Theater Review: Peace for Mary Frances compellingly explores the end of life

Peace for Mary Frances

By Lily Thorne

Directed by Lila Neugebauer

The New Group

Pershing Square Signature Center

May 27, 2018

Lily Thorne’s gently (and ironically) titled new two-act play is a compelling and harrowing experience. The performance of Lois Smith as the dying, hospice care-committed family matriarch Mary Frances joins Faulkner’s Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying as a memorable fictional dying mother-who-explodes-a-dysfunctional family.  Mary Frances wants to die at home, and the play takes us through events familiar to those of us who have been there with elderly parents. There are attempts at home care by the daughters, ranging from exhausting to abusive, then arrangement of home aids (suspected of crimes), then hospice with trauma over how much morphine to use and whether euthanasia is acceptable or not. There is much clinical terminology…perhaps a bit too much, as it sometimes slows the drama with lecture points about end of life care. The play follows a truthful linearity to the expected outcome, and avoids melodrama.  Side note: the New Group needed an MD editor as is done for TV, since the actors got a few disease names and drug names wrong (e.g. CPOD instead of the chronic lung disease COPD). Doctors go to the theater and notice these things!

The dysfunctional family overlay to this home death provides the play with its drama. This is a family who’s traumas and dysfunction are fully in league with the Tyrones (Long Day’s Journey into Night) and Westons (August Osage County). Thorne has a great talent for creating painful, wrenching arguments and manipulative interactions; I actually cringed at times. No one is immune from this, even poor old dying Mary Frances, who gives little hints of some of her past toxic mothering technique that contributed to all this family dysfunction. As she dies, she plays her daughters off each other for her own narcissistic benefit.

The cast was uniformly strong, and crisply directed by New Group regular Lila Neugebauer . As mentioned, the 87 year-old Lois Smith, who has appeared on stage film and TV in roles in East of Eden, Fatal Attraction, Desperate Housewives, and the Tony-nominated Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1990), dominated the stage with subtle, wide ranging emotions. She was absolutely on-spot as the dying matriarch. She was alternately funny, crusty, and evil in a great performance. 

Johanna Day was a convincingly creepy manic-depressive daughter off her meds, and the haplessly passive and schlumpfy middle aged son played by Paul Lazar made me want to strangle him. The drama plays out in a two level home, with the living area below, and Mary Frances’ bedroom above right, allowing some simultaneous scenes, as would happen in real life. This is a very fine play, with taut dialogue and an honest treatment of the issues of dying, in spite of the slightly excessive clinical education it tries to provide. It will make you see your own family as boring and vanilla. And, I would pay to see Lois Smith act any time.