No Mother-Daughter Angst for ‘Molly and Maze’ Duo

Lotus and Lili are determined to have a happy breakup.

“I really do not want to hold onto her,” said comedian/poet/musician Lotus Weinstock, whose daughter Lili Haydn will attend Brown University this fall. “The guilt of doing that would make me nauseous. I love my daughter winning in this life. That doesn’t mean I haven’t shed a tear. But by the time she goes, I hope we’re both OK. Our assignment is going to be to turn it into a positive thing.”

Not surprisingly, love and separation are the themes of her “Molly and Maze” (at the Eagle Theatre through June 12), an autobiographically inspired piece in which mother and daughter play characters very similar to themselves.

“It’s all about letting go,” noted Weinstock, 45, smiling across the couch at 18-year old Lili. “Molly says, ‘it started the second you were born--and neither one of us wanted (to let go). I guess that’s why you were a Caesarean. After three days of labor, you didn’t want to leave.’ Our director, Tracy Newman, was talking about the trauma she experienced taking her daughter to kindergarten for the first time. I felt this incredible pull on my womb when Lili got her driver’s license. I watched her driving down the street, squealing with the delight of all the possibilities open to her--and I just contracted.

“In this play, I deal with that. I say, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do at 3 in the afternoon, when it’s time to pick her up from school; it’s the highlight of my day.’ I used to dress up really nice, look real prim so she’d be proud of me and want to show me off. I thought I was the coolest mother in the world, until I got in the passenger seat and started shrieking like a lunatic. She said, ‘You’re invalidating me.’ I said, ‘Well, when there’s a truck coming at you 100 miles an hour, it’s very hard to say, ‘Honey, should we explore our options?’ ”

From the start, it has been a family of two (Lili’s father never lived with them): first at a farm in Canada, where Weinstock practiced strict macrobiotics. “Somebody told me Lili’s intelligence would be totally dependent on what I fed her. So I began to count grains. People would run screaming from my house: ‘Give me some coffee!’ ” In 1971, Weinstock settled in North Hollywood and joined a spiritual collective: “It was the cheapest therapy I could find. All you had to do was give them your car and change your name.”

Before long, she’d moved out and set up housekeeping with five other families in a condemned “farmhouse” in Hollywood. “We lived there till a bulldozer nearly ran over our shoes. Then we moved to a place on Fairfax with real bathrooms--one actually worked.

“It’s just that we had no kitchen in the other place,” Haydn said. “You work through your garden phase and you would like a bathroom, a bathroom where you don’t have to wash the dishes and find rice grains in the tub.” In spite of the unorthodox environment, her education was a priority: She has studied the violin since third grade (last year she played a duet with her teacher and the L.A. Philharmonic) and excelled in academia.

Beamed Weinstock, “One of the reasons we moved to the Valley is that Lily was accepted at Walter Reed IHP (Individual Honors Program). It scared me, because I didn’t know who was going to help her with her homework. She has an affinity for calculus. . . . I love our differences, I’m proud of them. But I feel no genetic link. Sometimes I look at her and think, ‘This is my daughter?’ We have a major affinity for each other--and our good sides are complementary. But that’s it. She’s the absolute image of her daddy, who’s gorgeous.”

Why no mother/daughter angst ? Weinstock sighed. “I see kids who are fresh to their parents. There’s such a nastiness, an acceptance that that’s what’s supposed to happen. People almost think it’s sick if you don’t have that. I don’t think you have to make each other wrong to get out of the house. After all, she’s not running away from me; she’s running to something.” (Haydn is, however, leaving a blossoming acting career; she’s currently on “The New Gidget.”)

As for the maternal/professional path she has chosen, “I wouldn’t prescribe what we’ve done to anyone else. This relationship was born out of necessity. I never felt I had a choice. But even though I stopped pursuing some of the opportunities in show business, I never stopped creating. I did what I could do at home: wrote a book (‘The Lotus Position’), had a musical group. But later, when she was like 15, I did start going out on the road. We needed to separate a little bit--and I had to help her. I had to leave.”

Now it’s Lili’s turn.