It’s certainly one of life’s nice strokes of luck to have a superb mom. The playwright Paula Vogel didn’t get one. The actress Jessica Lange did: candy and nurturing, accepting of her kids, the type of mother the opposite youngsters wished was theirs.

“I had an ideal mom,” Lange, 75, stated on a June afternoon in a lounge on the Helen Hayes Theater in Midtown Manhattan, her tone making clear that she wasn’t boasting or being hyperbolic. She was merely stating a reality, one which she realizes is “past lucky,” and units her personal heat familial dynamic aside from that of the characters in Vogel’s “Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions.” On the drama’s middle is a painfully lower than splendid dad or mum. Lange is up for a Tony Award for portraying her.

To Vogel, 72, a Pulitzer Prize winner for “How I Learned to Drive,” a backward-spooling 1997 reminiscence play inspired by her uncle, the situation of a mom who doesn’t precisely throw herself into the job is as acquainted as her private previous: autobiography spun into drama.

“I’m the child that discovered different mates’ moms, and went house with them after faculty,” she recalled, perched throughout a excessive, round-topped desk from Lange. “I keep in mind as soon as coming right into a pal’s home drenched from the rain, and her mom introduced me a bathrobe and stated, ‘Take your garments off within the lavatory. I’m drying your garments.’ I’m like” — and right here Vogel channeled a toddler’s voice, wonder-struck — “‘You are? You’d try this for me?’”

Nonetheless, “Mom Play,” a best-play Tony nominee, is just not an train in demonization or revenge. Condemning Phyllis, the mom — who shares Vogel’s mom’s title — is just not the purpose. Understanding her is.

For Lange, who has three grown kids whom she considers her chief precedence, meaning making sense of some irrevocable betrayals by Phyllis of her daughter and, most profoundly, her son.

“You can’t decide this character as you’re enjoying her,” Lange stated. “However there are parts of Phyllis, there are choices that she makes in life, which can be as international to me as something I might ever think about.”

Vogel calls “Mom Play,” a Second Stage Theater manufacturing that’s slated to finish its limited Broadway run on Sunday, “the prequel” to her 1992 play, “The Baltimore Waltz.” A heartbroken comedian fantasia a couple of brother, Carl, and a sister, Anna, “The Baltimore Waltz” is devoted to the reminiscence of Vogel’s brother Carl, who died of AIDS in 1988.

Within the decades-spanning “Mom Play,” set within the Washington space the place Vogel grew up, Carl (Jim Parsons, Tony-nominated for his efficiency) is Phyllis’s doted-on darling boy. He’s additionally the tenacious champion of his worshipful youthful sister, Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger, likewise), a fictionalized model of Vogel. And he’s the kid solid out when Phyllis breaks what Vogel described as “a contract of parenting and household,” which is “that you just handle your loved ones after they’re dying, regardless.”

In a phone interview, Keenan-Bolger famous that “most of our nice American performs about households had been written by sons of their 30s and 40s.”

“To have a household play a couple of mom written by a daughter in her 70s feels important to me,” she stated, “significantly since this play facilities rather a lot round forgiveness. Age has such an influence on the way in which that we’re capable of view our dad and mom and their shortcomings.”

But as Tina Landau, the manufacturing’s director, identified in a separate interview, the play inhabits a theatrical universe whose unconventionality is a Vogel hallmark.

“As a reminiscence play,” Landau stated, “it’s not steeped in sepia and nostalgia. It’s vibrant colours and it’s fast switches and it’s loopy music and it’s dancing cockroaches.”

Phyllis, inside that universe, is a witty if reluctant mom — a divorced secretary, keen on martinis and cigarettes, who’d had her kids in a time when getting married and beginning a household appeared nearly inevitable in ladies’s lives: extra destiny than alternative. She makes her entrance in a roach-infested condo when a chair swivels round, revealing her. That’s how Phyllis appeared as Vogel started writing the play, which had been percolating in her thoughts for greater than 15 years.

“When that occurred,” she stated, “it’s possibly the second web page of the script, and I received to see her once more, I went, ‘Oh, there she is!’”

A shocking quantity of pleasure animated her voice as she recounted that, given the searing recollections that the play revisits — alongside charming ones, just like the mutual adoration in Phyllis and Carl’s relationship, and therapeutic ones, the place we see the household contract faithfully upheld. In any case, it makes emotional sense to Vogel.

