New Play in Manhattan, Oct. 30, 1944

I Remember Mama (adapted by John van Druten from Kathryn Forbes’s Mama’s Bank Account; produced by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II) is the first producing enterprise of the great music-&-words team of Oklahoma!, the second smash hit within a year for the author of The Voice of the Turtle, and Broadway’s pleasantest family album since Life with Father. Not really a play—it has no plot, no structure, no weightier crisis than an operation on a child or the chloroforming of a cat—Mama gets across as theater partly because it never struggles to.

A chronicle of a Norwegian-American family in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, Mama is unfolded retrospectively (from a corner of the stage) by daughter Katrin, now a successful writer. The kitchen-for-parlor home life that Katrin looks back on is dominated by firm, frugal, warmhearted Mama (extremely well played by Mady Christians) who, to give her children a feeling of security, pretends that the family has a flourishing bank account. Domestic fireworks are provided by hard-drinking, softhearted Uncle Chris (Oscar Homolka); domestic dissonances by Mama’s prying married sisters. The adolescent Katrin composes excruciating short stories about artists who go blind; baby sister Dagmar pines for a menagerie; demure Aunt Trina becomes the tremulous bride of a timid undertaker’s assistant.

Closer in tone to Our Town than to Life with Father, Mama is warm, humorous, sentimental, lightly nostalgic, more than slightly idealized.