“I’ve had Mother Play in my mind for at least 15 years,” says the American playwright Paula Vogel. “But I feel like we’ve been in a climate, in both film and theater, where we are encouraged to create likable women.” Vogel based her new play on her own life experience. The year is 1962 and the action happens just outside of Washington, D.C., where Phyllis, a penniless single mother of two teenagers, tries to help them through challenges, decisions, and regrets over 40 years. Jessica Lange is cast as Phyllis, who approaches the world unpredictably, lovingly, angrily, and with a glass of gin in hand. “It’s going to have to come out of some desperation, some miscalculation, some rage,” Lange says. Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger play her two children. Together they discover, Vogel says, “what happens in the body, to the voice, to the psyche as those decades pass.” —Jeanne Malle