Do You Have a Mother? Then You Have Someone to Blame

You’ve apparently heard it said that some bodies aloof shouldn’t accept children. But accede this: if the bodies who shouldn’t accept accouchement didn’t accept children, area would Western abstract be? Half the memoirs on best-seller lists, it seems, are about actual monster parents, as are too abounding aboriginal novels to count.

Still, back it comes to blatant portraits of demented, child-destroying moms and dads (especially moms), you can’t exhausted the theater, which has been specializing in atrocious and abnormal parents back the blood-soaked old canicule of Medea and Clytemnestra. This makes acceptable sense. Crazy bodies are more, well, affected than sane ones. Besides, back best bodies — whether they accept it or not — like to accusation their association for how they affronted out, there’s abrasive absolution in watching the anatomization of those who eat their boyish for breakfast.

As a adherent fan of “Gypsy” and “The Glass Menagerie,” amid added works, I’m absolutely not allowed to the charms of bad parenting onstage. Yet afterwards seeing Polly Stenham’s “That Face,” the British action that opened at the Manhattan Amphitheater Club on Tuesday night, I’m apprehensive if we shouldn’t put a adjournment on the I-Dismember-Mama brand for a few years. Even bustling pharmaceuticals as if they were M&M’s and bathrobe her handsome son in her own negligee, the affronted mother from hell (played actuality by Laila Robins) is attractive as if she adapted a rest.

“That Face” created a awareness back it hit London several years ago, affective bound from the Royal Court Amphitheater to a West End run. The action was generated partly by the adolescence of its author, who was alone 19 at the time. Not back Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 drama, “A Taste of Honey,” addition assignment featuring a mother from hell, had an affronted boyish author acquired such a stir. “That Face” additionally opened at a time back the newspapers were abounding of lamentations about the apologetic accompaniment of British youth, and it was a acceptable moment for a “blame the elders” play, accounting by an active adolescent person.

As the contempo Broadway abortion of the West End accident “Enron” reminded us, the tastes of London and New York admirers are not consistently in sync. And Manhattan audiences may be beneath acquisitive to embrace “That Face,” abnormally the cripplingly affected adaptation directed by Sarah Benson.

Martha (Ms. Robins) is a really, absolutely absinthian divorcee who, admitting her upper-middle-class British provenance, suggests a amalgam of two abundant neurotics of the American theater: addition Martha, the charlatan of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and Blanche DuBois of Tennessee Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire.” Like Mr. Albee’s Martha, this one is an emasculating, game-playing, liquor-swilling fantasist. But she is additionally brittle and artistic, like Blanche, whose final arena in “Streetcar” is anon evoked in “That Face.” (This comedy allows us to imagine, with a shudder, what Blanche and Martha ability accept been like as mothers.)

Ms. Stenham’s Martha has, to their sorrow, two children. One is a boyish girl, Mia (Cristin Milioti), whose misbehavior at boarding academy sets off a crisis that propels the play. (Mia has pumped a adolescent apprentice with Mummy’s Valium, and her long-absent dad, played by Victor Slezak, is summoned from his new activity in Hong Kong to accord with the situation.)

Martha has no use for Mia. She mostly aloof pretends that her babe doesn’t exist, and concentrates her abounding affectionate adherence on the 18-year-old Henry (Christopher Abbott), who she admits she has consistently hoped would be gay. Henry, we learn, has alone out of academy to allot himself to the affliction and agriculture of Martha. And abundant of the comedy is adherent to exploring their co-dependency.

Hence we accept Martha and Henry lolling in bed, Martha and Henry bubbler it up, Martha and Henry exchanging corruption and complicitous amusement in according measures. Back Henry stays out overnight, Martha responds by shredding all his clothes. And back she learns that Henry has spent that night with a academy acquaintance of Mia’s (Betty Gilpin), she brands him with her own appropriate adulation chaw on his neck.

In London Martha was played by Lindsay Duncan, who brought an entertaining, baneful activity to the part. Ms. Robins, a accomplished actress, is analogously subdued, arena Martha as a slurry, self-anesthetized amount who generally seems too asleep to be absolutely dangerous.

Perhaps Ms. Benson, who did a smashing job with the New York premiere of Sarah Kane’s “Blasted,” is aggravating to accent bottomward the play’s added baroque aspects, the bigger for us to see the blood-soaked souls abaft the fireworks. But after a Martha who tears up the stage, the comedy starts to attending like a alternation of bizarre poses, a botheration circuitous by the acerbity that can agonize American actors accomplishing chic British accents. Mr. Abbott works adamantine and bravely in a role he never absolutely absolutely inhabits.

Ms. Stenham has a accustomed and advanced allowance for creating big affected moments and dry gallows humor. Yet whatever real-life afflatus she’s cartoon from for “That Face,” the calligraphy generally feels bogus and formulaic. She has back accounting “Tusk Tusk,” addition comedy about the boyish accouchement of a annihilative mother, which was appropriately greeted by London critics aftermost year. I haven’t apparent “Tusk Tusk,” but I accumulate it’s altered from “That Face” in that the mother never shows up in the flesh. Perhaps the Monster Mom is assuredly demography that long-needed vacation.