i. recognize
Over the past decade, there’s been an acceleration in what I call the “watching this made me realize I was queer” essay. It’s a cottage industry for Millennial and Gen Z culture critics, one with a standardized formula. First, a queer writer talks about a piece of media seen at a formative age, whether it be The Matrix, horror films, so many TV shows, 2000s media, or even the men’s underwear aisle at a store. Then, the writer unearths the media’s queer subtext, which wasn’t discussed explicitly during the writer’s adolescence. Reexamining artwork allows the writer to identify their latent queerness. Crucially, this dynamic can only be understood in retrospect, in combing through memories on the page.
This is a writing model I’ve indulged in for nearly a decade, too. My first piece of cultural criticism, published in 2017, traced my queer identification with the early music of Taylor Swift. I’ve since written about being a teenager and encountering the works of multiple queer playwrights. Their shows shaped how I understood my own queerness, weaving theater into the “origin story” of my life.
Yet there’s always been a presence hovering above my shoulder while I’ve written these essays: my mother, Aileen Lopez Pugh. She was the one who took me to Taylor Swift’s Red Tour as a middle schooler; she also fostered my love of theater by taking me to DC shows throughout my childhood. Her presence complicates the writing model I’ve held onto so tightly. The “watching this made me realize I was queer” essay sometimes ignores the fact that families (especially mothers) recognize a child’s queerness long before they can recognize it themselves. It’s also parents who control what media their queer kids access — far before a child can stealthily check out a gay book at a library, or sneak into a basement to watch queer shows at night.
I asked my mom when she realized I was gay, and she said it was when I was three. I was obsessed with “driving” my triplet sister’s Barbie dolls in a miniature, pastel car. “It just became apparent that I should just buy three Barbie cars,” my mom told me. She knew what was going on, and slyly supported it without singling me out.
A few years later, my mom noticed how much I was interested in artwork. She’d ask my father questions like, “How would you feel if one of our kids was gay?,” acclimating him to that likely possibility. When I was in middle school, she bought DVDs of the musical TV show Glee, and we watched them together. I couldn’t tell if I was drawn to Glee because of its theatricality or because of its queerness; the two forces became synonymous in my mind.
Sensing this, my mom used theatergoing trips to strategically show her support of me. When I was in eighth grade, I studied Romeo and Juliet — and Signature Theatre happened to simultaneously produce a gay adaptation of the play just a short drive away from our Alexandria, Virginia, home. My mom took me to see the production, which completely unnerved me. It’s one thing to watch guys vigorously make out when you’re discovering you’re gay. It’s another thing to watch guys vigorously make out a few feet away from you on a stage, with your mother sitting right next to you.
The whole situation now reminds me of Hamlet’s staging of theater, his attempt “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature,” and force his mother and stepfather to confront the truth of their lives. My mother was similarly using theater to hold up a mirror to my sublimated self. She forced me to confront my sexuality. At Signature Theatre, it felt like my mother was watching me just as intently as the show onstage. To this day, when I write about theater shows and bring my mother along, perhaps I’m watching her just as much as I’m watching the actors. If theater is our shared mirror, I hope to catch her eyes in its reflection.
ii. ours
I’ve taken my mother to see Paula Vogel’s latest work The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions twice. The first was in 2024, when the DMV-set play premiered on Broadway in a production led by Jessica Lange. The second was a few weeks ago, when the play made its DC premiere (with revisions and a slight name change) at Studio Theatre, where it’s running through January 4. A semi-autobiographical work, The Mother Play feels like Vogel’s own attempt to comb through her memories, reconsider the media that have shaped her queerness, and stare directly into her mother’s eyes.
At the show’s beginning, it’s 1967 in Adelphi, Maryland, and the strong-willed Phyllis Herman (Kate Eastwood Norris) has just left her abusive husband. She’s moved her 12-year-old daughter, Martha (Zoe Mann), and teenage son, Carl (Stanley Bahorek), into a small custodial apartment. It’s not lost on Phyllis that the circumstances around their move are humiliating, or that their new space is infested with cockroaches. Still, her children instinctively know to prepare her a gin with ice while they unpack boxes.
Within Vogel’s play, it’s never stated explicitly when Phyllis understands that both her son and her daughter are gay. Phyllis certainly has an affinity for her son: Carl is booksmart and wry, referencing Virginia Woolf and longing for European luxury. When Phyllis shows off a thrifted Chanel suit, she’s flummoxed that Carl spins a tale about the “Potomac matron” who got rid of it, and that Carl can name many fashion designers. But the duo’s playful taunts are their form of affection.
