In Surviving Mama, playwright Sonia Levitin has dramatized her mother's story and put it on stage at the Edgemar Center. Levitin’s mother is called Marlena and is played by Arva Rose, a replacement for Lainie Kazan who unexpectedly left the production to take a role in a feature film. Rose, despite being too young by some twenty years to play a 70-year-old woman, does a capable job in the lead and manages to keep a somewhat shaky production together.
One of the problems with Surviving Mama is that it tries to tell two important but separate stories. The first deals with Marlena's escape from Nazi Germany in 1938 and her survivor's guilt at having left family and friends behind to perish in the Shoah. The second is set in 1983 Los Angeles, where the widowed Marlena is beginning to suffer from dementia. Her two daughters, played strongly by Gina Manziello and Sharon Rosner, must try and persuade her to give up her independence and enter an assisted-living home. That's no easy matter, if only because Marlena's traumatic past (plus a bad marriage) has turned her into a bitter, caustic old woman.
That these two stories are also somewhat familiar creates another yet another problem for director Doug Kaback, who must cope with numerous jumps in time and place while trying to give the play suspense and urgency.
Surviving Mama’s hardworking cast also includes Emily Dean (as a young girl); Jerry Lacy (doubling as a patriarch/landlord); Peter Lucas (as Marlena's philandering husband); and Matt Silver (as a Nazi/Priest). The production gets a big boost from Travis Tuyen Thi's clever set design and Rob Fritz's sparkly lighting scheme.
Levitin's world-premiere play has many powerful and moving moments, but it just doesn't cohere into a satisfactory whole, perhaps because all of its main characters are such unsympathetic people.
