Theatre in Review: Wives (Playwrights Horizons)/Mothers (The Playwrights Realm) Rarely do circumstances deliver such an obvious pairing of titles for a dual review; in addition, these two attractions are marked by similar strategies: Each begins as a satire, displaying a fair amount of wit before abandoning laughter for an attitude of knitted-brow seriousness. In neither case is it a winning approach, although both writers are clearly talented, and their efforts are shored up by gifted actors and directors. Wives is a time-tripping collection of comic sketches examining the state of marital unfairness in several historical contexts. (Jaclyn Backhaus, the playwright, says inspiration came out of research for three separate works, although, as rendered here, there is barely enough material for a single evening.) We are whisked to the Château de Chenonceau in the sixteenth century, where, following the death of Henri II, Queen Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers (Henri's paramour) verbally bitch-slap each other before concluding that they are better off teaming up. The next stop is Idaho, just after Ernest Hemingway's suicide, where his widow, Mary, hosts a raucous get-together with her husband's exes, Hadley Richardson and Martha Gellhorn. (Pauline Pfeiffer, wife number two, is already dead.) Then we're off to India, during the Raj, where a British official is appalled to discover that the local maharaja has, with his wife's connivance, taken up with a "female Rasputin" whose frank sexuality poses a threat to the empire. To call Backhaus' approach scattershot would be putting it mildly; one has to grin and bear such sophomoric gags as Patterson, the pillar of the empire, retching into a bush at the sight of the maharaja's wife breastfeeding. But, at its skeptical, wisecracking best, Wives recalls one of Caryl Churchill's early assaults on the establishment. The Hemingway scene is a small riot. It's hardly a fresh idea; Comden and Green and Kurt Vonnegut, among others, picked off the chest-beating novelist decades ago. But -- unlike Halley Feiffer in her endlessly titled Moscow play -- Backhaus pulls off the trick of investing historical characters with snappy contemporary lingo: "I'm, like, literally penniless, and it's chill," says Hadley, certain that she has been cut out of Hemingway's will. In these scenes, Backhaus' magpie sense of humor effectively dismantles standard notions of male privilege, which, no matter the time or place, leave women hopelessly marginalized. The fun evaporates in the final scene, however, which is set in a modern-day university where, at an impromptu meeting of a club for witches, a new member stirs a cauldron and has an empowering vision of women in history, connecting with the shades of her grandparents and concluding with a manifesto of self-assertion. ("Everything about me is right. It is so nice to see me.") After all that has come before, this burst of sincerity is something of a letdown; it's a tall order to introduce a new character at the eleventh hour and expect the audience to care about her issues with selfhood; given the circumstances, her climactic monologue can only move in the most generic, up-with-women way. Sadly, a play that, whatever its weaknesses, steadily amused, at the last becomes a bore. Backhaus is lucky to have the directorial services of Margot Bordelon, who shapes each sequence into its own elegantly styled cartoon, aided by an adept cast. Purva Bedi scores as Queen Catherine, busily rewriting Henri's will to her own advantage, and as Hadley, gamely admitting that she rather enjoyed purposely losing Hemingway's manuscripts. Aadya Bedi is especially fun as a disarmingly dishy Martha Gellhorn. Adina Verson adopts an almost incomprehensible British accent as a put-upon servant in the Henri-Catherine scene, but is a hilarious and touching Mary Hemingway, who, alone among her company, still retains some affection for the novelist. Sathya Sridharan is unfailingly adept as worthless men of various centuries, especially as the maharaja, who, amusing, talks like James Stewart. Jumping around as it does, the play presents many design challenges, but Reid Thompson's set, a Tudor-paneled interior transformed by various scenic drops, is a solid solution. Valérie Thérèse Bart's costumes are well-suited to each location and time frame. Amith Chandrashaker's lighting and Kate Marvin's sound design and original music are also on point. Wives is such good fun that one is sad to see it partly undone by its sharp left turn into sententious speechmaking. Backhaus' comic instincts are her strong suit; her good work is undermined by reaching too strenuously for uplift. Breastfeeding also figures in the plot of Mothers, which is set in a Gymboree-type toddler hangout during a session called "Mommy-Baby Meet-Up." Meg and Ariana, best friends and uber-parents, are fond of self-congratulatory exchanges about their excessively cute offspring. Vick, a lawyer and Meg's college friend, who is visiting from the big city, has little use for Stepford wives and their obvious posturing; even more dismaying, when her milk starts to flow and she produces a breast pump, the others react as if she has reached into her purse and produced a dirty bomb. Also on hand are Ty, a stay-at-home dad, who has a rather tedious monologue about the length of his penis, and Gladys, a nanny who looks on silently and balefully. Mothers benefits from some artfully executed acts of one-upmanship, deft sparring over hot-button topics like vaccinations ("There are several very compelling online documentaries about the truth that you should watch before you start judging," sniffs Ariana, a defensive anti-vaxxer), and clarifying burst of candor: As Vick, exhausted from her career and raising a son, notes, "Sometimes it's just like 'Wow, yeah, thanks for all this love, but maybe could you stop for like, a weekend.'" And clearly, the playwright, Anna Moench, has more on her mind than maternal squabbling; for one thing, the play unfolds in an alternate universe in which people of color constitute the privileged class, allowing the female characters, all of whom are black or Asian, to deliver any number of appallingly (and amusingly) patronizing remarks about "beige people." Then disaster strikes -- about which my lips are sealed -- and the play suddenly turns into a doom-laden prophecy of social collapse. Melodrama takes over as everyone is pitted against everyone else in a struggle for survival. This choice kills off any previous sense of pleasure without adding anything new or gripping. The script's structure devolves into a series of blackouts in which increasingly awful events occur, all of them attributable to evil bands of offstage men. The one character who doesn't totally freak out is Gladys, who, apparently comes from a war-torn country about which we learn nothing, and who instantly assumes a kind of Mother Courage survivalist stance. This sort of feel-bad exercise never really works because the apocalypse is so vaguely described; the world is sufficiently full of vexing and intractable problems to make such booga-booga scare tactics feel thoroughly fake. Until then, Mothers certainly has its moments, under the brisk direction of Robert Ross Parker. (He can do little with the script's requirement that all of the children in the play be represented by stuffed animals. This is, in a way, an elegant solution, but it begs the question of why, when all hell breaks loose, we never hear a peep out of those kids.) Maechi Aharanwa as Ariana, the most ulterior of the mothers when it comes to housewifely displays of contentment, is an expert comic caricaturist, and she has a fine sparring partner in Jasmine Batchelor as Vick, who can't believe that she has landed in this jungle of total womanhood. Satomi Blair is equally proficient as Meg, the eternal peacemaker, torn between two diametrically opposed BFFs. Max Gordon Moore is solid as Ty, although that penis monologue is one for the books. Tina Chilip is little more than a presence as Gladys, but she makes an impression, nonetheless. The play unfolds on Wilson Chin's sleekly curved but rather anonymous set, its main function being to execute a coup de théâtre halfway through. Karen Perry's costumes and Porsche McGovern's lighting are both solid. Shane Rettig's sound design includes some impressively ominous effects involving planes flying overhead, as well as a preshow playlist that includes such recent charting pop hits as "Happier" and "Better Now." It's interesting that both Backhaus and Moench both have such strong comic instincts, which they seemingly don't trust. Each adopts an approach -- which involves stopping the action cold, clearing one's throat, and announcing that the fun is over and now comes the serious argument -- that is, to my mind, distinctly counterproductive. You can make many devastating points with wit, and you don't need to spoon-feed your concerns to the audience. --David Barbour 
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