Theater: Life with Ma

LADYHOUSE BLUES by Kevin O’Morrison

Family plays rank among the finest and most durable achievements of the U.S. theater. Season after season, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Death of a Salesman and The Glass Menagerie are revived all over the globe.

Even a demonstrably lesser drama, such as Ladyhouse Blues at Manhattan’s Theater of St. Peter’s Church, shows the deep affinity linking the family with the emotions and experiences that fire up a stage. Within the family—sometimes at scalding intensity—we get our first inklings of the nature of love, hate, time, memory, remorse and reconciliation.

Kevin O’Morrison displays an intuitive grasp of all this, and his Ladyhouse Blues is suffused with a contagious humanity. Mood, rather than action, dominates the evening, and the play is anchored with palpable authority in a St.

Louis neighborhood in 1919. An Irish-American mother, on the lower rungs of the middle class, and her four daughters are sweating out an August vigil for the sole son and brother, waiting for him to come back from service in World War I.

Spunk, verve, laughs, tears, death and God.

Only a telegram arrives. It informs the five women that the boy has died of cholera. His body has been cremated.

A sparse plot, downright anemic; yet O’Morrison fleshes it out with the wondrous detail of bygone commonplaces. In this household, light comes from kerosene, refrigeration from an iceman, fruits and vegetables are preserved and the tele phone and vacuum cleaner are wild rumors. It is a simpler world but not a qui eter one. The women fuss and explode over trifles, then sing together in tranquilizing harmony.

O’Morrison’s limber dialogue reveals character by indirection. One daughter (Laurie Kennedy), ill with tuberculosis, has been barred from seeing her husband and child. Another (Jobeth Williams) is held in waning esteem by her New York socialite husband and is downing one glass too many. The youngest (Christine Estabrook), a girl of vim and verve, has fallen in love with a Greek, a fate the rest of this Irish brood regard as scarcely preferable to acquiring head lice.

The mother, Liz, played by Jo Henderson with skill, zest and daring, is rather like the father in “Da, ” a character who follows you right out of the theater.

She is spunky, bluntly xenophobic, untutored in books but knowing in the ways of the world, and possessed of a hot line to God, in whom she puts the unwavering trust of an early Christian.

There are a trifle too many Chekhovian tableaux artily arranged by Director Tony Giordano — these are distinctly not those “sisters” — but Ladyhouse Blues is the sort of play Chekhov might have liked.