The mommy monologues

>> Is the diaper humour in Mom's the Word really for everyone?

By AMY BARRATT

 I'm still wondering what the childless people in the audience made of the inflatable donuts.

 The play was Mom's the Word, a big in-joke for mothers of young kids, playing at Centaur theatre as part of the Just for Laughs festival. In one scene, the six actresses don black trenchcoats, trying to hide their identities as mothers. But first, one discovers a white spit-up stain on her lapel, and before you know it, they're all waving these orange rubber donuts in the air singing "The Wheels on the Bus" with reckless abandon. While the mommies in the crowd just nodded and smiled, the rest of the audience must have felt they were watching pure surrealism.

 Last year, after a series of critical flops in the theatre division, Just for Laughs struck gold with Late Nite Catechism, an interactive, improv-based show about an old-style nun. That show was an import from Chicago, which might have been JFL's cue to give up on locally produced shows, but to their credit, they went with a local cast in a Canadian play this year.

 Mom's the Word is the collective creation of six Vancouver-based actresses-turned-mommies-turned-writers. The local cast (Ellen David, Jennifer Morehouse, Carolyn Guillet, France Rolland, Susie Almgren and Satori Shakoor) is terrific, but the show doesn't have the impact of Catechism.

 While Late Nite Catechism had a special impact on those who had actually been taught by nuns, you didn't have to be Catholic to howl. In contrast, Mom's the Word doesn't have much to offer the non-mommy crowd. The ideal audience for the piece is mothers--and fathers--whose kids are still in diapers.

 Unfortunately, the six characters are basically all the same character: white, straight, married, middle-class, stay-at-home-moms who all apparently experienced natural childbirth. There is one single mother in the group, and this production has attempted to introduce diversity by including one francophone and one woman of colour. Nevertheless, since the parts weren't actually written for them, the diversity remains superficial.

 The structure of the show, especially in the first act, has a lot in common with The Vagina Monologues: various characters take turns riffing on a common theme. Ultimately, Mom's the Word is a bit more of a play than Eve Ensler's tribute to female genitalia, but both pieces share a sense of indecision about whether to stick with a stand-up comedy tone or to go for the drama.

 For the most part, Mom's the Word has a refreshingly unsentimental take on motherhood. "You know that the post-partum glow is over," deadpans the character played by Guillet, "when you look at them and the word 'asshole' flashes into your mind."

 Morehouse is rightly entrusted with some of the most heart-wrenching material. She plays the mother of a preemie who spent the first three months of his life in hospital, his life hanging in the balance. But it was her monologue about briefly losing her two-year-old daughter that had me closest to tears.

 Shakoor's character talks about how having a baby indoctrinates you, like it or not, into a great big club. If you're not in this club--that is, you have no interest in ever having kids--go see something else at the festival. Also, stay away if you're pregnant with your first child--the graphic descriptions of childbirth will scare the crap out of you. :

 Mom's the Word through July 22 at Centaur Theatre, Tues-Sat, 8pm, matinees Sat-Sun, 4pm, $23.50-29.50. Info: 288-3161 or 845-2322