Perhaps it was to be expected that a first-time playwright in her early 30s would struggle a bit in crafting a drama focusing on mortality, with a 90-year-old protagonist. Still, there were reasons to anticipate—or at least hope—that Lily Thorne’s Peace for Mary Frances would be compelling in its world-premiere production.
Though still a student in Brooklyn College’s MFA playwriting program, Thorne has a background as documentary film producer, and she has teamed here with red-hot director Lila Neugebauer, who in recent years has collaborated with Pulitzer Prize winners and an array of rising talent. Even better, the actress playing nonagenarian Mary Frances is Lois Smith, whose choices in this late stage of her career—from classic American plays to new works by Annie Baker, Jordan Harrison and Amy Herzog—have been as impeccable as her gifts have been enduring.
In Peace, Smith has an imperfect vehicle, but she rides it beautifully. The play unfolds in the home of Mary Frances, the child and widow of Armenian refugees, now being tended to by her middle-aged daughter, Fanny, a recovering heroin addict with what might be generously described as a negative attitude.
Tensions develop when Fanny’s sister, Alice, arrives with her own pair of grown daughters: Helen, a TV actress, and Rosie, who’s nursing an infant. Though Alice is broke (Helen has been helping to support her), she’s obviously better suited and more inclined to truly take care of her ailing mother, and resolves against Fanny’s wishes to do so—for a fee, as the task will demand she forego potential work.
That task becomes more complicated when Mary Frances, her health deteriorating, opts for home hospice care. A nurse explains to the family that her patient “has chosen to focus on her comfort rather than on her longevity.” Mary Frances is more blunt. “I’m ready to go,” she says, and it’s assumed that she will, very soon. But days turn into weeks, and the family begins to unravel in ways that, if not entirely predictable, are seldom surprising or intriguing.
It grows increasingly clear that Alice, despite her own foibles, is not only the most responsible but the most caring member of Mary Frances’s brood, which also includes a listless, self-involved son, Eddie. That Alice also emerges as the child Mary Frances was toughest on is surely meant to provide irony or insight, but it’s the most tired of clichés: The child who has to work hardest for love and approval becomes the most diligent and generous.
Mind you, when Alice and Fanny fight, as they do often, each regresses in her own fashion. Johanna Day’s Fanny is a snarling cauldron of bitterness, erupting at the flick of a switch; as the good sister, J. Smith-Cameron is given more nuance to work with, and the always supple actress shows us the wounded girl Alice still carries inside her, and the toll of the character’s not always successful struggle to sustain her relative resilience.
Helen and Rosie, played with easy warmth and grace by, respectively, Heather Burns and Natalie Gold, are revealed as the real adults in the room, though Thorne also draws strained parallels to their mothers, with Helen bemoaning her life as a single, childless woman and praising her sister’s more nurturing existence. And the two male characters inserted into the play are both profoundly irritating; Paul Lazar’s Eddie remains deadpan as he puts his feet up on his mother’s bed and asks the overwhelmed Alice for coffee, while Brian Miskell turns up as a hospice psychologist who offers noncommittal assessments and banal advice.
The real irony of Peace is that for all the resolve Mary Frances shows in her final decision, the play’s winding second act suggests that Thorne may have been undecided about how to finally wrap things up. Towards the end, as scenes pile on top of each other, with characters clashing and wondering when and how this woman will finally die, we’re left asking similar questions about the play’s expiration.
Still, Neugebauer keeps the pace brisk and the characters, for all their flaws, sharp. And Smith is a gem, capturing Mary Frances’s sometimes caustic wit and the grievances and regrets that still haunt her, regarding her past, her legacy, her children. With fine support from her colleagues here, particularly Smith-Cameron and Day, she makes Peace worth the patience it requires.
Peace for Mary Frances opened May 23, 2018, at Signature Center and runs through June 17. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
