Rachel McAdams might at first seem to be miscast in her first role on Broadway. She portrays the title character in Amy Herzog’s deceptively casual play about the mother of a severely disabled son. Alex’s birth two years earlier has completely upended Mary Jane’s life. Her husband abandoned her because of Alex, and taking care of her child is so time-consuming that she had to abandon her studies (she had planned to be a teacher.) It’s also so costly she was forced to take a menial job just for the health benefits, and she’s about to lose even that, because of an (unseen) boss who pretends to car. Yet here is McAdams, fresh-faced and cheerful, like her beloved character Kate in “Slings & Arrows,” the twenty-year-old Canadian TV series about a fictional Shakespearean festival, at the start of a movie career with starring roles in such popular films as “The Notebook” and “Mean Girls” and as an Oscar nominated journalist in “Spotlight.”
I saw “Mary Jane” in its Off-Broadway production seven years ago, and I remember the actress portraying Mary Jane as more matter-of-fact, less sunny.
It took me a while this time around to realize how well McAdams’ approach fits the character. McAdams winds up startling effective in a play whose weight and power sneak up on you.
Four other actresses portray eight characters with whom Mary Jane interacts. In the first half of the play, which takes place in Mary Jane’s apartment in Queens, Mary Jane seems engaged in amiable and idle chatter – with the building’s superintendent Ruthie (Brenda Wehle); with Sherry, the home-visit nurse who is the closest thing Mary Jane now has to a friend (April Mathis); with Sherry’s teenage niece Amelia (Lily Santiago.) Even when she discusses the challenges of care-taking with Brianne (Susan Pourfor) a young mother with a similar son – dealing with the health bureaucracy, understanding the equipment – she’s helpful and positive as she offers advice. All along, we see how attentive Mary Jane must be to the unseen Alex in the bedroom. Early on, we hear an insistent beep, Mary Jane retreats to the bedroom, fixes whatever’s wrong, and comes back into the living room to resume her chat with the super, who is trying to unclog her sink – unsuccessfully. In these conversations, we learn specifics of Mary Jane’s situation, but we also learn her disposition in the face of constant disappointment. Even when Ruthie doesn’t unclog the drain, Mary Jane compliments her as “an excellent superintendent… easily the best superintendent I have ever had.” We only get hints of the toll the care-taking has taken on her. “I used to be someone who treasured sleep, I cherished it,” she tells Ruthie. “Before, if you had asked if there’s one thing I couldn’t do without, I would have said sleep. But… “
“But you adjust,” Ruthie finishes.
“It’s amazing…The things that become just….” She doesn’t finish her sentence. She frequently leaves her sentences unfinished; this too subtly hints at the toll.
But it’s not until the second half – when Lael Jellinek’s set of Mary Jane’s Queens apartment literally rises to the rafters, and reveals a new set of a hospital — that we realize the tremendous force of will Mary Jane has exerted to remain her hopeful, buoyant self, because it starts to crack. We see this as each of the actresses in the first half become different characters in the second. April Mathis ls now Dr. Toros, who is bluntly informative at just how bleak the prognosis for Alex is. Susan Pourfar now becomes Chaya, an Orthodox Jew whose own baby shares a hospital room with Alex, and whose upfront, unfiltered frustration and upset seems to encourage Mary Jane to be more a bit upfront in expressing her own inner despair. Lily Santiago is now Kat, the music therapist that Mary Jane has been trying to arrange for Alex for weeks, and hasn’t happened. This is one disappointment too many, and she explodes: “I have been telling my son for weeks that someone’s coming to play music. And it may seem to you guys that he doesn’t hear me or understand me, but he does hear me and he does understand me. And when I tell him there’s going to be music and then there’s no music… Then that’s actually harmful. Your music therapy program has been harmful to my child.” It’s a relatively polite explosion, which may be a factor in making it an intensely moving moment.
Brenda Wehle bookends the play; she’s the first character, the super, and then the last one, Tenkei, a Buddhist nun who works as a chaplain in the hospital. The scene, like most of the others, mixes in casual, sometimes humorous chat; at one point, they try to look up how to figure out the sex of a goldfish. But the conversation turns to something deeper, then something that’s not conversation at all; something ineffable. It seems no coincidence that there two of the characters in the second half are people of faith, of whom Mary Jane asks many questions. “Mary Jane” has taken us on a well-crafted journey from the practical to the spiritual – from the lady who tries to unclog the drain in Mary Jane’s apartment to the lady who tries to help Mary Jane unclog in other way — ever so subtly suggesting the connection between the two.
Director Anne Kauffman helmed the Off-Broadway production as well, and has brought to Broadway others involved in the original — both Pourfar and Wehle, who are superb; the sound designer Leah Gelpe, whose design reminds us through those beeps and other sounds of life-sustaining equipment what Mary Jane is facing,
“Mary Jane” is Amy Herzog’s first original play on Broadway, but she made her Broadway debut last year with her new version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and followed it up this year with her new version of the current “An Enemy of the People.” The precision and authenticity of her observations have impressed me from her first plays Off-Broadway, “After The Revolution” and “4,000 Miles,” and there is a special reason to trust the her insights in “Mary Jane.” Herzog and her husband Sam Gold were the parents of just such a child. In a recent interview, she explained how the experience inspired her: “I was just amazed by the people in our society who have chosen to live lives of caregiving—the richness of those lives and those relationships. I think people from the outside have a view of what that life must be like that goes something like, ‘How sad!’ And I really wanted to capture the strangeness and originality and richness in the lives of people caring for sick kids.”
Mary Jane
MTC’s Samuel J Friedman Theater through June 16
Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $84 – $318
Written by Amy Herzog.
Directed by Anne Kauffman.
Set design by Lael Jellinek. Costume design by Brenda Abbandandolo. Lighting design by Ben Stanton. Sound design by Leah Gelpe. Hair, wig, and make-up design by J. Jared Janas Vocal coach Kate Wilson.
Cast: Rachel McAdams as Mary Jane, Brenda Wehle as Ruthie/Tenkei, April Matthis as Sherry/Dr. Toros, Susan Pourfar as Brianne/Chaya, and Lily Santiago as Amelia/Kat.
