IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE
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Those fears are even more disturbing when you find yourself trapped under the big shadow cast by a famous parent. In her 1976 memoir In My Mother’s House, feminist writer Kim Chernin detailed the love-hate relationship between herself and her mother, Rose Chernin, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who became a communist leader and fearless labor agitator.
Arnold Aprill’s meticulous and celebratory adaptation, now premiering at the National Jewish Theater, has Kim giving in to Rose’s gentle nagging and agreeing to write her mother’s exciting life story. In flashbacks acted out by the middle-aged Rose, we glimpse her warm childhood in a Russian shtetl. That childhood turns cold when she arrives in America in the years before World War I and realizes what a hard man her father has become. (Before deserting his daughters he institutionalizes Rose’s mother, who apparently never recovered from the sight of a burning cross on her lawn.) Rose’s hatred of injustice begins at home, triggered by her father.
In Estelle Goodman Spector’s heartfelt staging the anger that must have made Rose a formidable opponent has been muted in favor of this remarkable woman’s softer side. Though the result is pleasant enough, it’s sometimes hard to see in Marge Kotlisky’s sweetly sensitive Rose the larger-than-life matriarch against whom Kim (perkily played by Barbara Faye Wallace) supposedly rebels. The brief mother-daughter squabbles never threaten major emotional damage: the inevitable hug sets things right again. I’m convinced Leo Buscaglia has done irreparable damage to contemporary plays.
