now, to imagine my life without
either of them ... I didn’t know who
I fully was until our son was born.
I’m so much ...
more
than I thought
I was. More interesting, more re-
sourceful, more less-self-centered.”
Ultimately, he says, he and Will
“
chose
to be a family.” Conversely,
Katharine recognizes that “people
have to want to change” and that
she has not wanted to. Instead, dur-
ing the past twenty years her life
has diminished into a bitter, angry desire to wreak revenge on
those who took her son from her. Referring to the framed the-
ater poster of Andre starring as Hamlet that Cal has hanging on
the wall, she spits out: “There is no closure for what happened
to me. I want revenge. I’m like Hamlet. Take my picture. I’m
my own poster. Vengeance!”
T
HE
M
USIC OF
F
ORGIVENESS
In McNally’s
Golden Age
(2012), when asked what
I Puritani
was about, composer Vincenzo Bellini said that his opera con-
tained the music of forgiveness. That same music continues to
play in
Mothers and Sons
. Challenged by the vengeful
Mothers and Sons
by Terrence McNally
John Golden Theatre, New York City
March–April 2014
33