NEW YORK, NY.- Soon after Alex was born at 25 weeks, with several catastrophic disorders, Mary Janes husband, unable to cope, fled their marriage. Still, she hopes he finds some peace, I really do.
She also thinks kindly of her boss, who means to accommodate her but pretty much fails to. Its daily moral agony for her, Mary Jane marvels. Its really something to behold.
Mary Janes own moral agony is likewise something to behold. She feels guilty about putting the super of her Queens building, where she shares a junior one-bedroom with Alex, in a difficult position by removing the window guards. Its just that he loves looking out the windows, especially when hes sick and I cant take him outside? she explains in upspeak.
Its the law, the not-unkind super replies though Alex, now 2, can barely sit up, let alone reach the sill.
Youre an excellent superintendent, Mary Jane says. She is the embodiment of apologizing for living.
That, at its heart, is the condition that Amy Herzogs steel-trap play Mary Jane explores: The death of the self in the love for ones child. As with Alex, so for his mother: There is no cure.
When it was produced in 2017 at New York Theater Workshop, I called Mary Jane a heartbreaker for anyone human. You did not need to be a parent, though it helped, to get dragged down by the undertow of terror beneath its placid, warm surface.
The Manhattan Theater Club production that opened Tuesday, starring the rom-dram charmer Rachel McAdams, confirms that earlier diagnosis. But Herzog, whose Broadway adaptation of An Enemy of the People is running a few blocks away, is not interested in locking down meaning. Like all great plays, Mary Jane catches light from different directions at different times, revealing different ideas. On the other side of the worst of COVID, Mary Jane feels less like a parents cry for more life than an inquest into the meaning of death.
I didnt notice that at first. The story spooled out, swiftly but subtly, along its original lines: a series of Mary Janes often surprisingly funny interactions with eight women, four in each of the plays two parts. First, the super (Brenda Wehle) plunges the kitchen sink, making uncomfortable small talk about holistic therapies. (Mary Jane respectfully hears her out.) Next comes Sherry (April Matthis), the most reliable of the home nurses who help tend to Alex. Mary Jane displaces anxiety about changes in the boys condition onto concern for Sherrys garden in wet weather.
Not that she is aware of how rigidly upbeat she seems; its Herzogs technique that makes even the dullest conversation feel as sharp as a scalpel. Brianne (Susan Pourfar), a newbie to the world of adaptive strollers and insurance wrangling, is overcome by Mary Janes glib you-can-do-it curriculum, in which caring for Alex (we never see him) sounds as easy as caring for his goldfish. And when Alex has a seizure while Sherrys niece Amelia (Lily Santiago) is visiting, Mary Jane calmly thanks the 911 operator. Twice.
As her life relocates to a neonatal intensive care unit in Part 2 there is no intermission the supporting actors return in new guises. Matthis is now a thoughtful but busy doctor, surprised by Mary Janes continuing denial; Santiago a music therapist with a knack for arriving when Alex is asleep.
Two other women, a sharp-tongued Orthodox mother (Pourfar) and a robed Buddhist chaplain (Wehle), lead the play gently into a spiritual realm. For the mother, her daughters illness is clarifying, the nearness of death becoming the only real thing in life. For the chaplain, it seems, there is nothing to do but face the suffering of both without rancor.
This turn toward questions of faith, and the way they finally breach Mary Janes defenses, took me by surprise. I hadnt remembered the play that way, perhaps because Id seen it first through parental tears. Now, as its chorus of diverse women suggests, it seems to be about everyones participation in loss.
What has changed? Other than a brief allusion to the pandemic, little in the script. The shrewd staging, by Anne Kauffman, looks and sounds much the same, too. Lael Jellineks set performs its wondrous midcourse transformation; Leah Gelpes soundtrack of susurrations and beeps implies what the rest keeps hidden. New to the production, Brenda Abbandandolo delivers pinpoint costumes (the Orthodox mothers outfit is a triumph) and Ben Stanton makes marvelous images from streetlights, night lights and hospital fluorescents. The cast, returning or not, is unimprovable.
Its McAdams, with her fetching warmth, who alters the temperature. If Carrie Coons more businesslike approach in 2017 was also valid, the greater distance between McAdams natural sunniness and Mary Janes reality enhances the plays tension. It leaves you to wonder what Mary Jane was like before Alexs illness gave overwhelming purpose to her life and, more painfully and permanently, what she will be like after it no longer does.
Mary Jane
Through June 2 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.