The ineluctable ovary sweetens the knob. The eye rests in the trench of the tongue. Mommy knows how to go down. On the parapet She says, sit in my folds, sit by, Let’s do a play. Yes, let’s do a play, She sssssazzz. She holds their hands, before the men leap, before we happen upon their unrecognizable one time bones. Something came out of me, gentlemen, a sticky weeping song. 11Asher Hartman, “Notes on This Play,” Playbill program for The Mommy Leaks the Floor (New Theater Hollywood, 2025), LINK.

Within a black lace-slipped theatrical space—itself a historical body—a staggering quasi-human enters stage left, fronting enormous, buoyant, transparent mammary glands, groaning and slowly sloshing toward the balcony stairs before collapsing with a guttural groan in seeming exhaustion, leaking her juices and fluids.

From this balcony, a group of silent “feminine” authors (director and musical director, assistant director and her infant son, and vocal coach/performer/composer) sit observing the “masculine” multi-hyphenate performers (not really actors, but highly skilled thespians) whose active dialogue seems to dominate. Remaining on two separate planes, visually divided by gender, they occasionally cross to wordlessly intervene with sound, song, or physical reaction to those pontificating below; in this staging, echoes of Jean Genet’s groundbreaking, “anarchic, provocative, outrageous” stage work The Blacks (1958) resonate.22Email with Hartman June 19, 2025: “As to the balcony… I was to some extent thinking about Jean Genet’s The Blacks, but I wrote the piece specifically for NTH.” See Elisa Bray, “‘The Blacks’: Genet’s Contentious Play Returns,” The Independent, October 17, 2007, LINK. See also Martha Swope’s photographs of the 1961 production of The Blacks at the Billy Rose Theatre, New York, in the Digital Collections of the New York Public Library: LINK.

Hartman’s poetic dialogue is channeled through the director—who is an intuitive—written in an active collaborative process with and inspired by particular long-time participants of the Gawdafful National Theatre over months of rehearsals; in particular, Mommy is begat by a series of productions, starting with The Dope Elf (2019) in San Francisco/Portland and most recently It’s Better to Start Out Ugly (2023) in Los Angeles/San Francisco. Mommy is a response to the New Theater Hollywood itself as a container for the generative energies of female-identified actresses who imbued the space with their creative juices, professional desires, and drives.

Mommy lays out the parade of wounded masculinity within her full-blown theatrical doyenne corpus. She holds the chaos, inspires the rants and reactions of four “men,” expounding their sexual games and interplay, power dynamics and confessions of violence, possessive thrusts and childlike cries for recognition, disturbing confessions, and desires for freedom and dominance, all with a sense of helplessness:

MICHAEL
Let’s get straight to the point

MICHAEL x down to get 2 chairs. PHILIP x in, sits.
LUNA gets chair to stage, prepares, sits, back to the men.

MICHAEL
We buried the girls at dawn
I wouldn’t touch em
All those limbs
Those crooked arms looking like swastikas
Feeling sorry for themselves coz they was chopped up
Trying to get those panties in the ground is a helluva job Fellas
And their little purses too, shoving them back to Eden
Ha. This work ain’t for sissies
I stole a nickel
Right outta that bag
To make a crown for my molar

PHILIP
King!

JOSÉ LUIS
What is this, a trick? A dirty trick? A nasty trick?
(bombastic, as if with double chin)
Girls, girls, inhuman girls, when they die they look like oysters
It’s the act of dying, the act, sir, when She, Death, presses upon me
Heavy lidded, drugged, I’m after that, sir, air, order, freedom!

ALL
(Sung high to low, chromatic)
Danger! Peril!

LUNA gets chair exits upstage

PHILIP
(stands, follows LUNA upstairs)
I’m not like them, I’m not like them, the good guys sing
I’m not like that, I’m not like that, I’m everything
I’m like ahhhhhh, I’m like ahhhhhh, I’m like ahhhhhh

It’s not a stretch to connect this with the current horror display of domestic and international breakdowns, cycloning around a few highly regressive, cruel, hyper-masculinized men. In describing Sorry, Atlantis: Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge (2017), Hartman stated, “Theater’s always had a role in hosting the parade of uglies—not necessarily the ills in domestic life, but those of political life. The play is like a carcass. Actors pull the carcass apart and allow us to look at its components.”33“Asher Hartman, Mark Allen, and Tim Reid in Conversation,” Mad Clot on a Holy Bone: Memories of a Psychic Theater (X Artists’ Books, 2020), 162.

Mother Theater has been a structural force in prior Gawdafful works, specifically Purple Electric Play (PEP!) (2014), when the theater’s giant tongue emerged from its backstage throat as the finale to clear performers from the stage and caress the audience. Characters inspired by pop culture figures embodying historical misogyny have appeared in Mr. Akita (2015) and Sorry, Atlantis, the latter of which features PoJo, lizard twins inspired by Lyle and Erik Menendez. Frank explorations of sexual drives and violence are mother’s milk for Mommy: “Theater has the capacity to put the unconscious on display, especially parts of the cultural unconscious.”44“Asher Hartman, Mark Allen, and Tim Reid in Conversation,” 161.

Mommy’s responsive lament to our current political, social, and physical vessels is a reflection of Hartman and the Gawdafful National Theatre’s process: “I think of these plays as collective works performed by a certain group of people, at a certain time, dependent on the intricacies of their relationships and intimate understandings of American sensibilities that roll around in seemingly ornate and crusty language.”55Asher Hartman, Mark Allen, and Tim Reid in Conversation,” 164. Returning to Genet’s pre–civil rights era staging reflects our nation’s crisis of gender and racial equality and clashes of family separation, abduction, abuse, and discrimination; our return to battles we naively assumed were “won.”

As dark as this reflection may be, Mommy’s creators and Mother Theatre hold down this fort of horrors and uglies, witnessing the show play itself out as they delineate its parameters. Here is where the deep streams of power and flows of agency can be re-established during upheaval and chaos without reasserting hierarchy: a feast of histories, stories more tragic than our own. Mommy knows how to play and lets the play run.

We used to scribble notes to each other in the theater, star, starfucker, sad, sadder, saddest. Harmless jibes from little players in a theater that always stood by us, even when abandoning Her from the feeling we weren’t getting what we wanted, which was to be noticed. Rarely did we think of her radicality, her force, her deep and holy dark as a container for our own. There are secrets here, ghosts, fumbling embarrassed loves, heartaches. We’d recite her rituals, snatching them from Africa, the global South, Asia, junky Europa. We forgot that she kills you, that her job is to drag you home.

This cannot be a play, only a stuttering ceremonial joke.66Hartman, “Notes on This Play.”