Hannah Jones/Winonan

“No.”

Theater professor Jim Williams stood up from his chair and stopped the scene for the third time in twenty minutes. The actors froze in their positions. Heather Williams, a fellow professor, was kneeling on the floor and holding senior Lily Roe, who sat stiffly in a chair at a kitchen table, by the shoulders. As the only two actors in Jim Williams’ production of “’Night, Mother,” the evening had been a full one for both of them.

“No, it’s got to be more explosive,” Jim said, crossing the black box to confer with the actors. The space had been transformed into a compact house, with a kitchen, a set of shabby couches and easy chairs, a worn china hutch, and an abandoned laundry hamper.

Jim demonstrated for Heather how he wanted her to cling to Roe’s shoulders while Roe tried to break away from her. He wanted the visual just right for the conflict between their two characters.

“’Night, Mother” is a Pulitzer-winning play by Masha Norman that centers around a mother, Thelma, and her daughter, Jessie.

The two of them must test the boundaries of their relationship when Jessie tells her mother she plans to commit suicide that night.
Roe, who plays Jessie, is performing the play as part of an independent study. Even with nightly three-hour rehearsals, she still finds the emotions in the play raw and beautiful.

“It shows how far someone will go to keep someone they love alive,” she said. “And it shows how far someone will go if they really want to… leave.”

Jim had the actors run the scene again, and Heather went back down on her knees and placed her hands on Lily’s shoulders:
“If you’ve got the guts to kill yourself, Jessie, you’ve got the guts to stay alive.”

Roe pulled away. Before they could get much further, Jim stopped the scene again.

“It seems like she’s getting away so easily,” he said. He wanted Heather to cling more, to try and make Roe struggle to get out of her grasp.

They ran the scene again from the top.

“He pushes us, which is good,” Roe said. “If you don’t put everything you have into it, then it’s just not going to work.”

The cast of “’Night, Mother” would be rehearsing for three hours every day in the week leading up to their first performance on Wednesday, Sept. 25. They’d have until then to explore what was proving to be an increasingly complicated relationship, balanced between love, resentment, life and death.

The actors ran the scene one last time, this time continuing on. With still a half hour left to rehearse, the night wore on, and the actors kept working, holding on tighter, pulling away harder, and working toward something “explosive.”

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