by Curt Holman, Creative Loafing
Comprised of the dinner party farce "Entertaining Lesbians," the TV parody "A Lifetime Original Movie Starring Judith Light," and three monologues under the title "Letters from Home," Bad Mama takes parenting to its most absurd extremes. Having celebrated Southern women with his previous play, Beached Wails, the 25-year-old actor/playwright describes how he pokes fun at motherhood and the media in Bad Mama. Creative Loafing: What does Bad Mama say about motherhood?
Payne: In all the plays, the mothers desire to be in better situations, and they see their children as the avenue to that, so everybody wins. It's not the theory but the practice in which things fall apart. In "Entertaining Lesbians," a straight white woman does everything she can to blend into "diverse" society to get her 4-year-old in a good pre-school. The pregnant mom in the monologue "What Are You Expecting" wants to raise her son to be a "gay best friend," like the ones she's seen on television. But every mama in the show starts out with the best intentions.
Do any of them resemble your own mother?
She'd probably be offended to know this, but my own mother's probably most like Ruth in the monologue "The Groom's Cake." They're both Mississippi mothers who never lose their poise, but Ruth goes from being inconvenienced by people at her son's wedding to actually eliminating them.
"A Lifetime Original Movie Starring Judith Light" features characters written to be played in imitation of TV actors like Judith Light and John Stamos. How do you and the cast handle that?
I watched about 50 Lifetime movies to prepare for it, and they have amazingly precise structures. I picked the famous actors not because they're bad, but because whenever they're in material like Lifetime movies, you can see the autopilot switch on, which I thought was beautiful. Each cast member is encouraged to study the performer they're playing, as if, say, Shari Belafonte sat down and said, 'This is the best script I've ever read!' and gave it her all.
