(Munich, Nov./Dec. 2008) Dan thinks that someone is stalking him. What's worse…that someone is his Mother. He can't run away from home fast enough and, even as an adult, he can't escape the loving mother who follows him wherever he goes. A surprising and moving story about the double-edged blade of a mother's love. It's funny…until it scares the life out of you.
Gina Wilkinson's first play took the audience by complete surprise when it premiered at Canadian Stage in Toronto in 2005. My Mother's Feet is the harrowing and beautiful story of the double-edged blade of mother love. Wilkinson's play - clever, witty, sometimes quietly savage and upsetting - is passionate about language and its use; lines keep echoing in various reso-nant contexts. The playwright toys and puns with her words, fashioning a series of tales-within-tales that interlock to show the key figures in Dan's life: his parents, his wife, Ursula, and his son, also named Dan.
Never melodra-matic nor cliché, My Mother's Feet brings to the stage an accurate portrayal of a mother's all-encompassing and suffocating love for her son. Jumping from one form of storytelling to another, the show uses humour to beguile us before dark elements emerge. The character of Dan switches be-tween boy and man, always affected by the presence of his mother, even more so as he attempts to protect his own son from her grasp. The sole ac-tress in the piece plays two characters; the powerful, stalking mother with a sneering disregard for peasants, and the more give-and-take, sensual Ursula, both of them rich figures. The third actor performs the roles of the all-too-unintrusive Dad, and the police officer, who can no longer take Dan's para-noia, about his mother stalking him, seriously. My Mother's Feet is about human feelings that get out of control. Guilt and innocence, sympathy and antipathy are evenly distributed in this play which runs on the power of words, the hope of salvation and a pair of prosthetic feet. It's funny. If you happen to think life is funny.
BeMe Theatre is proud to have the playwright herself, an experienced and highly-respected director and actress as well, come to lend her talents not only as writer but as director of our production. This production will also mark the European premiere of My Mother's Feet.
