That, anyway, is the vision of AI-aided accessibility in “My Mama & the Full-Scale Invasion” at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Sasha Denisova’s sassy world premiere comedy about the power of mothers to make the world safe. Or at least, the way we wish they could. The play is an irreverent yet affectionate portrait of the dramatist’s own mother, a bombastic city dweller who refuses to let a little thing like a Russian missile dislodge her. In that sense, it is a study in the wonderful absurdity of a stubbornly resistant woman under fire.
The great gift bestowed on Denisova and director Yury Urnov is that Mama is played by Holly Twyford, who again gets winningly under the skin of an ebullient character and allows us to share the saucy pleasure. Her gravel-voiced, chain-smoking Mama (the program IDs her as “Mother,” but naw, she’s Mama) is a dish of drama queen served with wry. The portrayal is enhanced by the contributions of two other protean actors, Suli Holum and Lindsay Smiling, in roles credited blandly as “Daughter” and “Man.”
There’s nothing so neutrally conceived, though, about “My Mama & the Full-Scale Invasion.” The Ukrainian-born Denisova seizes on an American audience’s natural heartstrings, both for a mom who insists on cooking hearty meals while bombs fall and for the country enduring the heartless bombing. (Don’t get Mama started on Russian President Vladimir Putin — whom she derisively refers to as “the Putin”; he has a cameo, as does a certain more sympathetically evoked leader of the free world, in signature aviator sunglasses.)
As you may intuit, “My Mama & the Full-Scale Invasion” takes liberties with Aristotelian values, as Denisova reflects on life with her charismatic mother, an engineer, often from the safety of the Daughter’s exile in Poland. Some ingenious fantasy interludes involve Mama’s FaceTime confabs with the likes of Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which are made to seem like two-way conversations by projections whiz Kelly Colburn. They’re not so much expressions of Mama’s delusions as of the desperation anyone would feel in dire circumstances for a direct pipeline to the powerful.
The play at other times feels like the dramatist’s guilty apologia for leaving Kyiv when her mother refuses to budge. The Daughter visits Mama in her Kyiv flat, a claustrophobic box on wheels, designed by Misha Kachman (who also translated the script). Their relationship is, yeah, you guessed it, complicated: Science-oriented Mama can’t quite believe she had a would-be artist in her womb for nine months, and that feeds her suspicion the Daughter was switched at birth.
Even if that’s just one of Mama’s crazy notions, the gap between them helps explain why the mother stayed and the daughter left. And although Denisova never shies from portraying Mama as an agitated fly-off-the-handle type — “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” is the kind of thing Mama says to offload her anxiety — there is abundant warmth, too, in the picture Denisova draws.
The writer tends to wear her own political leanings on her sleeve: Another of her recent works, “The Gaaga” (“The Hague”), produced recently in a vacant bar in Cambridge, Mass., by Arlekin Players Theatre, unfolded around a little girl in a Ukrainian bomb shelter, imagining Putin on trial for war crimes. “My Mama” gives Denisova the opportunity to purge more of her rage, and who in an American audience, not wound up in their own self-serving agendas, wouldn’t empathize? The play has that going for it, though the mind of beloved Mama, whipped into a patriotic frenzy by the long history of Soviet and Putin-led depredations, is itself a vivid window into the toll that oppression takes.
Holum and Smiling, the latter recently named a co-artistic director of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia — where “My Mama” will run from Jan. 30 to Feb. 18 — get to display their comic chops: Wait especially for Smiling to materialize as our implacable American president and Holum to slither into view as the Russian autocrat. The main event, however, in costume designer Ivania Stack’s loopy fur-lined (bulletproof?) vest is Twyford, asserting Mama’s moral authority. In a play in which even the utilities are under siege, the actress’s electricity provides the power, full scale.
My Mama & the Full-Scale Invasion, by Sasha Denisova. Directed by Yury Urnov. Sets and translation, Misha Kachman; lighting Venus Gulbranson; costumes, Ivania Stack; adapter, Kellie Mecleary; projections, Kelly Colburn; sound and music, Michael Kiley. About 90 minutes. Through Oct. 8 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, 641 D St. NW. woollymammoth.net.