When Mary Jane takes her son to the hospital, it’s as if she descends through the ground into another world. Lael Jellinek’s set accomplishes this effect by moving upward: As an alarm sensor goes off, indicating that her chronically ill son is experiencing a seizure, the walls of Mary Jane’s modest Queens one-bedroom rise halfway into the rafters, though they don’t disappear from view. Her furniture and appliances — a foldout sofa, the kitchenette, a fridge speckled with magnets and reminder notes — hang over the antiseptic white and gray of the pediatric intensive-care unit. It’s like an insect molting an exoskeleton, one aspect of life sloughing away to reveal its new form underneath. As the set ascends up, you feel a primordial movement downward that’s reminiscent of classical myth — Mary Jane has gone into the depths, like Orpheus or Gilgamesh, with the hope of bargaining for a soul’s return to the world above.
That gesture is typical of the understated yet gutting quality of this production of Mary Jane, which cuts the quotidian open to get to the bone of the existential. Amy Herzog’s script introduces Mary Jane when she’s more than two years into a medical nightmare: Her son, Alex, was born with cerebral palsy, among other chronic illnesses. Herzog herself is familiar with this world; she wrote the play during the experience of caring for her own chronically ill daughter. You don’t see Alex himself — in the show’s first act, he’s behind the door of a bedroom; in the second, hidden among pillows and stuffed animals on a hospital bed — but you learn the details of the situation from Mary Jane’s conversations with the other women in her life who help care for him. Alex’s father has left the picture. Mary Jane is barely holding down a job as an administrative assistant to cover the health insurance. The story heads in a certain direction — as a doctor reminds Mary Jane, no matter how good Alex’s care is, his life expectancy is not long — though Herzog holds off from depicting the inevitable end onstage. Her script, guided by director Anne Kauffman’s eye for detail, shifts the focus to the moments of grace, as well as frustration and mystical oddity, that occur in the course of taking care of someone. Note an early scene in which, when she’s woken by a nurse in the middle of the night, Mary Jane pauses to admire the way a light-up ladybug toy scatters pinpricks of primary colors over her room.
That tonal balance is delicate, and it could tilt in any number of directions: too grim and it might be impossible to watch (I would understand someone not wanting to engage with the premise), too woo-woo and it might become sentimental. It asks a lot, specifically, of the actress playing Mary Jane. Rachel McAdams turns out to be more than up for the task. She’s making her Broadway debut (if you vaguely recall her as a Canadian Shakespearean, you’re probably thinking of Slings & Arrows), but as she often does onscreen, McAdams works in ways that tend toward the understated, yet precisely observed. Crucially, she and Kauffman don’t treat Mary Jane as too much of a saint; in fact, she plays the part as someone who’s well-meaning but a flibbertigibbet. (A contrast to the 2017 Off Broadway version with Carrie Coon, who has an essential core of steel.)
Early on, I wondered if McAdams had fallen into the classic movie-actor trap of going too big once you get into a theater, but she used that energy to calibrate the character. In the first half, Mary Jane keeps making ill-timed half-jokes, which McAdams delivers with “Look at me†neediness. As Alex’s condition worsens, however, McAdams layers more anger and frustration into those jokes; her pointed, sometimes relentless niceness is more visible as a coping mechanism. Through that choice, I could see Mary Jane more clearly as a person, not just an archetype living through an experience. McAdams’s take helps draw out the arc underneath the surface of Herzog’s chain of one-on-one conversations. I was struck, at the end of the play, by her haunted stillness.
McAdams is supported, like Mary Jane herself, by an ensemble of more than competent women, all playing doubled parts. Herzog has created a mini-community of other caregivers surrounding her protagonist, each of whom tends to be strung out in their own way — a quality intensified by Herzog’s updated script’s passing references to pandemic-related understaffing — while also clear-eyed about what their experiences have taught them. In the first half, there’s a building superintendent (Brenda Wehle), a nurse (April Matthis), a fellow mother new to caring for a sick child (Susan Pourfar), and the nurse’s niece (Lily Santiago); in the second, the same actors recur as a pediatric doctor (Matthis), a Hasidic woman (Pourfar), a music therapist (Santiago), and a Buddhist nun (Wehle). The conceit creates echoes between the characters, which adds to the mirror-world quality of the hospital scenes. Matthis, in both iterations, is the epitome of proficiency, though also working at the limit of her abilities — in either role, there is only so much she can do for Alex. Wehle’s rule-enforcing as a super gets reborn as spiritual knowledge, while Santiago’s sweetness ports between both of her characters. In Pourfar’s first appearance, she’s on cusp of a breakdown, thinking about how her life will change; in her second, she’s a repeat visitor to the PICU, familiar with, though not hardened to, the experience.
In Mary Jane’s conversation with Pourfar’s character, Chaya, Herzog arrives at a kind of thesis. She asks Mary Jane if she can relate to the feeling that, when she has to go to the hospital with her son, the rest of the world seems to fall away. “Everything I have been doing, that was very nice, but it wasn’t real,†Chaya says. “This is real. And it’s a relief, that’s what it is, it’s a relief to get back to it.†The observation allows both for the horror of the experience of performing this kind of care as well as the way it can be an unwelcome blessing — the “kind of blessing you don’t know anything about and you don’t want to know anything about,†as Chaya calls it. They have taken a journey to a place where you can see through everything else, for better and worse. A few scenes later, I realized that, when I wasn’t looking, the walls of Mary Jane’s apartment, previously lingering overhead, had disappeared into the rafters. The hospital, that underworld, was all there was.
Mary Jane is at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.