TAF’s 'night, Mother is a searing portrait of loneliness backed by real-world action

Some plays whisper before they wound. ’night, Mother is one of them. A story that unfolds not through spectacle, but through stillness, through two women locked inside the last conversation of their lives. There is no build-up, no disguise, but only a quiet truth waiting to be spoken aloud.

’night, Mother comes to Chennai with a new Indian context and a powerful message

The play begins on an ordinary evening: routine chores, a daughter moving about the house, a mother settling in. Then Jessie turns to her mother and calmly says she plans to end her life before the night is over. What follows is not hysteria, but a stark, aching intimacy, a final negotiation between love, autonomy and the loneliness that survives inside a home.

This Chennai production by The Art Factory reintroduces Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer-winning work with a gentle shift in cultural texture. While the script stays faithful to its emotional core, the staging carries a pan-Indian context, and the characters carry localised identities, Thelma becomes Thara, Jessie becomes Nisha, grounding the relationship in familiarity while retaining the universality of their emotional world. “Emotionally, the play is universal,” says director Vinod Anand. “Mother and daughter is not a cultural or geographical construct, but a human condition.”

Vinod, who has spent over four decades in theatre, describes this work as one where silence does the speaking.“A play doesn’t live only in its dialogue,” he says. “From warm cuddles to angry confrontations, it really is like a dance, a cat-and-mouse game. Desperate attempts and blame games, self-pity and guilt-tripping. The stillness is an illusion; underneath it bubbles a cauldron of emotions,” he continues. “The play lives in what is withheld. We’ve worked on the silences, we’ve let the unspoken dwell.”

The stillness is echoed in the set, designed by Prasanna Rajaram, which holds the audience in the same quiet pressure as the characters. “The house is both shelter and prison,” Prasanna explains. “The question in the audience’s mind willbe: is this a prison or a home — or are two people voluntarily imprisoning themselves within it?” And how has this been executed, he explains, “With the brilliant use of steel structures, the house doubles as a prison. Its significance won’t be obvious at first, but will be felt as the play progresses.”

For Aparna Rajhesh, who plays Thara, the character is neither villain nor redeemer; she is a mother convinced that protection equals love. “She doesn’t see the control as control. She sees it as care,” Aparna says. “She truly believes she’s doing the right thing.”

Stepping into Nisha (Jessie), Abhinaya Ravindranathan found that the emotional click came during a rehearsal where she spoke the lines “I’m tired. I’m hurt. I’m sad. I feel used.” “In that moment,” she says, “I stopped acting the lines and just let them be true. Jessie wasn’t a character anymore; she was a person who had exhausted every last inner resource.”

Her performance rests not in breakdown, but razor-sharp composure. “The chaos has already happened, in her mind, in the years leading up to this night. What we see is the calm after the storm. The hysteria is in the stillness.”

’night, Mother is also the genesis of The Art Factory’s Buddy Initiative, an effort to extend the play’s emotional aftermath into the real world. “Five years ago, when I read the play again, I felt something more than a staging was needed to bring focus to a global problem. The idea of the Buddy programme began there. I felt that just staging it and leaving it behind when the lights go out would be like commercially exploiting the theme.” “Vinod gave us so much insight into what loneliness does to a person. He did extensive study and research on loneliness statistics worldwide. It is an imperative initiative, and I really hope people see this as a good change and come forward to speak their unspoken emotions,” adds Aparna. This play begged the question: “You’ve brought attention to the problem — now what are you going to do about it?” Vinod says. “We couldn’t just close the curtains and walk away.”

₹200. On 1 and 2 Nov from 7.30 pm onwards. At AF Madras, Nungambakkam.

Email: shivani@newindianexpress.com
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