Theatre in Review: We Had a World (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage II)

	Andrew Barth Feldman. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

In We Had a World, playwright Joshua Harmon acts as a cartographer, mapping out the complex landscape of love and resentment that shaped his youth. The play is founded on two indisputable facts, communicated by Harmon's lead character and namesake: "Women who should not have been mothers can make very compelling grandmothers. Devoted mothers can raise ungrateful sons." And, as the play demonstrates, the consequences of both can last a lifetime.

Young Joshua, growing up in the suburbs, is delighted to get scooped up by his grandmother Renee, a dedicated Upper East Sider who gives the boy a cultural education racy enough to make Auntie Mame blanch. Trips to the Metropolitan Museum for art lessons are mixed with visits to R-rated films, a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition ("I was five," Joshua notes), and another gallery where they stare at something called "Public Hair on Soap." Even more alarming is their attendance at a performance of Medea, starring Diana Rigg. Joshua, ten, asks Renee, "Would you ever kill your children?" "It would depend on the situation," Renee replies.

As it happens, Ellen, Renee's daughter (and Joshua's mother), is often tempted toward matricide, but she tolerates this situation until the boy is fifteen. He is now an aspiring actor, appearing in the workshop for a new musical. Renee attends a performance but, mysteriously, leaves early. The reason? "She was drunk," Ellen admits. "She's an alcoholic." Suddenly that story, long enshrined in family lore, about Renee dumping ketchup on the head of Joshua's aunt doesn't seem so funny.

This revelation cues a series of separations, reunions, and confrontations across several years, as Josh begins to appreciate the sometimes-treacherous nature of family life. Loving and resenting Ellen, a lawyer and self-described "bitch" ("It's one of my best qualities," she insists) who can be counted on to get things done in a pinch, he tries to stay faithful to Renee, despite increasingly worrying signs. The penny starts to drop when, coming home from college depressed and suicidal about being gay, he finds Renee to be oddly opaque. Irritated that she heard the news from other relatives, she says, "I'm not gay." When Joshua notes his depression, she adds, "I've never been depressed." He adds that, fortunately, he had a good therapist; she responds, "I've never been to a therapist. If I needed one, I'd go. I don't need one." Quite apart from the lack of empathy, at least one of these remarks is a lie.

The play acutely understands how a family can form itself around a single polarizing personality, leading to various alliances and resentments. When Renee, close to death from cancer, puts together a family Passover seder, bringing together Ellen and the sister she can't stand (the feeling is mutual), a holiday dinner turns explosive, ending in a different sort of elder abuse -- by which I mean abuse committed by the elder. As the family flees, Renee shouts at Jonathan, now a writer mulling over the idea of penning a domestic drama, "You've really got material for your play now!"

We Had a World is eccentrically structured, with three characters standing in for the larger, highly fractious, family. (They also step in and out of the action, commenting on their motives.) But Trip Cullman's production is anchored by three superb performances that guide us through this shifting emotional terrain. Joanna Gleason's Renee is, at first glance, a young person's dream -- a permissive, inclusive adult who never talks down to children. (In one of Joshua's most cherished memories, Renee appropriates him on a school snow day, taking him to a cinema to see Secrets and Lies, Sling Blade, and The English Patient; for the precocious twelve-year-old, it's heaven.) Yet, lurking under that seemingly imperturbable surface is a hard-to-miss evasiveness, a talent for grievance-collecting, and a knack for making everything about herself. ("Winter is treacherous for people my age," she says, adding, "I'm glad for global warming" -- a remark that upsets the ecologically minded Joshua.) An intensively honest performer, Gleason refuses to sentimentalize Renee even as she grows increasingly frailer and more alone; she earns our sympathy by refusing to ask for it.

Jeanine Serralles, one of the New York theatre's best-kept secrets, responds in kind, making Ellen equally difficult as her mother, the difference being that she comes through for her loved ones. Whether pitilessly recalling her hellish early years, furiously insisting that she has moved on from Renee (when, clearly, she hasn't), or undergoing a meltdown for the ages in front of Joshua, she makes this supremely difficult woman understandable without sacrificing any of her prickly qualities. She can also be touching, especially when realizing that she is of no help to Joshua in his moment of mental illness. "Mom's good at fixing things. She tells you what to do," Josua says. "Dad took me for pancakes. I sat at the table and sobbed for an hour. And he just sat with me." "And that was comforting," Ellen asks in wonderment.

Faced with the tasks of navigating these two formidable presences, Andrew Barth Feldman -- one of the army of former Evan Hansens -- nimbly tracks Joshua's development from happily indulged child to tormented adolescent to happily married man; he also makes clear Joshua's dawning awareness of the many ways that Ellen and Renee's pained relationship has shaped his life. It's a high-wire act and he never puts a foot wrong.

Cullman and his scenic designer John Lee Beatty have settled on a rehearsal-room look for the production, an approach with an upside and a downside. At times, it seems as if Joshua is rooting around in the attic of his memories; then again, and when we hear about Joshua coveting two vintage love seats in Renee's apartment, the two ratty props onstage hardly fit the bill. This is intentional, I know, but I wonder if a more interesting solution might have been found. Ben Stanton's lighting ably reshapes the space, remaining attuned to the script's mood swings. Kaye Voce's costumes are well-suited to the characters; note the difference between Ellen's power suits and Renee's more individualized ensembles. In the later scenes, dressed in a nightgown, Renne appears to be little more than a wraith. (Tommy Kurzman's wig and makeup design makes a big contribution to the effect.) Sound designer Sinan Refik Zafar provides appropriate incidental music and various effects, including street traffic, music in a Mexican restaurant, and a bit of Medea.

Early on, Renee gives Joshua permission to write a play about her and her family, adding, zestily, "Make it as bitter and vitriolic as possible." We Had a World certainly has its vitriolic moments but, by the standards of Harmon's plays -- he is the master of the extended, no-prisoners-left takedown) - it is fairly mild. What's new here is his profound appreciation of his character's paralyzing contradictions. Renee is, to be sure, a monster, but she enriched his childhood. Yet it was the tough, unforgiving Ellen who gave him the tools to live. What to do with such a paradox?

The script's attempts at linking Joshua's family history with his concerns about climate change can occasionally feel forced, yet these ideas come together in the moving finale, in which Harmon engineers the mother-daughter rapprochement that real life could never provide. After all, a memory play is an exercise in grabbing at something that has already vanished. The world is slipping away, happiness is evanescent, the ugly truth cannot be avoided, and yet so many good memories persist; in the end, they're what we have to cling to. --David Barbour