NEW YORK, NY.- In the first scene of “Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions,” Paula Vogel’s antic, mournful new drama, Martha, a character modeled on the playwright, offers a version of Ecclesiastes.

“There is a season for packing,” Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) says as she slits open a cardboard box. “And a season for unpacking.”

Vogel, 72, has spent the majority of her career unpacking. Her work is not strictly autobiographical, but as in the plays of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee or Adrienne Kennedy, she has a canny way of rearranging the emotional furniture of her lived experience into tragicomedy.

Here, at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater, that furniture includes a mother, Phyllis (Jessica Lange), and a brother, Carl (Jim Parsons), named for Vogel’s own family. The story begins in 1964 with the family moving into a basement apartment in a Washington, D.C., suburb; Carl is 14, Martha 12. Phyllis is in her mid-30s, barely treading water after a foundered marriage. At times, when she can pry her hands from a gin bottle, she clings to her children as if they are life rafts. Otherwise, she regards them as jetsam. Phyllis, we learn, never wanted to be a mother.

On finding herself pregnant: “I thought: Other women aren’t mother material, but they get through it. Just hang on, Phyllis, hang on. But it is never over. It’s a life sentence.” How’s that for a bedtime story?

As a single working mother, Phyllis can afford only custodial apartments, and those early evictions come when she complains too loudly about the roaches and maggots. The vermin are brought to life, extravagantly, in Shawn Duan’s projections. And David Zinn’s flexible set nimbly conveys each new abode. The later, more fraught expulsions come when Phyllis rejects first Carl, who comes out as gay in college, and then later Martha, who is also queer.

“Was it too much to ask for one normal child?” Phyllis, who always sees herself as the victim and not the aggressor, moans.

Versions of Phyllis and Carl have stalked Vogel’s past plays. Carl is the key figure of “The Baltimore Waltz” (1990), Vogel’s first major work, a comic burlesque of her brother’s death from complications of AIDS. And in “How I Learned to Drive,” which won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1998, the main character’s unnamed mother shares Phyllis’ taste for liquor and her distaste for the ways of men. After her real mother’s death, Vogel acknowledged that the play, which deals with sexual abuse, was drawn in part from her own life.

“Mother Play” is of course a showcase for Lange. Her Phyllis, dressed in Toni-Leslie James’ chic costumes, is on the blousy end of elegant. Nearly parodic in her feminine grace, she is also as hard as buffed, polished nails. Phyllis is in some ways a monster, but Vogel doesn’t traffic in monsters. As a writer, she understands that people do terrible things for unterrible reasons — out of love, out of fear, out of loneliness.

The characters age perhaps more than 40 years in the play’s 105 minutes. Another actor as Phyllis might have done more to communicate the small ravages of time, but Lange concentrates instead on her ageless ferocity and charm. She is supported, sturdily, by Keenan-Bolger, who imbues Martha, a playwright like Vogel, with goodness, righteousness and a gift for plain speaking, and by Parsons, a born clown savvy enough to show the pain behind the buffoonery.

Director Tina Landau, a longtime collaborator, embraces that buffoonery, almost to a fault. During scene changes, the roaches don’t scurry out of sight. Instead they dance, to a jazzy version of “La Cucaracha.” There is more dancing, when Lange and Parsons burn, baby, burn in a duet set to “Disco Inferno.”

Does that sound too silly for a play about death and estrangement? Probably. But silliness has always been a signature of Vogel’s work and, at least for me, sometimes a source of frustration. Reading her early plays, I have thought, “Can’t you be serious?” But Vogel, who loves a dirty joke, knows that laughter is a way of taking things seriously. Sometimes the best way.

By comparison with “The Baltimore Waltz,” its obvious companion piece, “Mother Play” is a quieter show, softer and less shattering. The wounds that Vogel prods have largely scabbed over, and the concluding mood is one of compassion and release. When it comes to Phyllis, Martha knows what the playwright knows: that you can love someone without forgiving them, and that love is preferable to the alternatives.

Thirty or so years ago, Vogel told a reporter, “I like theater that makes me feel like it’s a healing.” That’s what “Mother Play” is, a balm that comes in cardboard boxes and packing tape. It honors the dead by making them alive again and nurtures the living by providing a place to put a daughter’s love and rage. Martha’s box is not Pandora’s. It’s just another way of organizing a life.

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‘Mother Play’

Through June 16 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.