Created in the spirit of "Love, Loss and What I Wore" or "The Vagina Monologues" but using fourteen authors to voice the show and a permanent cast of four to give embody it, "Motherhood Out Loud"
, in a Primary Stage production at 59E59 Theaters through October 29th, is the brain child of producers Susan Rose and Joan Stein.
The episodes, divided into five "Chapters" each with four scenes, cover the ground from giving birth to finding an empty nest, or as Cheryl L. West puts it in her segment, "Squeeze, Hold, Release."
Michele Lowe, the most prolific of the contributors in "Motherhood Out Loud" frames the intros of each selection of scenes with things she calls "Fugues" as in "Fast Births Fugue" or "Graduation Day Fugue." Ms. Lowe also wrote a couple of skits ("Bridal Shop" and "Queen Esther") for the show.
.(L to R) Saidah Arrika Ekulona, Mary Bacon and Randy Graff Photo credit: James Leynse.
The stories like the ones from Marco Pennett ("If We're Using a Surrogate, How Come I'm the One with Morning Sickness"), David Cale ("Elizabeth"), Leslie Ayzavian ("Threesome")or Claire LaZebnik ("Michael's Date") feel very personal.
Other monologues -- for instance by Beth Henley ("Report On Motherhood")
or Jessica Goldberg ("Stars and Stripes") feel more imagined.
Some of the material just seems a bit generic, like Brooke Berman's "Next to the Crib," for example.
Mary Bacon (Actor A), Saidah Arrika Ekulona (Actor B), Randy Graff (Actor C), and James Lecesne (Actor D) willingly work back and forth through the copious bits and pieces that include adoption, senility, in-laws, and parents, sometimes hitting the mark, sometimes misfiring.
Parts of "Motherhood Out Loud" are funny, or moving, or surprising, but it remains a pastiche, and somehow the parts just don't add up to a whole play.
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