Phyllis doesn’t express the same fondness for her daughter. Carl’s “feminine” qualities feel like a refuge for Phyllis, yet Martha’s “masculine” qualities frustrate her mother. Martha performs masculinity as a kind of protection: in an early scene, Carl gives his sister his clothes, instructing her to ward off bullies by “walk[ing] urgently but with command like Napoleon when he has to take a piss.” Martha’s performance grants her a butch aesthetic and much-needed confidence. But it also alienates Phyllis, who sees conforming to women’s gender roles as necessary for survival.
Audiences watching The Mother Play will realize that the family’s arguments over clothing, literature, and media are really arguments over identity. When Phyllis gives her daughter The Well of Loneliness (a tragic novel about lesbians), Carl deems the gift a scare tactic. It’s the opposite of my mother giving me that Barbie car: Phyllis acknowledges her daughter’s queerness, but suggests more repression.
Vogel’s plays have always interrogated how culture shapes identity. Indecent (2015) explored how the Yiddish play God of Vengeance became a prism to witness both queer beauty and antisemitic oppression; The Mineola Twins (1996) staged a feud between sisters to satirically comment on American culture wars. Vogel’s Pulitzer-winning masterpiece How I Learned to Drive (1997) delivered a haunting tale of sexual abuse, saturated with references to Playboy, 1960s music, and romance literature. The play’s characters feel overwhelmed by sexual media; as scholar Joanna Mansbridge has argued, “Drive shows how our sexualities and our subjectivities are not ‘ours,’ but rather products of culture and history.”
Yet Vogel’s plays are the products of personal history, too. She’s come forward recently to reveal that How I Learned to Drive’s plot was inspired by her own life — a fact she didn’t share partially because of a promise made to her mother. However, Vogel has always been upfront about writing about her brother Carl Vogel, using theater to process Carl’s death due to AIDS-related complications in 1988.
In The Baltimore Waltz (1992), Vogel imagines siblings Anna and Carl going on a European vacation (a trip Vogel wishes she had taken with her brother the year before his death). But Vogel also flips the script from real life: Anna is the one dying from a stigmatized disease, and Carl is in a conspiracy to find life-saving medication. In The Long Christmas Ride Home (2003), Vogel drew on her brother’s love of Japanese culture to create “one westerner’s misunderstanding of Bunraku.” Puppets, narrators, and actors recreate a family’s fraught history, with their sole adult son dying to a “virus multiply[ing] with a ferocious beauty.”
Now, The Mother Play completes a kind of “Carl” trilogy. Because The Mother Play moves forward chronologically, with less abstract staging, audiences may consider the show to be the truest representation of Vogel’s real life. But as the title suggests, The Mother Play is also about the iconography of motherhood. At times, it feels like Phyllis is simply trying to perform the maternal archetypes seen in kitchen-sink dramas. Martha’s metatheatrical narration and Carl’s haunting offer a counterpoint (or competing) dramaturgy.
Plus, Vogel is highly attuned to audiences’ knowledge of the theater canon. Late in The Mother Play, Martha tells the audience, “We all know what time it is: the 1980s. And we all knew what was coming.” Hearing this at Studio Theatre, I looked toward my mom and thought about us watching The Normal Heart and Angels in America in DC. Vogel doesn’t even have to say the word “AIDS” in her playscript for audiences to recognize a familiar dread, a narrative inevitability.
iii. armor
Aileen Lopez Pugh first learned about queerness in December of 1979, when she was twelve. That was the first time she’d ever visited the Philippines.
Aileen’s mother, Ruena Hernando, immigrated from the Philippines to North America in the 1960s to work as a nurse. She was soon followed by her then-boyfriend, Rodolfo Lopez, who arrived to complete his medical residency. The two married and had my mother, but my grandparents’ temporary stay in America turned permanent after the Philippines’ brutal Marcos dictatorship took power and declared martial law in 1972. The Lopez family moved to Virginia, and Ruena and Rodolfo obtained green cards in 1979, which allowed them to finally return to their Ilocos Norte hometowns with their children. There, Aileen saw openly effeminate men for the first time, and was given language for queerness: the Tagalog word “bakla.” In the 1980s, when Aileen was in high school and college, she would understand the medical field’s paranoia about the spread of AIDS by watching her father’s reaction to the news.
