The Mother

Five years after a horrific school shooting, the mother of the slain shooter agrees to be interviewed on a network news special called “A Killer in the Family.” Moving between the television studio and non-linear flashbacks of her agonized inner and outer worlds (with glimpses of the father, the shooter’s best friend, and the shooter himself), the mother before the shooting and the mother after the shooting confront each other with three impossible questions: What did she do wrong? Can she continue to love her son? And should she?

The Mother is held under copyright by Lynne Conner. All rights reserved. To request a copy of the script or for information on producing The Mother, please contact Lynne Conner at:

lynne.conner@gmail.com or 412.251.6235.

“a powerful and harrowing drama” ~Portland Press Herald

“Adolescence, masculinity, and gender scripts are among the many lenses ‘The Mother’ very acutely employs to explore school shootings, along with nature-versus-nurture, cultural representations of death, parents in Shakespeare, the observer effect in physics, the media, the systems described in Arendt’s “banality of evil” concept, and everything that mothers have been blamed for – homosexuality, autism, etc. – over the years. ~Portland Phoenix

“Devastating and exhilarating in its relentless truth-telling, shining a light on our culture of violence and its consistent mother-blaming as a coping skill.” ~ Abigail Killeen, creator/producer of Babette’s Feast (Theatre at St. Clement’s, NYC)

THE MOTHER is a 2023 Bay Area National Playwrights Festival Semi-finalist and a 2018 and 2019 Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center National Playwright’s Conference Semi-finalist.