The Sins of the Mother: a robust and surprising plot by Israel Horovitz
The old television series Cheers may have celebrated places where everyone knows your name, but American playwright Israel Horovitz is less than convinced that familiarity breeds contentment. Just ask the characters in Horovitz’s Sins of the Mother which NORT is presenting in admirably muscular fashion.
The play centres on the economically eviscerated fishing village of Gloucester, Mass. where three men, who have known each other for longer than may be healthy, spend too much time together with devastating consequences.
Combative and frustrated by unemployment, the cynical Bobby (Jerome Bourgault), hair-trigger-tempered Frankie (Sean Tucker) and sensitive Dubbah (Adam Skanks) tangle as they wait one morning for the unemployment insurance office to open. With them is the fish-out-of-water Douggie (Ray Besharah), a native of Gloucester who has returned after several years of wandering the country. A dark secret involving Douggie’s late mother connects the four even more deeply than does sharing a common hometown.