My old playwriting professor, Howard Stein, used to say, when evaluating students’ work offered up in class, “You’re hiding! You’re hiding!” This critique was often given to young writers who often danced around what their plays wanted to be and should have been about. I have a feeling that Professor Stein would have said much the same to Terrence McNally after reading his Mothers and Sons.

To be fair to McNally, he has good reason to avoid the heart of his drama. In short, the play concerns Cal Porter (Bill Mootos), who survived the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s and early 1990’s but who also lost his lover, Andre, of the time. It is a sequel of sorts to McNally’s television play Andre’s Mother; it also converses with the AIDS plays of the 1980’s such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. That mother, Katharine Gerard (Annette Miller), returns to New York City to return Andre’s diary to Cal. Cal is a survivor, and, Mothers and Sons is as much about surviving catastrophic circumstances as are David Rabe’s loose trilogy on the Vietnam War. But McNally keeps steering away from the beating heart of his play, from the trauma of his characters’ past as well as his own.

Much of the early portion of this play trades in strained humor about the minutiae of  Manhattan upper-middle-class life (e.g. what those on the West Side versus East Side refer to as “The Met”). McNally, like 1990’s era Woody Allen, name checks bourgeois cultural touchstones without really delving into them in any meaningful way. Cal has moved on. He is now has a husband – Will Ogden (David Gow) – and a son – Bud (in my performance, Evan Miller). While he has moved on, life has conspired to chain Katharine to the past. He offers a potent set-up for an explosive drama, but the playwright keeps sidestepping it with heavy-handed maneuvering of the cast to switch move individuals on and off-stage so we are constantly mired in more comedic two-hander scenes instead of more dramatic three-handers.

However, the pain that McNally wants paradoxically both explore and avoid lurks just beneath the surface. The responsibility of any production of this work is to allow that pain to slip through the cracks, to transcend from sub-text to text, and rampage across the playing space. I am happy to report that the production at Shakespeare & Company under the direction of James Warwick let’s that pain out of the cage and rampage across the stage. Though he must bend to the sentimentalization of the play (an unearned family portrait at the coda), he mines the tragedy for the maximum impact on the audience.

Mootos and Miller in their early scenes frequently devolve into mannered performances as they struggle with one of the play’s main structural issues: why does Katharine not leave? But once the comedy of manners is put aside in favor of the conflict over Andre’s legacy, they find their voice and stride. The rawness that characterized McNally’s work when he was a protege of Albee is cathartic. Gow expertly marries civility with rage as he must t negotiate with the continuing shockwaves from the death of someone he has never met. A recent graduate of the School of Arts from the University of North Carolina, Gow is on his way to becoming one of our leading interpreters of McNally having starred in the title role in a New York revival of Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? this past winter. Through sheer force of charisma, Evan Miller as Bud built an island of calm in an otherwise stormy night of the theatre. Set designer Patrick Brennan ably recreates a West Side apartment in winter for the Berkshires in the summer.

In short, this a flawed but important play that benefits from a superlative production. It serves as a strong lead-in for Shakespeare & Company’s production of Taylor Mac’s Hir.