Toronto Star - May 21, 2008

"'Night, Mother shows that after 90 minutes, we still have time"
Richard Ouzounian

★ ★ ★ ★ (out of 4)

"What if you're all I have and it's not enough?"

When Megan Follows hurls that line at Dawn Greenhalgh during the climax of Marsha Norman's `Night, Mother, which opened last night at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, your heart is likely to break as surely as mine did.

The fact that a real-life mother and daughter are playing the roles ups the stakes considerably, but this emotionally shattering production would still earn its laurels on sheer merit alone.

Jessie, a woman who looks on her life as a total failure, has decided suicide is her only viable option and picks a calm Saturday night when she usually sits around with her mother, Thelma, nibbling on candy and exchanging empty pleasantries.

But on this particular evening, she tells her mother she intends to kill herself in an hour and a half.

The rest of this 90-minute toboggan ride to the depths of the human soul is filled with a mother who tries to delay the inevitable while her daughter is cleaning the kitchen and making "to-do" lists.

Long-repressed truths are told, ancient wounds are opened and we come to know these sad and lonely people far too well.

There isn't any one thing that has brought Jessie to the end. Yes, she suffers from epilepsy, her marriage failed and her son is a runaway hoodlum, but the pain is deeper, more existential.

"I'm tired, I'm hurt, I'm sad, I feel used" is her litany and like Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, the sole solution she sees is to take her own life with her dead father's gun.

Follows plays Jessie with the cold, empty eyes of someone who has already left this world, only stirring herself to an emotional peak on a few occasions when the remembered pain of the past cuts too deeply. It's a boldly understated interpretation that doesn't ask for sympathy and forbids us the healing balm of pathos.

That sets the stage for an utterly amazing performance from Greenhalgh as Thelma. In the course of the play, she goes from a simple-minded old lady to a mythic Gorgon capable of spewing out a lifetime of hate, only to pull back to the primal passion of a mother trying to save her child from destruction. On every level, Greenhalgh is astonishing.

Alisa Palmer has directed the play with the kind of calm, cool hand it needs, taking her cue from Jessie's orderly progression towards her end. All the various stocking of candy supplies and emptying of trash bins is done with a ritualistic air that keeps us in check until those horrifying times when the reality of upcoming death intrudes.

`Night, Mother may sound depressing, but in the truest sense of the word, it isn't. The lives we witness unravelling on the stage should make us think of how we, the living, still have the chance to make things better

Source: Toronto Star

Now Magazine

A 'Night to remember - Casting choices pay off in Soulpepper's disturbing two-hander
Debbie Fein-Goldbach

Imagine trying to talk your daughter out of committing suicide. This is actor Dawn Greenhalgh's excruciating objective every time she plays Thelma to real-life daughter Megan Follows's Jessie in Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Night, Mother.

For an intense 90 minutes without intermission, Jessie and Thelma reveal the tragedies of their lives. Thelma has endured a loveless marriage for years, and Jessie, chronically depressed and epileptic, has been abandoned by her husband and her troubled druggie son. Confined throughout the play to the house they now share, they surround themselves with knick-knacks and cupboards full of bulk candy.

Both actors plunge into their characters' misery with honesty, but Greenhalgh takes longer to find her bearings than Follows. The casting choice pays off: you feel their real-life relationship unites them onstage at Thelma and Jessie's every impasse. Particularly heartbreaking is the delivery of Follow's final line, the play's title (you have to really listen for it), uttered with quick and haunting finality.

Norman crafts the script carefully, slowly unwrapping plot details like a big present filled with smaller ones – although you don't always want what you get. She even includes some humour to break the tension.

Director Alisa Palmer uses Ken MacDonald's highly detailed kitchen and living room set (complete with a wall clock ticking away in real time) to its full potential.

Jessie and Thelma must confront each other in this intimate space, and they make great use of props like laundry, dishes and food. Although the pacing sometimes falters and particularly slackens through the middle, with Thelma's last moments onstage Palmer creates an understated and poignant end.

Source: NOW Magazine

Torontoist

Middle-Aged Suicide (Don't Do It!)
Johnnie Walker

Soulpepper continues its year-round season with Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Prize–winning drama 'Night, Mother. Written after the suicide of one of Norman's close friends, this quiet, personal drama tells the story of a mother and daughter's strained relationship in a single scene, at the beginning of which the daughter informs the mother that she will be killing herself that night. The play not only consists of the events that take place between this revelation and the act itself, which involves the mother, Thelma, pleading for the daughter, Jessie, to change her mind, but also the simple, mundane events of a typical night in. The mother-daughter dynamic owes more than a little to Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, and the play can almost be read as a the further adventures of Laura and Amanda Wingfield.

Alisa Palmer directs a very straightforward production of the play: the scripts every bag of Ho Hos, jar of licorice allsorts, and sofa slipcover remain intact and in detail. The choice works, and it's actually somewhat refreshing to see a production of an established play that doesn't involve a director forcing and obnoxious and ill-fitting concept onto the work. The performances are also very compelling. Dawn Greenhalgh's Thelma is clueless, a little goofy, and entirely believable, while Megan Follows's Jessie is a woman who is entirely convinced she has made the right decision, and the two play off each other beautifully. The strange thing about 'Night, Mother is that while the dialogue is all highly realistic and credible, the situation itself is somewhat questionable. Who would inform their mother of their impending suicide and expect her to be okay with it? If you can suspend your disbelief on that one detail, you're in for an affecting, beautiful night of theatre.

Source: Torontoist