It’s not easy to negotiate the subject of motherhood–to chart a course between the Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of gleeful attack. Yet why should it be so hard? I have a mother; you have one. I am a mother. Maybe you are too, or will be one day. But motherhood is a lost continent, a terrain so vast and intricate and overgrown with feelings that few even attempt to map it.
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Veteran solo artist Jenny Magnus, who has a young child, makes the attempt in Cant, a 45-minute monologue (with songs) that’s running as part of the 15th annual Rhinoceros Theater Festival. Magnus has a lot of performance experience, but her newness as a mother gives this piece its freshness, its emotion, its honesty, and–for better or worse–its indirection. She attacks the subject not single-mindedly but somewhat distractedly, surrounding it with various characters: using as props only a folding chair and a pillowlike bag of rice, she plays good mothers, bad mothers, a self-absorbed young father, the hard-bitten mother of a mother, and a lactation consultant/nurse’s assistant.
Sucking also figures in Magnus’s universe of consuming. Of course babies suck, but she also alludes–briefly and unsatisfactorily–to the sexual side of sucking. This section then turns into cultural commentary, as Magnus talks about TV shows and how mama and papa give us sugary foods to suck out of bottles because some things are just “too hard to look at.” The preceding section is a list of the many meanings of “cant,” and in the section before that a self-righteous mom talks about good kids being obedient and the stupid stuff kids do and how the soldiers were being good kids but nevertheless must be punished, while the prisoners were being bad and so must also be punished. Clearly a comment on Abu Ghraib and the sort of mentality that assumes the right to pass judgment on others and inflict punishment, this section is confused, possibly on purpose. You have to admire Magnus’s intent: to broaden the scope of a piece about motherhood, creating an analogy between government/cultural mavens and authoritarian or spoiling parents. But at this point the connection is sketchy and intellectual in a way that the rest of Cant is not.
