PLAYS AND PARENTING: DID MAMA KNOW BEST AFTER ALL?

Why can’t my mother be the leader of the Earth? She’d make the world a nicer place for every mother giving birth. Every child would have enough to eat and more ... No nation turned from Mama’s door ... I love you . . .

This Mother’s Day greeting comes to you from “Rotondi,” the new entertainment at the Boyd Street Theatre. “Rotondi” is half performance-art and half polka-party. It’s a giddy show, especially if they get you up to dance.

When you get back your breath, you can also see that there’s an idea at work here. Not that playwright Paul Lacques is actually espousing a new metaphysics based on the polka beat. But he has to admire his weird band leader hero (Tony Patellis) for codifying such a philosophy, just as one admires the kind of fanatic who builds an amazing cluster of towers in his backyard out of scrap metal and broken pop bottles.

And when our band leader defeats his sinister Nazi alter ego with the phrase “Someday there will be no Papa . . . only oompah,” it’s not merely the dumbest pun of the decade. It’s an identification of “Papa”--the masculine principle--with the forces of darkness and death. Who does that leave as the symbol of light and life? Mama. No wonder she gets her song.

Playwrights seem to be identifying more with Mama these days than they did 20 or 30 years ago, when her role was to be either pushy (Mama Rose in “Gypsy”) or castrating (Mommy in Albee’s “The American Dream”). You see it spelled out in Donald Krieger’s “Rocket” at the Powerhouse.

“Rocket” is also in a way a “performance” piece, but it has such a strong narrative element that it’s fair to call it a play. A typical American play, at that, with a young man walking back through his childhood: the happy days with Dad and Mom; the troubled days as Dad and Mom started to have problems.

Dad (Scanlon Gail) is a space engineer in the early 1960s. At one point, we see him tracing trajectories at a light table. A shadow of his hand is projected onto the wall and his son (Donald Thompson) forlornly matches his small hand against it, at once trying to touch his father and to measure up to him.

But the play’s most interesting scene focuses on the mother (Noreen Hennessy). She is sitting alone in the dark after dinner. The boy is watching TV in the other room. The father has left them for another woman.

The mother has a visitor from the future. It is the son, now an adult (Ray Underwood). “I’m a man,” he tells her. “You are me ,” she says firmly. In an Inge play, the remark would brand her as an emasculator. Here we understand exactly what she means--that she’s passed the best of herself on to him and won’t see it devalued.

“Rocket” also uses a ghostly grandmother (Georgie Paul) to further the son’s belief that the universe is with him. The father’s calculations and star charts also have their romance--it’s not an either/or piece. But, as in “Rotondi,” it’s Mom who has the right stuff.

For those who forget how Mom used to be portrayed, see “Blue Denim” at the Harman Avenue Theatre. James Leo Herlihy and William Noble’s play could only have been written at the end of the 1950s, the last decade when Americans could swallow the idea that what women most liked to do in this world was to pour coffee for their menfolk.

The play is about an innocent teen-age boy (Chad Lowe) who gets an innocent teen-age girl (Alexandra Powers) “in trouble,” after which they try to get an abortion. You can see the authors wavering between a tragic ending or a relatively fortunate one. They chose the latter, and it’s not necessarily a compromised ending. Families in real life do rally around when their kids need help.

The last scene does, however, bear an unfortunate resemblance to a “Father Knows Best” wrap-up, and director Martin M. Speer makes the most of the parallel. Though played solemnly, there’s a touch of camp nostalgia to this production. We’re reminded less of a real 1950s family than a TV family, with Dad (Herb Mitchell, filling in for Robert Pine the night I saw the play) more of a grouch than usual and Mom (Caroline McWilliams) a little more out of it.

Mom truly does come off as a drone in this play. She is Dad’s eternal yes man, without even the gumption to manipulate him behind his back. Although reading Aristotle with her Great Books group, her real specialty is What The Neighbors Will Think--and shopping, at which she seems to be a demon (although how banks work is a mystery to her).

Nor, as you might imagine, does she trigger the reconciliation. That comes about from the son finally owning up to Dad about what’s happened, and Dad realizing that he hasn’t been communicating with the boy.

Mom does serve cookies at the end, as Father and Son settle down for a serious man-to-man chat in the living room, after which she scoots back to the kitchen. Were mothers ever really this complaisant? Well, they were on TV.

The Improvisational Theatre Project’s “School Talk” is based on interviews and improvisations with high school kids in the mid-1980s, and Mom and Dad aren’t idealized at all. Since it’s performed in the schools, this show concentrates on its kids, and it makes clear that one of the things they’re up against today is a lack of parenting, from either mother or father.

One girl’s father is a cocaine addict, who says “Do as I say, not as I do” and thinks he’s being funny. Another girl’s Mom informs her--in a shriek--that this is a “civilized family.” One of the saddest and funniest bits is an imaginary boxing match between “Mom and Daddy for the middle-aged championship of the world!! Mom hits Dad in his guilt. . . .”

I hate your yelling, the kids want to say. It’s like a nut house around here. So home becomes basically a place to sleep. The kids hang out with friends, and experiment with sex, and more or less do their schoolwork, and have big vague dreams about making it out in the world--”Going platinum,” as one guy puts it.

Saving the world isn’t in their plans. Having homes and rearing children? That’s probably in there, but not high on the list: Their parents’ example hasn’t been that red hot. These kids have learned that you can’t rely on parents, adults, anybody. They know that you have to “make your own mind.”

“School Talk” isn’t primarily concerned with Mom or Dad, but the absence of Mom and Dad as empowering figures is sobering. It almost makes you nostalgic for the world of “Blue Denim,” myth though it was. Perhaps we need those myths to pull us through.