Playwright Joshua Harmon secretly recorded the last conversation he had with his dying grandmother, during which he told her that his next play was going to be about their family.
“Do you have the courage?” she asked him.
“I don’t know. We’ll find out.”
Andrew Barth Feldman as Joshua and Joanna Gleason as his grandmother read aloud that conversation verbatim from a transcript in a scene near the end of “We Had A World,” which is opening tonight at City Center, a production of Manhattan Theater Club. Harmon’s grand title for his latest play is somewhat misleading, since the personal story he tells, which focuses on his recollections of his relationship with his grandmother, feels considerably narrower in both focus and effect than the worlds he has created previously for the theater.
Harmon has evidently mined his family for inspiration before, from his early play “Bad Jews” to the Tony nominated production last year of “ Prayer for the French Republic.” He even arguably used a character as a stand-in for himself in “Significant Other,” but with a different name. This is the first play of his I’ve seen, though, in which the connection is direct. The reading of that transcript is just the most explicit indication that Joshua the character is Joshua Harmon the playwright, and that we’re meant to understand there is a one-to-one correlation between what happened and what’s on stage.
That is not an inherently unworkable approach. David Henry Hwang has drafted himself as a character effectively in such plays as “Soft Power” and “Yellow Face.” But “We Had A World” falls short of Harmon’s best plays, despite charming performances and some of the playwright’s trademark humor, because “what happened” is just not all that fresh, insightful or provocative. “We Had A World” feels not much larger than an exercise in personal nostalgia.
Feldman as Josh first narrates the good times he spent with his grandmother Renee, how she brought him to cultural events when he was young, some of them deeply age-inappropriate, such as an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s graphic photographs. “I was only nine. I didn’t yet grasp the concept of fisting.” She also brought him to many plays. “I became a playwright because of her.”
It’s only after he presents “the good stuff,” that we learn of the broken relationship between Renee and her daughter Ellen, Joshua’s mother (portrayed by Jeanine Serralles.) We’re soon told why there was so much ill will: Renee was an alcoholic. Joshua was shielded from Renee’s problem for much of his childhood, because, as his mother explains to him, “when you were born, I told her, “If you want a relationship with your grandson, you are never to drink in front of him. Ever.” Renee was able to keep this commandment until Joshua was 15, and performing in a workshop of a new musical, to which Renee showed up…drunk. Ellen could no longer keep quiet to Josh about the nightmare her childhood had been because of her mother’s drunkenness.
Under the direction of Trip Cullman, the three performers expertly navigate their roles in scenes that change in tone from amiable and amusing to sharp-edged and ugly. Feldman handles his part well,even though the narrator he’s portraying (aka the playwright) is supposed to be in his forties, while the actor is not yet 23 years old (and flaunts it, inexplicably spending the first scene dressed only in underpants.) Joanna Gleason nails the semi-bohemian Auntie Mame vibe, her recklessness reading more often as laissez-faire obliviousness. She is the only one of the three who visibly ages at all, helped along by designers Kaye Voyce and Tommy Kurzman. Jeanine Serralles has the more challenging role of a self-declared bitch who only eventually gets to shed her resentfulness and show her compassion and intelligence.
Too much of “We Had A World” is taken up with plaintive anecdotes and petty squabbles. Some of these are amusing. Some exhibit a refreshing self-awareness, such as the time when Josh in college was Irrationally ranting against his mother for having bought him a mirror when she noticed the one in his dorm was broken. But the scenes play out over three decades (more in a hodgepodge than with a clear chronology), and start to feel not exactly redundant, but static.
Throughout the play, Joshua expresses concern about threats to the environment. This Is perhaps Harmon’s excuse for the title, but the connection of lost glaciers to lost grandmothers isn’t developed substantively enough to resonate persuasively the way the larger contexts have in many of his previous plays – white privilege and affirmative action in “Admissions,” aging and societal notions of beauty in “Skintight,” gay loneliness in “Significant Other,” antisemitism in “Prayer for the French Republic.”
The narrator in “We Had a World” spends less time on climate change than on incidents like “the Rosh Hashanah blowout of 2003,” which he obviously labels half tongue-in-cheek, but still finds important enough to include: Ellen won’t attend Rosh Hashanah with her mother because Renee also invited Ellen’s sister. The sisters, we’re told, had a complete falling-out, but we’re not told why. Josh explains that would take up too much time: “we only have one play, so just take my word.”
That gets a laugh. Still, even a mention of such vague quarrels feels the stuff of family lore, not great drama.
We Had A World
MTC at New York City Center Stage II through April 27
Running time: 100 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $135
Written by Joshua Harmon
Directed by Trip Cullman
John Lee Beatty (Scenic Design), Kaye Voice Costume Design), Ben Stanton (Lighting Design), Sinan Refik Zafar (Sound Design), Tommy Kurzman (Hair, Wig & Makeup Design), and Bess Marie Glorioso (Production Stage Manager).
Cast: Andrew Barth Feldman, Joanna Gleason, and Jeanine Serralles
Photos by Jeremy Daniel.