Aileen’s teenage years came two decades after Carl and Martha in The Mother Play. My mom also traveled through a different social milieu from that of The Mother Play’s siblings. Carl bemoans the fact that “the children of rich Washingtonians are going to Sidwell Friends and Washington Cathedral.” But my mother was one of these children, attending the private prep school St. Agnes (I’d eventually attend a co-ed version of the same school in the 2010s).
Aileen’s family more closely resembles Luna, the Filipina lead of Studio Theatre’s previous show The Heart Sellers, more than Phyllis. Despite these differences, my mother recognized a lot of herself in the Herman family while watching The Mother Play. Like Carl, she was the eldest sibling, obsessed with culture. Because her mother was epileptic, Aileen searched through American culture for models on how to take care of her younger siblings. She took inspiration from Marmie in Little Women, and the mothers in Little House on the Prairie and Happy Days.
Like Martha, Aileen paid close attention to her clothing and to how she presented herself. Growing up at the height of ’80s preppiness, she wore bright Fair Isle and patchwork sweaters, wide corduroy pants, and “add-a-bead” necklaces. My mom admits these were a kind of “costuming,” but, like Martha’s performance of masculinity, it became a kind of “protective armor.”
“I was growing up in an immigrant household,” she said. “So you had two standards. It was almost like you had to code-switch between what’s acceptable as a child of Filipinos and what’s acceptable in Filipino culture, but then also what looks ‘normal’ in an American setting.”
Perhaps my young mother was also similar to Phyllis: both mimicked media in order to assimilate into a WASP-y, elite DC culture. This was something Aileen’s parents reinforced for her. At the age of six, they told Aileen that she wouldn’t get the same chances as everyone else because she was Asian. After speaking with other children of immigrants, she’s learned that this was a common attitude told to people of her generation.
“I don’t think it was meant to be harsh or hard, but more just to share what the reality was, to prepare your little person to face the world,” she said. Still, when she became a parent to triplets, Aileen wanted to send a different message to her kids. “That’s not what I wanted for you guys,” she told me.
iv. reckoning
In The Mother Play, there’s a small window of adulthood when Martha connects more with Phyllis. In the late 1970s, the two briefly live together in Takoma Park, and Martha convinces Phyllis to attend PFLAG meetings and meet other parents of gay children. Phyllis, Martha, and Carl even briefly reunite dancing at a Warehouse District disco. Phyllis enjoys the scene until she catches Martha kissing another woman — leading Phyllis to kick her daughter out of her apartment.
In a 2024 discussion on The Mother Play for 3Views on Theater, playwright Lynn Nottage (one of Vogel’s many students) wondered if Martha intentionally stages the kiss for her mother to see. Perhaps Martha wants to reveal her queerness on her own terms. When I asked my mother if she thought Martha’s kiss was intentional, she said the confrontation was the important element.
“Whether it was conscious or unconscious, I think all children want their parents to see them for who they are,” my mom said. “So whether or not that’s through a natural, easy process of being seen, or a difficult process, at some point you do have that reckoning.”
I’ve never kissed a man in front of my mother, nor taken her to a gay bar. But I have taken her to see a lot of theater. When I moved back to my hometown after college and began covering theater as a journalist, I was surprised to receive “plus-one” tickets to press performances. I started bringing my mother to see shows, payback for the years of theater tickets she purchased in my childhood.
Today, my mother remains my perennial plus-one, chatting up theater publicists in ways my introverted self could never do. She’s willing to go on some wild theatrical rides with me. On Broadway, we’ve watched queer men fall in love in Illinoise and get kinky in Slave Play. In DC, we’ve seen productions boldly staging queerness: Ain’t No Mo, Fun Home, We Are Gathered, The Inheritance. She even learned about Grindr by way of A Strange Loop.
My mother is quick to remind me that she’s always watched queer media with me. When I was a teenager, we saw Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name in movie theaters, the only mother-son duo in a sea of gay couples. My father has tried to show his acceptance of me through art, too. In 2018, he skipped watching an NFL game to see Round House’s How I Learned to Drive; in 2019, he was one of the first white audience members to go up onstage at Woolly Mammoth’s Fairview. Both shows may have been too intense for his sensibility, but he was still in the room, listening intently and trying to understand.
After listing all these dramas, the throughline I discover is their intensity in both subject matter and form. These shows aren’t vanilla or comforting — they’re extreme, ribald, and often deeply uncomfortable. They place me directly in the “reckoning” my mother talks about, confronting the harshest truths about myself and the world I live in.
