''Everybody's Favorite Mothers' gets behind banners of protest to foreground widely available celebration

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 awkwardly, as "Historic action without vision-guided memory is hallucination." And love is often the catalyst. To avoid a deceptive interpretation of significant events requires finding ways to a desired outcome through the partnership of mind and heart.

What can result? From the decision of one New York City grade-school math teacher, "Everybody's Favorite Mothers" sheds fresh light on American society's resistance to homosexuality and the eventual vulnerability of barriers it puts up. The production's integral use of video and newspaper clips roots the play in recent history, from a half-century ago up to the present day of toxic governmental moves.

Chief among the positive landmarks included is a speech that Barack Obama gave to commemorate the establishment of an important auxiliary movement involving family and friends. Still revisits that at length, embracing Obama's eloquence and placing it in the context of his own. His application of "rewind" technology and the dizzying variation in time-framing in "Everybody's Favorite Mothers" makes activist Morty Manford's suffering and determination heroic. Yet it takes surprising second place to the determined love and defensive strength of his mother Jeanne, whose distinctive participation in a protest march led to the formation of PFLAG.

Still ranges across several styles of presentation in this moving one-act

Mike and Leena raise fists with Morty (right) in solidarity.

account. His knack for crisply conveying tension in dialogue shows up in how Morty and colleagues Mike (Matthew David Conwell) and Leena (Alicia Barnes) talk with one another, their strategic vision sometimes at loggerheads. Still applies his accustomed skill at writing sizzling lines that define conflict without having to linger over it. 

For the seriocomic back-and-forth between Morty and Jeanne as he nudges her toward participating in what she wants to call a parade, not a march, Still draws on the spirit of those funhouse dialogues of Tom Stoppard and his absurdist forebears. His characters often step outside a straightforward narrative direction, with Morty in particular shouting "Rewind!" to cue a time shift. This is how stories in real life get built and reconstructed, here recast with technical savvy in contemporary-theater terms (credit to Ben Dobler's sound and video design).

Zack Neiditch directs a cast headed by Constance Macy, whose affinity for Still was memorably established in the COVID-haunted IRT production of "The House That Jack Built." With a credible accent of a New York Jewish mother, but without a trace of caricature, Macy sustains a portrait of the woman who genuinely told an interviewer: "I wasn't going to let anybody walk over Morty." 

Her path toward celebrity was blazed with a letter to the editor praising the New York Post for its follow-up report of an incident in which Morty was beaten for crashing an anti-gay party of city officials. That led to her position front-and-center in a much publicized protest march that galvanized an increasingly sympathetic public.

Incidentally, in trying to trace the source of one of the play's  witticisms about fractions, I remembered an interview on "The Living Room" podcast, but cannot credit the source of this insight, having failed to find the episode again. The interviewee said about himself: "I'm a shallow person, but I have a very deep surface." 

Jeanne is, when casually observed, a shallow person from the standpoint of activism and the necessity for a deep commitment to social change. The depth comes in the form of accommodation to prejudice, keenly portrayed by Zarah Shejule as Jeanne's school principal. Political energy against the status quo is concentrated in Morty's life and proclaimed identity. 

 Jeanne's "very deep surface" is her open-hearted love for her son, shared with somewhat more trepidation by her husband, Jules, Morty's father (John St. Angelo). To different degrees, every loving parent has this kind of conventional shallowness, perhaps, against which a "deep surface" of love proves to be sustaining. The way Macy embodies this quality is gripping and unrelenting, yet believably nuanced. 

Maria von Trapp  (Zarah Shejule) appears in Jeanne's dream.

Jack Ducat grabs our attention as Morty from the first scene and never lets go. Against him is poised the barbed humor of gay activist Mike and the militant, shrewd lesbian Leena, feeling like part of a minority group within a minority group. 

Identity politics has a way of splintering into further, smaller divisions, like fractal geometry. Yet I, part of the demographic to whom privilege sticks like white on rice, can hardly complain, but only seek to understand. This play helps me, as it likely will any who lend sympathy to it through Sept. 20, however they might self-identify. 

The wonderful cartoonish figures representing female icons in Jeanne's eve-of-protest dreaming (played hilariously by Conwell, Barnes and Shejule) put the show's entertainment level at a twin summit along with its stern challenge to the stubborn structures of American bigotry. 

[Photos by Indy Ghost Light]