Paths That Crossed Cross Again. ‘Mothers and Sons,’ an AIDS Tale Starring Tyne Daly
Ben BrantleyMarch 24, 2014: The curtain rises on two people frozen in what feels like a thaw-proof silence. Their eyes are fixed straight ahead, and the possibility of even their gazes’ intersecting seems remote; forget about a meeting of minds. With these figures implacably embodied by Tyne Daly and Frederick Weller in Terrence McNally’s Mothers and Sons, any dialogue that might occur seems destined to be nasty, brutish and short. Yet a conversation is going to happen, as surely as Gary Cooper faced down his enemies in High Noon. It has to. These people have so very, very much to say. More to the point, so does Mr. McNally, a probing and enduring dramatist who has set out to take the pulse of a gay American subculture several decades after the plague that altered its form and content forever.
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