FringeNYC 2013: Milk for Mrs. Stone

Review by Steven Cherry · August 16, 2013

Milk for Mrs. Stone is a hard play to like, and a hard play to dislike. It wants to say something authentic about truth, honesty, and, well, authenticity. And the thing it wants to say is while that honesty veers between being ridiculously easy and being simply impossible, authenticity is always complicated.

Daniel’s male partner has been diagnosed with a cancer that’s treatable, but only with immediate and expensive treatment. His mother, who he has unexpectedly dropped in on as the play begins, is a bit homophobic and—here’s where the play gets interesting and complicated—suffers the aftereffects of a stroke. She moves across her living room only with a walker and her speaking can only be understood by Martha, her caretaker—apparently she slurs her words so thoroughly that Daniel, and later his sister, Jenny, cannot understand a thing she says. I say apparently, because we in the audience can understand her quite well.

At first it’s puzzling—we don’t understand why Martha keeps repeating what Mrs. Stone says and why Daniel keeps turning to Martha for understanding. Only after a scene in which Martha is out of the room to make tea, and Daniel can’t understand his mother at all, do we understand the severity of her impairment.

Colleen Smith-Wallnau, as Mrs. Stone, does a heroic job of simulating someone whose words can’t be fathomed even as she futilely repeats herself, straining to be understood, even though her words are—by us—perfectly heard.

From the storywriter’s point of view, it’s an impossible choice. We need to hear Mrs. Stone’s thoughts and to know how intelligent she is. But the story requires her to be trapped inside a body she hates and is frustrated by (her son makes a wonderful speech to that effect at one point). And Martha’s “translations” are sometimes pointedly nonliteral or funny and sometimes both.

The effect, though, is that sometimes we just don’t know what Daniel and Jenny hear. And when Martha leaves the room, the action grinds to a halt, as Mrs Stone repeats herself, slows her speech down, and even spells out her words letter by letter. At one point, she even draws the letters in the air with her finger. Just grab a pen and paper and write it down, I could hear my fellow audience members thinking.

In spite of, and also because of, these difficulties, the play ultimately says something about the things we can and can’t say. Jenny is full of blunt honesty and descries hypocrisy and her brother’s reluctance to come out. Daniel criticizes her for her bluntness and yet appeals to his mother to face the reality of her life. And yet, he also defends his father’s dishonesty. (As it turns out, the late Mr. Stone deceived his wife in a very direct way concerning their relationship—a way that all too conveniently circles back to some other plot themes).

And so, the ultimate message of Milk for Mrs. Stone is that authenticity is a difficult dance between truth and propriety, for which the rules are hard to enunciate, if they’re not, in fact, random. Daniel and Jenny each have their own very different ideas about the proper mix of them in the authenticity formula, and Mrs. Stone, in the play’s final scene, has her own revelatory understanding of the way more honesty, and less propriety, might have helped her husband, and therefore her, lead happier lives.

Unfortunately, Milk for Mrs. Stone cannot offer any rules for us as we try to conduct our own lives. It is, as the play says, complicated.