Spare, direct contact

By definition, staged readings are not reviewable. They have no set, little lighting, few rehearsals. They’re actors seated behind music stands reading a play, maybe a bottled water to one side, maybe a costume that suggests character. Staged readings are minimalism to the nth degree: actors, words, audience.

And there are times, as at Ion Theatre’s reading of Night, Mother last week, when the actors and the audience disappear, and language, charged with feeling, reigns supreme.

Much as I love that spare, direct contact, staged readings are a luxury my busy schedule can’t afford. But when I heard Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson and Yolanda Franklin would read Thelma “Mama” Cates and her daughter Jessie in Night, Mother, I had to go. Afterward I begged director Glenn Paris for permission to write about it.

I also pleaded with him to give the piece a full staging at Ion, with Thompson and Franklin.

The one-act play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1983. It became a melodramatic movie, with Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft in 1986 — and hasn’t been staged in San Diego in quite some time.

The scene is simple and startling. It’s Saturday night. Jessie, who has epilepsy and is out of work, will do her mother’s nails, as always. Jessie’s antsy. She roams around their small, country home looking for things, putting others away. In passing, she asks for her late father’s revolver. Later, also in a calm voice, she says she’ll be killing herself tonight.

The writing’s so powerful because it’s not clear how serious Jessie is at first: she’s so rational, even talks about finally feeling clear-headed enough to end her life. But Mama’s had it tough as well. Plus, and she never saw it coming, this is her daughter saying such unbelievable things — her daughter!

As the two women excavate their pasts, Jessie gives Mama precise instructions on how to run the house after she’s gone. Stupid, mundane things, like where to stow this and that. In these speeches, Jessie’s so dominant, so “mothering,” the play’s title could work two ways.

Jessie’s also adamant, rock solid certain, in fact. For her, as they say in the South, it’s “quittin’ time.”

And the play offers no simple reason for the decision. Instead, we watch both sides of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy escalate before our eyes: “to be” (Mama) and “not to be” (Jessie).

Theater is a singularity. Every performance is unique, yadda-yadda. Ion gave three readings of Night, Mother last weekend. Now it’s a gone dead train.

I wish more people could have seen Thompson and Franklin — how they connected as Mama and Jessie disconnected, and how they transformed the reading into an unforgettable theatrical event.

Ion has a full, ambitious schedule this season. They’re creating four world premieres, all penned by members of the company. One will be produced Off-Broadway at the Peter Sharp Theatre. So they’re busy. But still.

A full production of Night, Mother should be a must. Or, since the play’s so prop-heavy, with potentially distracting stage business, maybe a spare version would be the ticket: just a dark room without distractions, and Thompson and Franklin and that tension and that stillness and those aching souls.