Manipulative bitch or exploited woman? This is the strength and weakness of The Good Mother starring Gretchen Mol of Boardwalk Empire fame and written by Francine Volpe, now at The New Group Theater. All the performances are excellent, but Volpe’s play, in which the plot is slowly and elliptically revealed, leaves the audience unsatisfied. We know little more about the lead character at the end than we do at the start. Whether treated kindly or manipulatively, Mol’s character always reacts either defensively or exploitatively, with the result that she always hurts herself. She does try to protect the emotionally and mentally damaged child we only hear but never see, but with whom she rarely seems to interact and from whom she often tries to escape. She is in fact an adult version of her child except that she is physically whole and beautiful but mentally impaired from what she experienced as a child.

Gretchen Mol holds center stage for an hour and forty minutes, without an intermission and almost without a break, in a physically demanding performance that left this reviewer wondering how she could do it without exhaustion. Mark Blum, as Joel, the sympathetic but sleazy psychologist, gives a bravura performance as someone you want to hate but can’t, even though he has left a trail of broken lives. Eric Nelson as Angus, the Goth-looking, emotionally damaged son of Joel, gives a creepy but textured performance that hints at but never shows the underlying turmoil.

While the play gives a denouement so slight that the audience didn’t applaud at the final blackout because it didn’t know the play was over until the players appeared for their curtain call – it is a devastating look at a bunch of wasted lives in an archetypal American landscape.