Alex, the two-year-old child at the center of Amy Herzog’s excellent play Mary Jane, is a constant presence on stage, despite never showing his face nor saying a word. Alex can’t, actually, vocalize anything – he was born with a paralyzed vocal cord, his endearingly peppy mother explains, along with other health conditions such as cerebral palsy, requiring round-the-clock care. We hear his machine’s beeps and whirs, see his mountain of stuffed animals on a hospital bed, jolt and hurdle along his journey from medical hiccup to crisis. He can’t communicate his pain or his joy. And yet, as Mary Jane – the titular mother so movingly, hauntingly embodied by Rachel McAdams – insists, he can understand her. She is the conduit, shield, giver.
Healthcare is a vast ecosystem of treatment, suffering and healing, of hospitals, bills and logistics. It’s often, rightly in the US, denigrated for its opacity, inequities and Kafka-esque absurdities. It’s a tricky system to capture in a tight play with a five-person cast and sparse, economical staging at the Samuel J Friedman Theatre, but it’s one this Broadway edition, directed by Anne Kauffman, manages to wrangle through the nucleus of Mary Jane. She’s the center of a network of women who help care for Alex, from contracted at-home nurses to emergency room doctors to supportive parents of fellow chronically ill children. Herzog based the play, in part, on her experience with her daughter Frances, who was born with Nemaline myopathy and died last year at age 11; the specificity of this work, from the dosages of anti-seizure medication to the type of generic coffee machine for a hospital lounge (scenic design by Lael Jellinek), feels born of experience – motherhood, and then a whole present shaped by intensive caretaking – that you can only ever truly imagine by going through it.
The role of Mary Jane – chronically dressed down, subliminally and perpetually stressed, projecting cracked cheer for the sake of her beloved child – is a perfect fit for McAdams, who first shot to stardom in the mid-2000s with leading roles in Mean Girls, The Notebook and Wedding Crashers, before settling into a more sustainable, steady career playing women with palpable heart and mettle, most recently in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. It’s McAdams’s Broadway debut, and though she started the play, in my viewing, a bit jittery and unnaturally rhythmic, she soon settled into her role as the linchpin in this young’s boy curtailed life with magnetic ease. Even from rows back, you can see a hint of tears, the tick of a clock and checks of a to-do list behind McAdams’s smile, her lighthearted banter with her super (Brenda Wehle), at-home nurse Sherry (standout April Matthis), Sherry’s niece Amelia (Lily Santiago) and fellow mother Brianne (Susan Pourfar). It’s present-day New York – though the play was first staged by the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2017, there are enough hints that it’s now post-pandemic – and the dialogue, when not trained on Alex, is filled with mentions of Instagram observations and gossip, believable low-stakes filler to soften the unfathomable, awkward or near unmanageable.
All actors besides McAdams play dual roles. The first half of the play takes place in Mary Jane’s Queens apartment, which is small, bright and lightly cluttered and which levitates to reveal a sterile, eerily white hospital set for the second half. (The raised apartment set, hovering overhead, has the surreal double effect of imparting Mary Jane’s home life, on mind yet unreachable, and making one worry about a fridge falling on Rachel McAdams.) McAdams holds the center as the indignities and stressors mount, though this play could go a lot harder on the hell of the American medical system if it wanted; instead, Herzog’s eye remains trained on the incredible human capacity for care over weeks, turned months. (Lighting design by Ben Stanton and sound design by Leah Gelpe provide liminal, effective transitions between scenes and days.) McAdams’ peculiarly chipper, strained cadence reveals not just Mary Jane’s resilience but also, in part, her desocialization, so much has care for Alex consumed the world of this former aspiring teacher.
And so much does she desire Alex’s comfort, his fleeting moments of child joy, despite tubes and immobility and illness. The play has a hypnotic, suffusive effect – there’s not one heartbreaking or cathartic moment but a series of many wins and setbacks, hurdles and sprints of human care, that left me on the verge of tears for hours afterwards. In her small gestures – climbing into bed with Alex, reassuring him that “Mama’s here” – McAdams, with the chorus of help around her, conjures a world of compassion, one I missed when it was over.
