Andre's Mother [Schwiebert pg311]
The play Andre's Mother by Terrence McNally is a tragic play and somewhat a play which expresses deep emotions. In this play Andre has died of AIDS and we placed in a scene where Andre's partner Cal, his father and sister (Arthur and Penny) and Andre's mother are in Central Park, New York with balloons.
In this play Cal and his father and sister talk about Andre and how he was a great person. Cal then attempt to talk to Andre's mother who throughout the whole play is speechless and does not say a word.
The most interesting part of this play that I noticed was near the end where Cal compared Andre's mother with the comic Lulu and how Lulus mother was just addressed as "Lulu's Mother". This kind of gives the audience the impression that Andre's mother is almost invisible, nonexistent or merely an emotionless anonym’s character. As we see at the end of the play Andre’s mother does feel saddened that her son has died and that she does have some emotion towards this incident.
As Cal is a homosexual and has been through a lot with Andre, it seems that he feels that Andre’s mother was emotionless and does not care about her son due to her disagreement towards their relationship. We can see near the end of the play that Cal is constantly trying to communicate to Andre’s Mother but in the end fails to get her to respond to anything that he is saying. But, I believe that Andre’s mother is not emotionless and that she is merely keeping everything to herself. This play is actually quite complicated as we do not know in the end how Andre’s mother really felt about the relationship between her son Andre and Cal. But, in the last few lines of the play we see Andre’s Mother standing alone and looking as if he was on the verge of breaking down. From this section of the play we can see that Andre’s mother is upset but as she releases the balloon it resembles her letting go of her son.
The most interesting thing about plays is how much you can get carried away in the moment when you reenact it. We sometimes seem to forget that these are only characters from a person’s imagination and that this is merely someone’s work on a piece of paper and not a real event. Quite often we seem to mix reality with imagination and loose ourselves in the moment.