So why do I take my mother on such radical journeys? Maybe it’s because by making her watch an intense show like The Mother Play, I can express how intensely I’ve grappled with my identities, especially my queerness. When we watch a queer drama together, an isolated experience suddenly becomes shared. It’s also comforting to me that, between Paula Vogel’s childhood and mine, many attitudes around raising gay children in DC have changed. My mom is one of many straight women in DC who volunteer for Pride festivals, participate in Holy Trinity’s LGBTQIA+ group, and seek out radical artistic journeys.
“It’s like you’re pulling back the curtain,” my mom said of watching queer theater with me. “Even if it’s not directly about you, it’s something that you understand or relate to. So the art makes it really easy to talk about different topics without exposing [you], or making you feel vulnerable in a way that’s not comfortable for you.”
v. sliver
Most days, I wish my life weren’t so reliant on theater. I wish I could be vulnerable in front of my mom all the time, not only after we’ve seen a show. I wish I could just write a personal essay without close-reading plays. I wish I didn’t have to write about other people in order to say something true about myself.
Yet this is the writing the nonfiction world encourages and publishes. In her 2021 essay collection Pop Song, Larissa Pham argues that Millennial critics (including herself) mostly became known by connecting personal traumas to artwork. “The struggle — be it anorexia, depression, casual racism, or perhaps a sadness like mine, which blended all three — was described lyrically, articulated through the lens of a recent book or film and hung out to dry,” Pham writes. “For this, I was paid the industry rate of $150.”
In my career, I’ve also hung myself out to dry without receiving much in return. I’ve long suspected that my memoir-ish criticism does a disservice to myself. Maybe I’m just instrumentalizing my worst experiences and identity struggles into tidy essays with simple takeaways. But recently, I’ve suspected that my criticism does a disservice to the art under focus as well. Why do I filter complex, ensemble-driven work through the narrow sliver of personal experience?
In Paula Vogel’s writing, I’ve discovered better methods to explore memories and culture, ones that surpass the limits of nonfiction. Even though her plays may be classified as autofiction, Vogel consistently pushes her drama into speculative and metatextual directions. For example, one of the most humorous stage directions I’ve read comes from The Long Christmas Ride Home. Vogel imagines the cruising encounter that led to the surrogate-brother character contracting AIDS: “Stephen bends over à la Harvey Fierstein in Torch Song Trilogy. Because I have personally never been in a back room.” Vogel challenges herself (and her theatrical collaborators) to embody other people’s slivers of life. These moments might be filtered through actors or theater — but they’re still circling around something true.
One such sliver is The Mother Play’s wordless scene, “The Phyllis Ballet.” It takes place directly after the disco scene, as Phyllis enters a phase in her life where she’s often alone. For an extended period onstage, Phyllis quietly mixes drinks, brushes a wig, listens to music, and waits for time to pass. Just as Vogel has never been to a back room, I will never be a middle-aged mother. Still, I circle around something true by watching Phyllis, and imagining my mother in a similar situation.
“Every parent at some point will feel that loneliness and sadness,” my mother told me. “Because if you’ve done your job right, your kids will leave you, or they go off to have their own life that’s separate and apart from your life.”
This separation between generations informs the end of The Mother Play, when Martha ultimately cares for an elderly Phyllis with dementia. There’s a cyclical nature to Martha serving a maternal role to her own mother, now childlike. A frustrated Martha even pretends to be a care worker, and hears Phyllis compliment her. There’s a danger that this ending becomes sentimental in performance (as critic Helen Shaw noted in 2024, “Dementia is a surefire way to make your audience weep”). But when I asked my mother about the ending, she was aware of its speculation, its theatrical hope in the face of real-life sadness.
“I don’t know if that actually happened for Paula Vogel, but I hope it did,” she says. “Even if it didn’t, it’s something that she’s created to give her a sense of peace with her own relationship.”
vi. prisoner
I took my mother to see The Mother Play in DC while I was in a depressive episode. There was no “trigger” that initiated this episode, much to my frustration, and much to the confusion of my therapist and psychiatrist. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve simply gone through phases when my life feels empty and not worth continuing. I pass through weeks willing my body to disappear. I want to leave behind only a shallow indentation on a mattress that’s also a grave.
What’s strange is that I feel more comfortable writing about depressive thoughts on the page — and even sharing that writing publicly — than I am admitting these thoughts in a private conversation. I struggle to talk about my depression, especially to family members who haven’t experienced these struggles themselves. The closest I’ve gotten to sharing my depressive thoughts with my mother has been directly after seeing intense theater shows. At least while I’m sitting in a theater, I can fantasize about being a brave on-stage character, saying exactly what I’m feeling without writing it down first.
