Mary Jane: A Profound Exploration of Caregiving and Humanity
Rachel McAdams and Lily Santiago in Mary Jane.
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 rfollowings, 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 might 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, 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.
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.
