Theatre in Review: The Waverly Gallery (Golden Theatre)

	Elaine May. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe.

That Elaine May has spent more than six decades spreading laughter among us makes all the more remarkable her heartbreaking turn in this immaculate revival of Kenneth Lonergan's memory play. She plays Gladys Green, retired lawyer, widow, mother and grandmother, ex-communist rabble-rouser, and, by the late eighties, longtime operator of an art gallery on Waverly Place. True, the paintings on display aren't much to look at -- the artist whose work is currently being shown has decamped to Europe, more or less sticking Glady with them -- but the sunlight is abundant and there's a portable TV with which to pass the time on days -- most days -- when no customers drop in.

It is 1989, however, and the world is changing. Greenwich Village is no longer a bohemia for artists and political dissenters, and drug dealers are roaming Washington Square. The owner of the hotel where the gallery is located is making noises about a renovation, which would involve turning Gladys out to use the gallery space for a breakfast café for the guests. And, at eighty-five, Gladys is failing, her mind increasingly obscured by the creeping fog of dementia. It's a long, slow, uneven descent, and all her loved ones can do is look on in dismay as she anxiously slips away.

In the first act of The Waverly Gallery, when Gladys' problems are still manageable, Lonergan mines the situation for droll, frustration-based family comedy. Ellen, Gladys' daughter, doesn't view her mother with unreserved adoration, facing with gritted teeth the prospect of caring for her. Ellen's son, Daniel, lives in the same building as Gladys, and his polite, dutiful manner is strained by her endless chatter, all of which he has heard a hundred times before, not to mention her inability to grasp that he is not a newspaperman but a speechwriter for the EPA. (The line between Gladys' screwball tendencies and actual illness is, in the early scenes, sometimes hard to detect.) Gladys' endlessly repeated non sequiturs sow confusion at the dinner table; a series of overlapping conversations and fruitless crosstalk are superbly orchestrated by the director, Lila Neugebauer. It's little wonder that the fed-up Ellen finally mutters, "I'm going to blow my brains out."

Even in its most amusing moments, however, one can see layers of memory falling away from Gladys like so many autumn leaves, replaced by racking fears and bursts of hostility at her increasingly incomprehensible world. When she can't be trusted to handle her medications, home health aides are engaged, but soon she fails to recognize them. She keeps Daniel up half the night, driven by nameless worries to repeatedly ring his doorbell, seeking reassurance. And as the prospect of losing the gallery draws near, the one remaining anchoring element in her existence is lost. May subtly charts the changes in Glady's affect. At first, she's a lovably chatty old bird, filled with opinions about everything. But watch what happens when caught in an obvious mistake -- suddenly going silent, a faint look of fear in her eyes contradicting her determined smile. See how by degrees her posture becomes stooped until, stumbling down her hallway late at night, she looks frail enough to break. And, when being escorted out of the apartment she has occupied for decades, she asks, wonderingly, "Are we going to New York?" -- one realizes, sadly, that Gladys has reached a place from which there is no return. May's work is incisively detailed, yet extraordinarily delicate; she renders her character's plight fearlessly and without a trace of sentimentality, while employing the pinpoint timing that made her the leading female comic of her generation.

Neugebauer has surrounded May with a blue-chip cast led by Lucas Hedges as Daniel, a wryly amusing family observer ("We're liberal Upper West Side atheistic Jewish intellectuals -- and we really like German choral music") who begins to dread seeing Gladys for fear of detecting further signs of slippage. Admitting, with a mix of candor and shame, that he stopped responding to her late-night visits, he says, "I'd just go to the door and look through the peephole to make sure she was okay, and then I'd watch this weird little convex image of her turn around in the hallway and go back into her apartment." Later, he says, with no small tenderness, "Her mind was smashed to pieces, and the person she used to be hadn't really been around for a long time...But the pieces were still her pieces." Hedges' work is all the more touching for its restraint, which hints at a deep well of carefully held-back feelings.

Joan Allen matches him moment for moment as Ellen, who frankly resented growing up among a clamorous chorus of disputatious mid-twentieth-century Village lefties. ("My father would sit there and play devil's advocate to all my mother's friends, they'd have screaming fights until two in the morning, and then she'd get up at the crack of dawn to go stand on a milk carton in Washington Square and campaign for low-income housing. She was very impressive in her own maddening way.") Still, her brisk, brusque manner doesn't hide her essential devotion, and when she finally loses her composure, baring her rage and helplessness, is one of the production's most harrowing moments. Equally memorable is the exchange that begins with Ellen muttering, "Well, when I get senile just put a bullet through my head." Daniel, his head snapping in her direction, his eyes filled with a panic that has never before occurred to him, says, "You won't get senile." The look between them is enough to fill several plays.

Also making signal contributions are Michael Cera as a not particularly talented artist from Massachusetts whose work Gladys decides, on a whim, to exhibit -- and who ends up sleeping on a cot in the back of the gallery, serving as part-time caretaker -- and David Cromer, as Ellen's second husband, especially when he gets caught up in a maddening conversation with Gladys, now terribly deaf, that could have come from a vintage Mike Nichols-Elaine May sketch.

The Waverly Gallery poses daunting challenges to a set designer, as it requires four detailed sets; David Zinn's work here is deeply evocative of the Village, especially his rendering of Gladys' rambling, art-filled apartment. His work is aided by Tal Yarden's projections of the neighborhood in decades past (imagery that is feathered on and off the show curtain, like fragments of a dream) and Brian MacDevitt's meticulously calibrated lighting, especially a night-into-dawn sequence for the final scene. Ann Roth's costumes are exactly right for each character, from the schlumpy jeans-and-plaid-shirts combinations worn by Daniel, who is experiencing a crisis in his romantic life, to the carefully preserved 1950s suits that Gladys prefers. Leon Rothenberg's sound design figures in a couple of exquisitely timed gags centering on Gladys' misbehaving hearing aid; he also provides solid reinforcement for the melancholic incidental music.

The Waverly Gallery is a play that must be handled just so, lest it become maudlin or depressing. Neugebauer and company have an exquisitely delicate touch, treading lightly and flawlessly in a series of emotionally telling scenes: a gallery opening for which there are no customers besides Gladys and family; a sudden mother-son embrace that constitutes a desperate gesture against an indifferent Fate; and a quiet, almost hushed, summing-up that, like a cold slap, confirms that this is a play about the importance of living every moment. And then there is May, who, in shrinking before our eyes gives a towering performance. I saw the original production of The Waverly Gallery and I never imagined that anyone could come close to Eileen Heckart's performance as Gladys. That May proves to be her equal is the highest praise I can offer. -- David Barbour