Mother Play 2024

Illusion Consultant for the Broadway production of Mother Play written by Paula Vogel starring Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger.

I’m often asked what an “illusion consultant” is. Well, sometimes when a play or experience requires something impossible to happen - like pulling a large water basin out of a pocketbook (like in this show), they call someone with an expertise in illusion and magic. So many modern Broadway shows are employing magicians to help them make some moment in the show a little more surreal and imaginative.

Mother Play is now nominated for four TONY awards including Best Play.

Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) has written a bitingly funny and unflinchingly honest new play about the hold our family has over us and the surprises we find when we unpack the past.

It’s 1962, just outside of D.C., and matriarch Phyllis (Jessica Lange) is supervising her teenage children, Carl (Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger), as they move into a new apartment. Phyllis has strong ideas about what her children need to do and be to succeed, and woe be the child who finds their own path. Bolstered by gin and cigarettes, the family endures — or survives — the changing world around them. Blending flares of imaginative theatricality, surreal farce, and deep tenderness, this beautiful roller coaster ride reveals timeless truths of love, family, and forgiveness.