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Mothers of the Father Session Three: Designing The Mother

When one of my first stage plays was produced in college, I found out the hard way that directors are free ignore playwright stage directions. So this idea here is to envision characters outside of the script. So my Mother in Mothers of the Father is an Ectomorphic, youthful-looking charming woman. She is the type of sister who had to carry an ID to prove she was of legal age well into her thirties. From the shots below, most jealous, overweight women will not believe that she had a child.

I mentioned earlier that I do not want to idealize her skin tone. I have to compensate somewhat for all the idealism in the previous paragraph with a little bit of imperfection! In the tight shot below, you can see that her skin tone is uneven:

The Mother in Ashy Closeup

The wide shot makes matters worse for the average, ‘thick’ North American woman. Surely, we would think this mother is bulimic:

The Mother in Wide Shot

All of this anti-large-woman talk can make me sound cruel. But you were not the sensitive child I was, living with my mother and watching her struggling with her weight problem—which was—and still is—an emotional problem. This problem is connected to the addictive personality forged by a commercial, imperial society and not of the innocence of a girl that is different because she has “big bones.”

In terms of wardrobe, the earlier shots of The Mother suggest that she is very “ethnic” looking. The shots above suggest a story of a woman just arriving from the corporate world where she dominates. These shots show a bit of that ‘worldly’ knowledge. As time progresses in the play, she will dress more and more in an “ethnic” style. One of the ‘logical’ reasons for this progression is that the play of dialog will take place at a Caribbean resort… coming soon: resort hotel sets and tropical flora and fauna shots.

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