The Gay & Lesbian Review

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

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

Mothers and Sons by Terrence McNally John Golden Theatre, New York City

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

March–April 2014

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