Embarrassing Theater Critic Admission: I’ve never seen Marsha Norman‘s 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, ‘Night, Mother, onstage. And technically, I still haven’t. But at least I can now say that I’ve seen it, thanks to Invictus Theatre’s current livestreaming production.
Norman’s play carries within its DNA a trap for actors, especially for whoever plays Jessie. If she’s too downbeat and defeated from the start, then there presumably isn’t much of a trajectory for her to explore in the 90-some minutes before the inevitable. (Spoiler alert: she kills herself.) At the same time, whoever plays Thelma has to negotiate the balance between a chatty woman, seemingly content with the quotidian side of life, and a woman who is slowly being tortured by the revelations of her only daughter.
How much do we belong to ourselves and how much do we belong to those who love us? After months of most of us being separated from loved ones by a deadly pandemic, that question carries extra weight. But also: knowing how hard life can be at the best of times, what right do any of us have to deliberately force a loved one to, in essence, sign a permission slip for our premature demise?The fact that these roles are played by Black women also adds an extra layer to the narrative power of the Invictus production. The death by suicide of This Is Us writer Jas Waters this past summer opened some public discussions about suicide among Black women. While according to the CDC, Black women have the lowest rate of suicide in the U.S., they also have more chronic anxiety, with more intense symptoms, than their white counterparts. The ongoing toll of living with systemic racism and misogyny cannot be discounted.
Through 11/8: Thu-Sat 7 PM CST, Sun 3 PM CST, invictustheatreco.com, $20 (10% of ticket proceeds will be donated to Sista Afya, a nonprofit organization that provides mental health and wellness services for Black women in Chicago).
