The Mother Act. When your mother turns your life into a show.
Sadie is an actress who so hates motherhood that she put together a one-woman show about how her daughter ruined her life; it is one of the reasons her daughter Jude feels Sadie ruined hers. Heidi Reimer’s debut novel is not just a great read; it’s one to which I responded personally from the very first paragraph. This is not because my mother wrote about me (although she did.) “The Mother Act” (Dutton, 395 pages) begins with Jude finally attending her mother’s show in a theater that, Reimer writes, is “a West Village landmark nestled between a psychic and a sex shop, one of those old, not-quite-kept-up theaters off Broadway: sweeping staircase, ornate moldings, the appointment of its former splendor battling to keep It on the right side of dingy.”
Could she be talking about The Actors’ Playhouse?! A West Village landmark, it wasn’t squeezed right between a psychic and a sex shop but there was a psychic on the corner a few doors down (there still is!), and there was a sex shop a couple of blocks up. It stopped being the Actors’ Playhouse 15 years ago (the building still exists; it’s now Playhouse Bar), but in 2008 (when the first chapter in Reimer novel is set) it was capping more than half a century as a home for some hundred plays and musicals, including early showcases for James Earl Jones, Colleen Dewhurst and Al Pacino (the latter in a Harold Pinter play called “The Long Stigmatic” in 1969) as well as such shows with legs as “Fortune and Men’s Eyes” in 1967, which led to the founding of the Fortune Society; “Torch Song Trilogy” in 1982, which went on to Broadway and made Harvey Fierstein a star, and “Gutenberg! The Musical” in 2007, which 16 years later wound up on Broadway with Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad. The Actors’ Playhouse is also in the neighborhood where I grew up.
I’m not sure how sweeping the staircase was, or ornate the moldings, but her description of a certain kind of Off Broadway theater hanging on into the twenty-first century is just the first taste of what’s a terrifically savvy take on the ways of the stage. “The Mother Act” is a novel — well-plotted, sometimes affecting, sometimes amusing — but it’s no stretch to call it a theater book.
Sadie, Jude and Jude’s father Damian are all actors, Damian a fourth generation Shakespearean from England, Sadie a co-founder of a New York City guerilla feminist theater company. The book’s chapters are called Acts, some named after Shakespeare plays – not as metaphors (or not only as metaphors) but because we see the characters perform in these plays.
“The Taming of the Shrew” is where Sadie first saw Damian perform; she stridently rejected the play, as she had earlier rejected the idea of marriage and motherhood; after all, she had escaped at age 17 from a religious household in the Midwest where her mother seemed to exist to make babies; she made ten of them. Still, Sadie and Damian fell hard for one another. It didn’t turn out well.
We see Jude at age 13, already a pro, portraying Miranda in “The Tempest,” a production of The Strolling Players, the touring company led by Jude’s father – Sadie having long ago abandoned both of them.
We see Jude at age 19 in “The Comedy of Errors,” her first production that her father hasn’t directed, and it is one of the best accounts I’ve ever read of being inside a show that goes wrong.
“The Mother Act” is not in chronological order; the narrative shifts back and forth between times, and between perspectives. It eventually becomes clear why the author has decided to organize her novel in this jumbled way. Learning the details later, and from different perspectives, makes the readers rethink our first impressions, and expands our understanding.
Reimer’s book offers insights about mothers and daughters, feminism and motherhood, and the nature of an artistic life. It encourages us to think about the ethnics of putting onstage true stories that involve other people. Sadie has a talent of turning “the most private of expressions into a public performance” – a talent that’s turned back on her, in a comeuppance that’s at first satisfying and then…complicated. (For the record, the children’s books my mother wrote, including “Jonathan’s Sparrow,” didn’t ruin my life.)
But “The Mother Act” – which is also the name of Sadie’s show – is mostly time spent with some vivid theater people.
How does Reimer know so much about them? “Her front row seat to the theater world,” her bio says, “began two decades ago, when she met and married an actor.” – an actor who was actually born (as was Damian) in Stratford-upon-Avon.
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