Dear mom, I’m fine, or I will be. The agony and the ecstasy of being someone’s mother, Parenthood: It’s A Mutha. A Fringe review

Parenthood: It’s A Mutha (Stage 32, Lorne Cardinal Theatre at the Roxy)

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

This show by the warm, charismatic Michelle Todd isn’t really shaped like a play. It’s a free-form memoir, a personal confessional that starts in the middle, and free-associates backwards and forward, interspersed with “Random Thoughts,” her own and her kids’.

When you add it up, it’s a highly non-scientific one-woman survey — with an appealing air of spontaneity —  of the joys, and terminal fears, anxieties, panic attacks and stresses, of being someone’s mother. And all it feels reassuringly authentic.

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Anyhow, the middle is the telling moment when another mother at one of her kid’s games greets her as “Marcus’s mom,” and she’s can’t come up with her own name in response.  Aha! But that unhinged, loss-of-identity feeling doesn’t go further, at least overtly, in this amiable piece. The thread that weaves Parenthood: It’s A Mutha together is a blend of wonder with a self-deprecating sense of absurdity, the former highly emotional, the latter bemused.

We meet, vicariously through their mom, her two sons — from birth (yup, two birth stories) through childhood, the coming-of-age years into adulthood. And through the eyes of their mom at least, the two seem to be nice, smart, caring, funny people, people on the ball like their parents and their Philippine-born grandparents.

Alongside their mom they go through rough patches, disconcerting reviews at parent-teacher meetings, generational crises where kids rise to the occasion with empathy (or demonstrate that cursive writing is gone gone gone), teaching moments about the hard cultural realities of being Black in the world, assorted  sports, family holidays, Easter chocolate, first girlfriends….

The piece is a little over-endowed with anecdotal raw material, in truth. Specific detail is enlivening in a stage memoir, true, but this one would benefit from a trim, both in length and repetition, I think. Something it has in common with parenthood, perhaps. Or maybe my appetite for minor-league hockey anecdotes is below the national average.

Along the way we do catch glimpses of the artists’ lives of Todd and her husband Bob. And while you’re kind of glad they don’t have three sons under the circumstances, you wouldn’t want to lose her heartwarming affirmation that “theatre saved me; artists saved my kids.”