“This has been beautiful for me,” she stated. “I do love my mom. She was by no means boring. It was all the time fascinating. You understand, I walked by means of the door and I knew it was going to be a problem, however I knew it was going to be authentic.”

Lange’s earlier Broadway outings have all been in American classics, two by her favourite playwright, Tennessee Williams. She performed Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1992 and Amanda Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie” in 2005. She gained a Tony in 2016 in her most cherished position, Mary Tyrone, in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

Embodying moms onstage, then, is hardly novel for her. However “Mom Play” marks three sorts of firsts for Lange — as a brand new play, as a play written by a girl and as a play by a dwelling playwright. That final element is hanging, on condition that she had an in-house playwright throughout her practically three a long time with Sam Shepard.

“I did, I had one proper within the bed room, thank God,” she stated, and laughed. “You understand, we had deliberate a pair various things to do collectively. Twice, I believe, these plans had been abruptly altered by my pregnancies. However I received a daughter and a son out of it, so it is perhaps higher than a run of a play.”

Lange, who has gained two Academy Awards and three Emmys and has been well-known for the reason that Bicentennial, gives the look of being terribly snug in her pores and skin. It was 50 minutes into the interview, after Williams’s title and work had come up repeatedly, earlier than she talked about that she’d identified him a “little or no bit.”

“Oh, God,” Vogel breathed, reverently, and you could possibly hear that she would really like a Williams anecdote from Lange proper now, please.

So Lange complied, providing a reminiscence involving Mikhail Baryshnikov and their daughter: “As soon as Misha and I had been down in St. Barts. Shura was only a tiny child. He was there,” she stated, that means Williams. “Perhaps he was there with Liz Ashley, I don’t keep in mind, however I do keep in mind him holding little child Shura on his lap and bouncing her.”

Vogel has said that it was vital to her to make “Mom Play” with “an artist who has had a life stuffed with kids.” If she had had her manner, although, she would have had her personal little ones.

“I actually wished kids,” she stated. “It was like a bodily urge.”

However she apprehensive.

“I wasn’t certain that I might escape the damaging patterns,” she stated. “I didn’t assume as a homosexual lady, I’d have the funds for and sources to have well being advantages. To have meals on the desk. Artists, we normally reside under the poverty line beginning out.”

“I truly had tried to conceive with my finest homosexual pal and it didn’t take,” Vogel continued. “And I keep in mind pondering, properly, do I am going all the way down to the bar and put on a scoop neck and placed on make-up and simply see if, you recognize —”

“That used to work,” Lange interjected, offering corroboration the way in which solely somebody from the identical era can.

“That used to work!” Vogel concurred. “And then you definitely assume, OK, what am I getting genetically?”

“Nicely,” Lange stated, all practicality. “That rabbit gap is like, you recognize, what are you going to do.”

Vogel, who has been married since 2004 to Anne Fausto-Sterling, has turn into referred to as one of many American theater’s pre-eminent teacher-mentors, first at Brown College and later at Yale.

Her former college students had been fast to identify, in “Mom Play,” what it borrows from the German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s wordless 1973 play “Request Concert,” which she has lengthy used to show what a playwright can do with out dialogue.

Her riff, based mostly partly on observing her mom years in the past, is a portrait of Phyllis’s loneliness and a tour-de-force part of the present, titled within the script “The Phyllis Ballet.”

It is among the components of the efficiency that Lange enjoys most, alone onstage for about quarter-hour. Phyllis, having alienated each of her kids, passes a desolate night, attempting to not drink too quickly or an excessive amount of.

“Each night time that I do it,” Lange stated, “photographs and recollections and feelings simply type of transfer me from one second to a different. So it’s by no means precisely the identical, and it’s by no means simply mechanical: ‘OK, now I’m going to get the drink. Now I’m going to get dinner. Now I’m going to attempt to play solitaire.’

“And it’s nearly like being on water,” she added, swirling her arms gently forwards and backwards by means of the air for instance. “It simply retains transferring, you recognize. Like, increase, you knock into this after which, increase, you knock into that. Following the present.”

Vogel requested: “Do you consider your youngsters when you’re doing it?”

Lange took within the query, briefly began to speak about sense-memory and substitution strategies that an actor may use to faucet into emotion.

However her reply, finally, was easier than that, and in a way extra reassuring: “There’s nothing that I can draw on from my relationship with my kids on this.”