I saw two plays in NYC, both from the hand of Amy Herzog – her adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (directed by her husband, Sam Gold) and Mary Jane, starring Rachel McAdams.
(People are puzzled with me because I didn’t stagedoor for McAdams – well, it was cold and I really don’t know who she is…You don’t know who Rachel McAdams is? Um, not really…..)
(Practically speaking – I bought tickets a couple of hours before curtain via StubHub at about (I think) $50 less than face value.)
Mary Jane premiered in 2017 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play in 2018, but this production is its Broadway debut. This also is McAdams’ Broadway debut, and while her performance was in general quite wonderful, the flaw in it was her volume. It seems to be better than it was when the show opened (judging from discussion board comments and reviews), but she still struggled to make herself heard and understood – at least in the first mezzanine level.
Carrie Coons played the role in the Yale production, and I can see how she would bring a quite different vibe to the part – a steeliness, in contrast to McAdams’ strong, but always just-wavering-a-little cheerful strength.
Mary Jane is, on the surface, a simple play. It’s a 90-minutes, no-intermission story about a single mother parenting a seriously disabled toddler son. Herzog and Gold had a daughter, Frances, born with nemaline myopathy, a muscular condition, who died in 2023 at the age of 12.
The play begins in Mary Jane’s Queens apartment, then, after a crisis, shifts to a hospital. (The apartment set raises up in a single piece for that.)
We never see Alex, Mary Jane’s son. He is in the apartment bedroom, and we know of his presence through the interactions of other characters with him, as well as the noise of medical equipment and procedures. When the action shifts to the hospital, we see a figure, back to us, in a bed.
The play is episodic, in a way, a series of interactions between Mary Jane and various other figures – the apartment superintendent, a nurse, that nurse’s college student niece, and a mother of a disabled infant come to Mary Jane for, as it were orientation. In the hospital all the same actresses play different characters: a doctor, a music therapist, a hospital chaplain (Buddhist nun) and the Orthodox Jewish mother of another hospitalized child. All of the actors were fantastic, especially in their distinct, dual roles.
These interactions are opportunities to explore various aspects of Mary Jane’s experience: the learning curve, the physical demands, the frustrations and fears, the strength required to fight for her child’s life, the love and the mystery the whole experience evokes.
I liked it for the same reason some don’t. The dialogue is quick and casual, mostly non-expositional – that is, we are plunged into the middle of the situation, just watching, and so we’re not having things explained to us – the elements of Alex’s condition and situation emerge in bits and pieces in the course of ordinary conversations.
Through it all, Mary Jane is, as we say, a rock. I’m not sure what to make of this. Her cheerfulness seems almost delusional sometimes. It is as if she were to allow one question or moment of sadness in, she just might break.
My takeaway was that caretakers in challenging situations are often asked – or people wonder without asking out loud – how do you do it? Herzog’s play, rooted in her own experience, is perhaps an answer: this is how. This is what it’s like, and this is how what seems to you to be a foreign, frightening country, becomes simply daily life.
The end, though. I admit, I didn’t know a lot about the play before going in and I was a little afraid there was going to be a euthanasia or even quality-of-life angle, but there was nothing of the sort. So while I won’t reveal exactly what happens at the end, I will say, it’s none of that.
Instead, there’s a vision of sorts – a migraine? Something actually spiritual? Both? It’s open-ended, as are Mary Jane’s and Alex’s fates. Does one of them die? I overheard a lot of discussion on this score as I left the theatre. I have no opinion on that, but what the rather mystical ending indicates to me is that while throughout the play we have been witness to the ordinary, this ordinary – as is the “ordinary” each of us lives, no matter our circumstance – is a way – the only way we have – to be able to actually see.