Like many a gay man, playwright Joshua Harmon has been shaped at least in part by the dynamic of, dare-I-say-it, domineering women in his life. As he demonstrates in his remarkable but spare new memory play We Had a World, those women center on his mother and maternal grandmother, a combustible mix of pretension and delusion who nurtures his artistic inclinations but also submits to alcoholic episodes and blind rages. Harmon’s three-person drama, ably directed by Trip Cullman at Manhattan Theatre Club’s intimate New York City Center Stage II, unfolds like a triangle of familial love at its most fraught.
The wide-eyed Andrew Barth Feldman plays Harmon’s surrogate, also named Joshua, who narrates the action as a kind of millennial update of Tom Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie. He’s torn between his loyalty to his hard-working mother, Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), and his genuine affection for his grandmother Renee (Joanna Gleason), who introduces him to R-rated movies, serious plays like Medea, and even the work of Robert Mapplethorpe long before he reaches bar mitzvah age. But Renee also becomes so drunk at a play in which he’s performing as a teenager that she leaves early — and then offers no apology or even acknowledgement that anything happened. “That’s her playbook,” Ellen explains.
Ellen, a successful lawyer who has repeatedly tried and failed to establish boundaries with her mother, has her own issues. She stubbornly resists therapy — there’s no mention of Al-Anon here — and yet she offers an almost textbook case of codependency (as does her father, who’s frequently mentioned but never seen). But Ellen’s intention to separate herself from Renee, while also continuing a relationship with her in part for the sake of her children, seems to twist her into knots — which become even more tangled as her parents’ health declines. It also leads her to a kind of knee-jerk stridency that doesn’t allow for much nuance. “When I had you and your sisters, anytime I wasn’t sure what to do, I’d think, what would Mom do? Then I’d do the opposite,” she tells Joshua at one point. “And it was always right.”
She faults Joshua for his “brilliant nuance” and “sophisticated grey palette” — and yet time and again he’s able to puncture Ellen’s black-and-white worldview. Armed with letters and other material gathered after Renee’s death, he’s also able to lay down receipts to back up his arguments. In some of the most affecting scenes, Joshua essentially fact-checks Ellen and Renee’s more dogmatic statements about themselves and each other. This can lead the onstage Joshua to moments of didacticism himself, as when he delivers pat aphorisms that feel unnecessary since he’s already dramatized the message. “Women who should not have been mothers can make very compelling grandmothers,” he states, and then adds, “Devoted mothers can raise ungrateful sons.”
And yet there’s something compelling and genuine about Joshua’s enduring affection for these complicated, contradictory women who both reared him and shaped his perspective on life. Gleason is astonishing as Renee, the granddaughter of Jewish Brooklyn immigrants who has developed a kind of grandiosity with her pseudo-British accent and enthusiasm for high art in multiple forms. You can see why she makes a compelling grandmother — but also why she’s a harridan of a mother, pushing people away when they threaten to get too close or to puncture her lofty, carefully nurtured self-image. Doting grandsons are unlikely to call you on your BS, after all.
Serrales, meanwhile, imbues layers of hurt and protectiveness into Ellen, the dutiful and codependent daughter who cleaned up her mother’s post-bender vomit as a girl and now feels like she keeps getting drawn back into old patterns of setting things right. You can see the thick protective shell Ellen’s developed to shield herself from the worst outbursts of her parents (including her dad, an enabler of the worst sort) — but she also flashes heartbreaking signs of the frightened little girl hidden inside.
Early on, Renee urges Joshua to write a play about his family drama that she dubs “Virginia Woolf, Part II,” or “The Clash of the Titans,” urging him to “make it as bitter and vitriolic as possible.” She’s actually talking about the estrangement of Ellen and her older sister, Susan, who escaped to far-off Boston early on and whose fallout with the sibling who remained behind is never fully explained. Instead, Harmon shifts the climactic clash in his play to the two women who dominate his own life, his mother and grandmother. And they do indeed build to a shocking Passover-night confrontation at the end, one that owes more to primal Greek tragedy than the caustic verbosity of Edward Albee. Cullman oddly stages the scene way upstage on John Lee Beatty’s simply designed set, and it’s over almost as soon as it’s begun.
The bigger shortcoming, though, is that Harmon has narrowed our frame of reference by giving us only three performers. In his remarkable 2022 play Prayer for the French Republic, he needed a cast of 11 to chronicle a French Jewish family’s experiences and to flesh out the shades of difference in their points of view. In We Had a World, we get only secondhand accounts of Joshua’s grandfather or the aunt whose very presence triggers Ellen’s insistence on fleeing the premises at that fateful Passover reunion. There are moments when you long to hear from others — if only to question the ways in which our likable narrator may be missing some of the nuance himself.
Still, this is a compelling and heartfelt play — even if lacks the kinetic spark of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Harmon is not naturally suited to bitterness or vitriol, after all, and it’s clear he’s still trying to process emotional injuries he absorbed from his forebears. Feldman carries himself on stage with an easy naturalism as the ultimate Nice Jewish Boy, ever respectful of his elders even when he tries to assert himself. In the moments when he shouts at his mother in frustration, he displays an underlying empathy that lets you see him as the ultimate mediator. He’s been hurt, and he feels deeply for those in his family who have been hurt even more, but you emerge confident that he will survive this. And, more importantly, turn it into art. We Had a World is an artful look at how family trauma can be recast as a story that we tell — in a therapy session or on an Off Broadway stage. ★★★★☆
WE HAD A WORLD
Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through April 27 for $115 to $135
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