The 45 men who have been president have come from many different states, parties and backgrounds, but they all have one thing in common: They had mothers.
This often-unknown group of women and shaped the lives of our heads of state, but their stories are not told in high school history textbooks. “First Mothers: The Women Who Raised America’s Presidents” — a series of monologues by Lawrence E. McCullough — shines a spotlight on them.
Prime Stage Theatre will produce a one-night-only performance of “First Mothers” at the North Side’s New Hazlett Center for the Performing Arts. It will be held on Nov. 4, the night before Election Day.
In addition to writing the play, McCullough is a member of Prime Stage Theatre’s board. This event will be the Pittsburgh premiere of “First Mothers,” but it was first performed in New York in 2006.
McCullough said that he was inspired to write the series of monologues by his wife, Lisa Bansavage, a Carnegie Mellon School of Drama graduate. “She was my muse,” McCullough said.
He has been a playwright since the early 1990s. Bansavage told him of a book that her friend had read, “First Mothers: The Women Who Shaped the Presidents” by Bonnie Angelo, but the book only included mothers of more recent presidents, from Sara Delano Roosevelt to Barbara Bush.
“We started thinking, what if we dramatized some of these stories, we actually met the women, and went way back?”
Way back they went, all the way back to the beginning of the United States with Mary Washington, mother of first President George Washington.
“The idea was to look at a part of the presidency in the way that nobody has really much looked at. People know the First Ladies … but the first mothers were so powerful in the way that they really did kind of shape their sons’ moral characters, for better or for worse.”
The current iteration of “First Mothers” includes 15 women — since its premiere in 2006, McCullough has added in the stories of Ann Obama and Mary Anne Trump. Since it’s a series of monologues, the script can easily be expanded. “It’s a flexible play,” McCullough said.
While the featured presidents’ mothers were all different, he noted some commonalities between them — a spirit that defined the values of America.
“There was always this incredible emphasis on education, no matter where they were, what their limited means might be. The more I started digging into the research of it, I saw that there really was a pattern here,” he said.
Each four- to five-minute-long monologue takes place in real-time during an important moment in these women’s lives. Martha Washington waits for her son to be inaugurated in New York; Lillian Carter — a Peace Corps volunteer — sits at the bedside of an Indian orphan suffering from leprosy; Rebekah Baines Johnson writes a letter to a state college pleading for her son’s admission.
“Each of the women, they’re in the present. Dorothy Ford is counseling an abused woman because she had to run away from her marriage with her baby, Gerald. Martha Truman is explaining why she insisted that her husband spend money on getting Harry a pair of eyeglasses,” McCullough said.
Elizabeth Jackson — mother of seventh President Andrew Jackson — has perhaps the most shocking vignette of all. “Hold onto your seats when she comes on,” McCullough said.
“None of them really had any concept that their son would be president. Well, I guess Mary Washington did, but a lot of the others didn’t live that long. For them, it was just about raising a son to be productive and make their way in the world, better than the previous generation had,” he said.
The timing of the performance is fortuitous, and he hopes that Prime Stage’s production will inspire theatergoers to mark their own place in American history and their community.
“You don’t have to be passive, you can actually go out — as these women often did — and make a difference in public life,” he said.
To learn more about “First Mothers: The Women Who Raised America’s Presidents,” visit primestage.com.