Old Fitz Theatre, May 25
9/10
Although Alex never appears, Tenkei, a Buddhist nun, speaks for us when she tells Mary Jane, Alex’s mother, “I see him very clearly.” Alex, two-and-a-half years old, has been riddled with critical medical conditions since birth. Mary Jane has split with the father, and loses her job, but never loses her capacity for hope and unconditional love.
It’s curious to see this Amy Herzog play so soon after the American’s 4000 Miles and after Beckett’s Happy Days. The former alerted us to her compassion and tinder-dry humour, and here her titular character is a theatrical cousin of Happy Days’ Winnie: weighed down with an unimaginable burden, yet fighting on, clinging to hope, and unwilling to burden others.
Ultimately, the play’s about the profound necessity to share that load. Mary Jane’s plight touches those around her, and all do help in their very different ways. So, even though it’s among the saddest plays you’ll see, you come out having watched a little monument be erected to the triumph of shared humanity. Scene by aching scene.
I’ve never known a stage play with so much that we hear happening offstage, but don’t see, and Herzog also writes dialogue that poleaxes you with its authenticity. Countless sentences aren’t finished, ending instead with an exhalation, a facial expression or a (usually wrong) suggested word from the interlocutor. It’s a play that demands exceptional acting and a deep chemistry between the players. Director Rachel Chant (for Mi Todo Productions) has both.
Eloise Snape is desperately moving as Mary Jane, whose outward natural bubbliness must always mask a despairing cry within; a cry she dare not hear, or she will shatter. She comes close, cracking once at the hopelessness of the hospital’s understaffed music therapy department, and Snape spears your heart in doing it. She treads a delicate line, however, and doesn’t let her Mary Jane disintegrate. Like the other characters, you come to love this woman because she’s fundamentally such a sunny person, despite the desolation constantly gnawing at her vitals.
The other cast members play two characters each: one in the first act, when Alex is still at home; another in the second, in hospital. Di Adams, Sophie Bloom, Isabel Burton and Janine Watson are so good as not only to withstand the blowtorch of sharing scenes with Snape, but to enhance them. Watson is supreme as the razor-sharp nurse in act one, and, in the second, a torn doctor struggling for the words that will ease Mary Jane towards reality, without completely puncturing her fierce, fierce hope.
Perhaps more fluidity could be reached in some of the scene changes, although Soham Apte’s set is magically seamless in the way it converts from an apartment in Queens (with a blocked kitchen sink) to a hospital waiting room. Were all theatre this good, I’d have the best job in the world. Oh, and there’s fine performance from an uncredited goldfish.
Until June 15.