Mourning Pictures

Honor Moore’s play Mourning Pictures written as a part of The New Women’s Theatre.

The following is a review of Mourning Pictures, from After Dark: The National Magazine of Entertainment, by Laurence Senelick, September 1974.

Genuine theater is very much alive and quite well, thank you, in Massachusetts this summer. The Lenox Arts Center at Wheatleigh, brainchild of producer Lyn Austin, is an exciting, seething kettle of creativity. The Manhattan Project’s manic, irreverent version of The Seagull, a classic seen in a new light, was followed by Mourning Pictures, a new play by Honor Moore and one which may become a classic.

Mourning Pictures, which casts a slightly fictionalizing veil over the death of the author’s mother by cancer, is a harrowing comedy—harrowing because the slow, degenerative process is in no way palliated; a comedy because the ultimate feeling is affirmative, the triumph of the individual human spirit over the adventitious indignities of dying. The play is conceived in a brilliant theatrical idiom: a mélange of hard- edged poetry, brief dialogues, and the counterpoint of various pop song-styles, playing under, over, around, and through the action. The effect is reminiscent of Oriental theater, intense, yet detached, somewhat as if Emily Dickinson had written Noh plays.

It is welt served by its actors. Leora Dana, ravaged, gaunt, dry as a bone, and smart as a whip, has the role of her career, making of the dying mother a very real, very specific woman whose plight is universal. As the eldest daughter, who cannot reveal her love through fear, guilt, and disgust, Kathryn Walker has the luminosity of embodied intelligence; her final “aria” is delivered with a dazzling virtuosity few young actresses can command. Talk is that the show will be brought to New York in the fall. 

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