Mud

MUD

There are three characters in Mud. Mae irons clothes for a living and lives, if you can call it that, with Lloyd. Lloyd is a filthy scum who was adopted by Mae’s father sometime in the distant past. Mae defines her relationship with Lloyd not as family or lovers, but “like animals who grow up together and mate.” Into this squalor enters Henry, an upright twit who distinguishes himself only because he can read and has table manners. So, Henry moves into the bedroom, Lloyd sleeps on the floor, and Mae seeks, through this new arrangement, to rise up out of the quicksand of her life.

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You could call it a love triangle, but that word, love, is problematic. Under the maddening hand of playwright Maria Irene Fornes, love doesn’t fade, it deconstructs. Things start out positively enough. Mae likes Henry and he respects her, so she invites him to live with her, Then once Henry moves in, it’s as if some degenerative symbiosis sets in. Mae reveals the litany of her needs (“I am a hungry soul. I am a longing soul. I am an empty soul”) to Henry’s consternation. Henry, in turn, starts making demands on Mae. And in the background, although it’s unclear whether he’s a catalyst or a bystander, is the puling, sullen Lloyd. Whatever it is that these people call love begins to break down into its ugly components: blame, territoriality, revenge, envy, parasitism.

Otherwise Rand’s direction is competent, if somewhat labored. The general feel of the production is as if some ponderous abstraction–like a lesson in physics or phylogeny or social psychology–were being studied. And the characters aren’t so much enacted as presented, as Rod Serling would say, “for your consideration.”