A few days after Rachel McAdams made a noble but disappointing Broadway debut in Mary Jane, Jessica Lange fared much better in Mother Play, also about an unhappy mother, this one with two problematic children instead of one. Like Mary Jane, it’s one long act without intermission, subtitled “A Play in Five Evictions” because it begins in 1964 and covers several decades in the lives of a mother named Phyllis (Ms. Lange, hilarious and touching) and her son and daughter, Carl (Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger, who played Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird)—both marvelous—who move from town to town, enduring a series of horrible episodes and getting evicted five times from cheap apartments crawling with mice, cockroaches, and maggots. By the end, they are all halfway to madness, but I had a ball going bonkers with them.

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