Terrence McNally's "Mothers and Sons" opened tonight, March 24th, at Broadway's John Golden Theater. The comedy-drama marks the author's 20th Broadway show, with previous entries including the musicals "Ragtime" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and the plays "Love! Valour! Compassion!", "Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune" and "The Ritz". McNally’s last Broadway visit was a well-received revival of “Master Class,” featuring Tyne Daly as Maria Callas.

Daly stars in “Mothers and Sons” as a mom who visits the ex-lover (Frederick Weller) of her dead son. Expanded from characters in "Andre's Mother", a touching tele-play that McNally penned for PBS in 1988, the piece shows her Katharine being confronted not only by missed opportunities of the past, but by the surviving man's new husband and adopted child. It certainly is a changing world.

Interviewed for the New York Observer, McNally noted, “I certainly know what Cal and Andre went through, and I’ve lived to see [gay] marriage and adoption and family. I wanted to look at how far we’ve come in society, so I don’t think of this as an update at all. It’s a new story. We can live a new story now.”

Directed by Sheryl Kaller ("Next Fall"), the show premiered last June at Pennsylvania’s Bucks County Playhouse and is now set to run through June 8. What did critics think of McNally’s latest work?

Associated Press reviewer Mark Kennedy calls the play “gentle and moving” with an ending that’s “hopeful without being maudlin.” Kennedy adds that “the 90-minute play moves quickly, and although some of the most angry exchanges seem to erupt from nowhere, the playwright beautifully shows how close to the surface long-suppressed emotions and slights can fester.”

In his *** writeup for London’s Financial Times, Brendan Lemon is less taken with the “sometimes absorbing, somewhat unsatisfying” play and says Tyne Daly saves the evening. “She has,” he writes, “an uncanny aptitude for grounding an individual in a complex reality, so that even when the character does something unattractive we can feel why such a choice was made.”

NBC New York’s Robert Kahn admires the play as a whole and, like Lemon, appreciates the lead actress, who gives “an exquisite performance.” He lauds Frederick Weller and notes that he and Daly “have dynamic chemistry.” Commenting on Will Steggart as the new husband, Kahn writes that he’s “unapologetic and audacious throughout, in a fine portrait of a man who grew up in a world where the first question on a date wasn’t inevitably: `So, have you been tested?’” Concludes Kahn, “I thought `Mothers & Sons’ was fantastic, for how effectively it locks down this unique period of time that is 2014… I hope it finds a broad audience.”

Variety critic Marilyn Stasio couldn’t agree less about the play itself, calling “the ideas so diffuse and the dramatic structure so disjointed, there’s no cohesion to the material and no point to the plot.” She chides the playwright for idealizing the new marriage and for turning Katherine into “a gay man’s grotesque caricature of the cruel mother who doesn’t love or understand” her late son. Stasio appreciates Tyne Daly’s “uncanny ability to convey a whole range of emotions in a single line, she lets us see the pain and sorrow concealed by malice,” but in the end, she grouses, “no one can come to the aid of a play that doesn’t…quite…exist.”

Even harsher is New York Post reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli, who calls the play “a clunker” and slams it with just one-and-a-half stars. “Nothing makes sense here,” Vincentelli complains, “and under Sheryl Kaller’s stilted direction, all three adults look uncomfortable.”

Writing for The Wrap, Robert Hofler disagrees, noting the many ways he prefers the new work to the teleplay of “Andre’s Mother”. He asks, “Did McNally bring Katharine back just to beat her up again? Maybe. Whatever, this public trashing is a riveting show. Of course, by play's end Katharine has delivered a couple of bombshells that explain her bitterness, if they don't exactly absolve her, and Daly gets some of the evening's biggest laughs without even saying a word.”

In his mixed review for Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray finds the drama “sufficient” but thin: “It’s not a story to get lost in,” he writes, “and there are no obstacles other than Katharine’s that seem designed to be taken seriously… [Yet] it's possible to enjoy, and even be edified by, what happens…[and] the passion and the anguish they evince in their most in-tune moments somehow manage to be just barely real enough.” It helps that Daly is “outstanding as Katharine” and that “Steggert makes a strong foil.”

Also mixed in his feelings is AM New York's Matt Windman. Calling McNally not a particularly great playwright albeit a prolific one, Windman does compliment the dramatist for writing "one of his most compelling plays in years, even if it feels underdeveloped and offers little in terms of dramatic movement." In his **1/2 review, Windman calls Daly "masterful" and appreciates the drama as "a well-constructed, often funny dialogue that is both provocative and heartfelt."

Time Out’s Adam Feldman makes an interesting point to open his review – that the increasing acceptance and normalization of gay life in America has taken a toll on McNally’s recent plays, since his work is so often “centered on marginalization.” For this work, however, Feldman kvells, “Though dated at times, and shaded with passive aggression, this is arguably McNally’s best play in 20 years… Sensitively directed by Sheryl Kaller, “Mothers and Sons” rarely lags as it unfurls in a single unbroken scene.”