My favorite scene in The Mother Play deals with depression. Carl has contracted AIDS, and his mother has taken him into her gated community, only to resent both him and their neighbors’ ostracization. Phyllis admits that she “never wanted to be a mother,” but “couldn’t afford a hack abortionist” — things you’re also not really supposed to tell your children. “I’ve spent a lot of time as a prisoner in my bedroom while your brother has invaded my space with his rage,” she says. “His depression. His remorse.”
Watching this scene at Studio Theatre, I found myself more clearly recognizing Phyllis’ outburst as one of projection: she’s the one with a lot of rage, depression, and remorse. But this scene comes after an entire play of seeing Phyllis trying to perform stereotypical motherhood. It’s exhilarating to see Phyllis say exactly what she’s thinking, even if it goes against the parameters of good parenting.
I asked my mother whether parents should be brutally honest with their kids, and she gave a short, emphatic answer.
“No,” she said. “I feel a lot of compassion for [Phyllis], though, because I think in that moment, she was just trying to save herself.”
My mom’s response made me consider all of the things about her I’ll never know. When were the times that she was just trying to save herself? When has she wanted to be brutally honest with me, but didn’t say what she was feeling so she could be a good mother? When has she resented my own depression and remorse?
vii. distant
In this essay, I’ve attempted to do what Paula Vogel is doing in The Mother Play, to comb through family memories and assemble a portrait of my mother as a whole person. It feels surreal to write about her in the third person as “Aileen,” and not “my mom.” But I’m reminded that Phyllis R. Vogel was a real person before she was a daughter’s memory, before she was a dramatic character performed by actors across the world.
Writing this essay has also been a frustrating experience. Why can’t I capture my mother’s laugh, her warm charisma? Why does my portrait still feel like a caricature drawn in crayon? But any child trying to envision their parent as a whole person will fall short: it’s all just projection, it’s all just speculation. At least in the theater, artists are forced by their medium to acknowledge their writing’s artifice, their mimetic shortcomings. Paula Vogel embraces the surrealism of trying to understand your parents, fearlessly pushing memories into speculation. She emboldens me to expand my cultural criticism into those territories, too.
Even today, I can still feel my mother hovering over my shoulder, curious but nervous to encounter herself on the page. Many artists only publicly share works about motherhood after their mothers have died, like Vogel, Ocean Vuong, Steven Spielberg, and Mike Mills. Still, The Mother Play inspires me to share these stories publicly, right now. I wish Vogel’s own mother had been able to watch The Mother Play herself, to see slivers of her life presented in real time. Perhaps I’m writing this essay now to force difficult conversations to happen. I’m forcing a reckoning before it’s too late, and before there are too many things left unsaid.
In The Mother Play, Martha says that as Carl was dying, she understood what it means to be a mother: she felt “this ferocious possession to keep you as long as I could.” I think this is also what it can mean to be a child, to instinctively have a ferocious possession of your parents. The Mother Play teaches me how to express this possession, while also releasing it, dispersing it through a community of audiences and readers. This process reminds me of what it means to be a culture writer at all. Nonfiction writers must maintain a necessary objectivity with their subjects — but they must also still gain a subjects’ trust, be honest, research the gaps in their knowledge, and write with care. Perhaps this is the same distant (but intimate) relationship that children must have with their parents.
When I was interviewing my mother for this essay, I brought up the fact that Phyllis was probably just as depressed as Carl at certain points throughout The Mother Play. We laughed about the humorous ways this manifests throughout the show, and my mother casually said, “We all suffer from being human.”
I hope that this was her way of saying, “I love, I hurt, I feel this, too.” After my mom reads this essay, I hope we’ll have an honest conversation with each other, like the ones we have after watching a play. Even if that doesn’t happen, Vogel has taught me I can still stage that scene in my mind, circling around some kind of peace.
The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions plays through January 4, 2026, in the Mead Theatre at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th Street NW, Washington, DC. For tickets (starting at $42), go online, call the box office at 202-332-3300, email boxoffice@studiotheatre.org, or visit TodayTix. Studio Theater offers discounts for first responders, military servicepeople, students, young people, educators, senior citizens, and others, as well as rush tickets. For discounts, contact the box office or visit here for more information.
Running Time: 90 minutes with no intermission
The program for The Mother Play is online here.
SEE ALSO:
Gay siblings and a flawed mom make do in ‘The Mother Play’ at Studio Theatre (review by Amy Kotkin, November 18, 2025)
, the writer reflects on parenting and growing up queer. (A long-form personal essay.)){kind=link}