StageStruck: Crime on Campus

We were featured last week in the Valley Advocate.  Read the full article here.

Photo by Jon Crispin

Quoted from the article: Darren Harned, an MFA candidate in the Smith College playwriting program, says he wrote Some Mother's Son because "I love crime fiction and I wanted to tell one of those sorts of stories, but from a woman's point of view." Though it's not specified in the script, he set it precisely in 1963—on the cusp of history just before the Beatles and Vietnam—because in that era the woman's vantage point "would have been limited and oblique, as most women were stuck in their homes." Much of the play's dialogue has the feel of TV shows of the period, from Perry Mason toAlfred Hitchcock Presents.

The point of view is that of Masha Kvichak (Susanna Apgar), an unhappily married Midwestern housewife whose teenage son appears to have murdered his best friend. Her maternal impulse leads her to destroy incriminating evidence and ultimately to violence. She is, the playwright says, "a mother trying to protect their way of life for her son's sake, while that way of life may be the root of their problems." The cast also includes Masha's husband, her lover, her potential nemesis and two cops—but not her son the suspect, whom we see only through his mother's reckless devotion."