Of course Richard Hugo House asked former Seattleite and ascendant TV star Lauren Weedman to dig into her self-immolating psyche to pen and perform a short piece for Mother Knows Best. Yes, she's known to a greater number of viewers as Horny Patty, the office nympho on HBO's Hung—a vanity-free performance that easily steals the show (on which she's also a staff writer). But local stage audiences remember Weedman from her many lacerating solo works in which, among other characters, she portrayed her infuriatingly unflappable mother in dead-on detail. So how did Mom feel about the somewhat unflattering portrait?
Genevieve Pierson
Muth won't fictionalize her mom.
Details
Mother Knows Best Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave., 322-7030, hugohouse.org. $15–$25. 7:30 p.m. Fri., Nov. 19.
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"I think she likes it," says Weedman. "Now she leans into her quirks more when I'm around, acting loopy just because she thinks that's the way I see her." Obsessed with her status as a misunderstood adopted child, Weedman will be the first to tell you that mother/daughter communication is often strained, even in celebratory moments. Consider the time Weedman's comic confessional A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body was published in 2007: "My mother said, 'Oh, thank goodness; I hope this leads to something.' And I said, 'This is it, Mom—this is the something.'"
Yet it's Weedman herself, as usual, who'll provide the bigger target tonight. Her recent foray into motherhood was the basis of her touring show No . . . You Shut Up, which had its Seattle premiere last spring at Hugo House, and she admits the subject still grips her. "Initially, I thought I'd try to take a different approach and write about the sky or the sea or something," Weedman cracks with mock loftiness. "You know: 'In a way, I've always felt the ocean was my mother.' But . . . I'm writing about the anxiety attack after I had my baby. It hit me super-hard. I thought, 'I'm bringing my child into this cycle of suffering. This child is going to know that eventually it's going to die.' I couldn't believe I'd never thought about that before."
Heavy stuff? Sure. But likely also quite funny, when given the Weedman treatment. SW
Stacey Levine knows she owes plenty to her mom—including her career. "She helped make me very aware of language, and what it can do," says the longtime Seattle writer. "She's hugely inventive with language and very vivid in the way she talks." And while Levine has "definitely got my rocks out about mothers and family" in her previous work (two well-received novels and a collection of short stories), "there's always more to say."
For Mother Knows Best, part of the ongoing Hugo Literary Series, she's written a piece that explores a close mother/son relationship during the '60s. Readers of her work will be unsurprised to hear there's "a paranormal element to it." Conventional realism is not her style. The sentences can be as strange and fractured as the vision.
"There's a lot of pressure on mothers," Levine observes. "They're generally the ones in charge of impressionable, helpless children. We all have a shadow side, as Jung says. A side full of infantile rage, needs, hunger. Mothers are not exempt from that."
This won't be the first time that Levine has participated in one of the Hugo House events. She previously wrote on family tensions in a piece she describes as "a limit case," about parents who couldn't stand the idea of their kids leaving them and want to get their son and daughter married. That story found its way into her newest collection of short stories, The Girl With Brown Fur, to be published next spring.
Live stage performances can be especially nerve-wracking for a shy writer (unlike the energetic Weedman). "There's lights on your face—and it's a new work that you probably just finished," says Levine. "It's not like over at Pilot Books [a small Capitol Hill shop], where you can sit on the floor and be in a yoga stretch while you read." MDF
When Zoe Muth was asked to write three original songs about mothers, she wasn't sure how to approach the topic. "I have a great relationship with my mom," says Muth. The commission from Hugo House seemed to describe the paradigmatic maternal relationship as being fraught with dysfunction—the stuff of sad country songs.
But, says Muth, "I kinda wondered, 'Well, why did they ask me this?' I don't think it was necessarily because of [past] songs I had written that were specifically about moms."
In truth, most of Muth's country-inflected ballads are stories in the tradition of the Louvin Brothers and Loretta Lynn. Songs about broken hearts and bad relationships dominate her 2009 debut album, Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers, though in real life she lives happily with her boyfriend. As we talk over beers at the Lockspot Cafe—one of the last bastions of old Ballard, where Muth grew up—her quiet disposition gives no sign of family torment or mommy issues.
Sitting under a pair of oars signed by the cast of Deadliest Catch, she relates how fans who've heard her song "Never Be Fooled Again"—about a young girl whose father abandons their family—have approached her to commiserate about this supposed family tragedy. It's awkward to have to politely explain to them that her folks are, in fact, still together.
