Jonathan Raymond Popp
Fake Mom (Pamela Adams) advises a befuddled Barry (Bryan Royston).
Familial finger waving is an age-old tradition when it comes to relationships, especially for parents when their sons or daughters decide to marry outside of the community. But when it comes to marriage norms, things have been changing. Anyone can marry, well, anyone — a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man, or a Jew and a Gentile. But some things never change.
Fake Mom, presented through Sept. 28 at the Bartell Theatre by the Kathie Rasmussen Women’s Theater (KRASS), is the comedic, pre-proposal story of a Jewish man, Barry Finkelstein (played by Bryan Royston), and his longtime girlfriend, Lynn Stratton (Martha White), an African American union activist. They are struggling to tell Barry’s disapproving mother, Cecile, about their plans to marry. Barry and Lynn are roommates with Jules O’Malley (Steven E. Smith), an Irish gay man who Cecile also never fails to offend.
Ultimately, the torment of confronting his mother about her occasionally racist and bigoted comments proves overwhelming for Barry, and he hires “Fake Mom” (Pamela Adams) to help him practice for Cecile’s planned family dinner.
Written and directed by KRASS artistic director Jan Levine Thal, Fake Mom provides a hilarious and all-too-true take on motherly and overprotective brotherly judgement in the midst of interracial and interreligious relationships. It was inspired by the playwright’s own family history. Levine Thal’s mother was a Christian, and her father was Jewish. They had to endure societal condemnation in the 1940s and ’50s, but when it came to their daughter dating a man of color, her mother said the situation would be “very difficult — for you.”
Levine Thal uses humor in her script to bring to light the familial judgements and predispositions that still ring obnoxiously loud decades later. Peggy Rosin is almost too good as Cecile, rolling her eyes as she calls the other characters “so sensitive.” Then, of course, there’s Lynn’s younger brother (Ekenedilichukwu Ikegwuani), who aims to enrich the family’s gene pool by setting Lynn up with his associate Langston Chang (D.J. Xayasouk), who is actually gay.
Barry and Lynn have their own conflicts when discussing their future. Lynn insists she doesn’t want children, but she actually does. And if they have them, Barry wants them to be raised Jewish, not Christian, like Lynn. The tangled web of miscommunication turns into chaos, with drunken confessions, laughable misunderstandings, and Jules’ insistence that their apartment have better beer. But the play wraps up heartwarmingly.
The ending is sweet, but Fake Mom’s real contribution is the politically incorrect bombshells from Cecile and the quick-witted discussions that ensue about stereotypes and marriage.