MADRE AND I

Playwright Reyes (Theater/Arizona State Univ.) casts a grateful eye on the past and his mother’s many sacrifices in a strange land.

An immigrant from Chile in the turbulent 1970s, María brought her “love child” along with her, a boy whose father had at least given his son his last name—“and this fact, my mother convinced me once, pulls me up a notch or two in the hierarchy of bastardom.” María is a thoroughly complex woman, diligent, intelligent and hopeful for a life as a teacher of language and literature. Instead she ended up cleaning houses in Los Angeles, where, in one shining moment, she snuck a snapshot of herself holding the Oscar awarded to a client for producing the movie Annie Hall. For years she told stories of having worked for that famous film tycoon, though finally she confessed that it had really been a friend who was employed by the Hollywood rico. Meanwhile, Reyes was growing up conflicted because of his homosexuality, not to mention the embarassment he felt toward his mother during his teens. Reyes confesses much later, as María lay dying in hospice, that he felt “estranged from her final days,” but not, in the end, from her, who did nothing but sacrifice for him. Much of the book, too, has an estranged feel, a kind of narrative flatness extending over a story that has only a few critical moments. “You write as if you had an accent. You sound foreign on the page,” noted one playwriting classmate. Here, however, Reyes often sounds merely detached.

A fairly humorless recollection of a hardworking mother, but still an affecting homage to “the boundlessly life-affirming memory of her.”