Jay Harvey Upstage

Mother of them all: Jeanne Manford joins the parade. The shadow version of "coming out" turns out to have a brilliance all its own. "Everybody's  Favorite Mothers" proclaims the process in an enthralling way that  doesn't skirt the difficulties of owning sexual identity through open self-assertion and garnering the support of loved ones. In a premiere performance seen Thursday night at the Phoenix Theatre,   the audience of James Still's new play is brought into a close-up observer/participant's role centered on the emergence of gay-rights momentum and support in the 1970s. Without throwing himself into the briar patch of documentary-genre devotion, the playwright immerses us in a family story complicated by the movement's internal divisions and the unpredictable benefits of a loving ally's imaginative breakthroughs. The watchword evoked a few times in the play — "Vision without action is hallucination" — could be revised, somewhat ...