Liza Colón-Zayas and Carrie Coon                              photos by Joan Marcus

 

 

                        By Ron Cohen

 

Be prepared to have your emotions shredded. Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane quietly pulls you into the life of its title character, a single mother caring for her chronically ill child, and never lets you go. And Herzog does this without any maudlin sentimentality or depressing morbidity.

 

Her play is a detail-filled tutorial, filled with humanity, enacted brilliantly by a cast of five women (four of them taking on double roles), and directed with absolute seamlessness by Anne Kauffman. It moves us through the happenings of its heroine’s everyday existence, an existence that revolves without respite around her 2-1/2-year-old son, Alex.  As a result of brain bleed at premature birth, Alex is just about totally incapacitated.

 

Both in Herzog’s writing and in the performance of Carrie Coon, Mary Jane is a wondrous but yet totally believable character graced with high spirits and a task-oriented determination to keep her “little guy” alive. Heroics are not her thing, but a sense of humor and empathy for others are, along with a rarely flagging determination to keep at bay the despair and bitterness her situation might well foster. When that despair does finally break through -- but only briefly -- you may be tempted --- at least in your imagination -- to walk on stage and comfort her yourself.

 

Danaya Esperanza

 

The first half of the play takes place in Mary Jane’s Queens apartment, an example of unobtrusive verisimilitude in Laura Jellinek’s flawless scenic design. At the start, Mary Jane is conversing with a sympathetic building superintendent (Brenda Wehle), while the super works to fix the stopped-up kitchen sink. We learn just a little about Mary Jane and Alex, but more and more is revealed in the follow-up scenes, with the home nurse Sherry (Liza Colon-Zeyas.) and Sherry’s visiting niece Amelia (Danaya Esperanza). Particularly telling is Mary Jane’s tutoring of a Facebook friend, Brianne (Susan Pourfar), a new mother faced with caring for a chronically ill infant. It’s here that Mary Jane outlines for Brianne, in very human terms, the thorny path one has to negotiate through the bureaucracies of medicine and government.

 

The second half of the script moves to the pediatric floor of a Manhattan hospital, where Alex, having come down with pneumonia, is confined. The set change itself, under the ominously shifting lighting by Japhy Wiedeman, is an eye-filling, subtle demonstration of the dread that such a venue imparts.

 

In the “parents room” of the pediatric floor, Mary Jane talks with one of Alex’s doctors (Colon-Zeyas in another astute characterization), dealing gamely with the physician’s professional compassion.

 

Mary Jane then has a conversation with an Orthodox Jewish woman (a wonderfully no-nonsense Pourfar), whose daughter, one of her seven children, is also a chronically ill kid. The talk becomes a bit deeper as Mary Jane questions the role of faith and/or religion in the equation that both mothers are living through. There are no answers, and none come when Mary Jane – after a brief contretemps with the hospital’s over-scheduled musical therapist (Esperanza) – has a visit from one of the hospital’s chaplains.

 

Brenda Wehle

 

The chaplain is a Buddhist nun, affably limned with surprising bits of humor by Wehle, complete with shaven head. They talk while Alex is in prolonged surgery, and the mood becomes even more mystical as Mary Jane describes the visual auras she is seeing, which could signal the onset of a migraine. Or could those auras signal something else?

 

It’s an ambiguous but not unsatisfying conclusion. And despite the ambiguity, Herzog’s beautiful play has demonstrated with certainty the non-negotiable importance of life in every single human being, even a being as little and helpless as Mary Jane’s Alex.

 

Off-Broadway play

New York Theatre Workshop

79 East 4^th Street

212-460-5475

www.nytw.org

Playing in an extended run until October 29