Amy Herzog’s play is named after its lead character, but it might as easily have been titled Job.
Mary Jane is the thirtysomething mother of a nearly three-year-old boy named Alex who was born prematurely and suffers from cerebral palsy and frequent seizures, among other serious health conditions. With the aid of nurses, she devotedly cares for her son in her cramped one-bedroom Queens apartment, sleeping on a sofa bed in the living room since the bedroom has been effectively turned into a pediatric care unit. (We never see Alex, but we hear the constant sounds of his various monitors and life-preserving machines.) Still working remotely to ensure the health care coverage she desperately needs, she’s handling it all alone, her husband having abandoned the family after proving unable to handle the stress. Amazingly, she seems to bear him no ill will. “I hope he finds peace, I really do,” she says.
In spite of all her travails, Mary Jane manages to exude a stalwart optimism, even if the strain is apparent to others, including Ruthie (Brenda Wehle) her female superintendent who’s unclogging her kitchen sink. “You seem to be someone who’s carrying a lot of tension in her body,” Ruthie observes, before casually adding, “That’s how my sister got cancer.”
Mary Jane’s sunny attitude may be hard to believe if she weren’t being played by Rachel McAdams, making her Broadway debut in this Manhattan Theatre Club production. The luminous actress, who established her screen stardom via roles in such romantic dramas as The Notebook and The Time Traveler’s Wife, exudes a sunniness that works perfectly for her role as the beleaguered but resilient caretaker whose most frequent utterances are the words “thank you” to those helping her.
Herzog’s play — first seen here in a 2017 off-Broadway production starring Carrie Coon, which garnered the Best Play award from the New York Drama Critics Circle — is a subtly artful drama that is all the more effective for focusing on the quotidian details of the character’s stressful situation. With the exception of a medical crisis that occurs at the end of the intermissionless play’s first section, it’s composed of quiet interactions between Mary Jane and the women (they’re all women) with whom she comes into contact.
They include her son’s regular nurse Sherry (April Mathis), who exudes competence; Sherry’s college-age niece Amelia (Lily Santiago), who drops by the apartment at an inopportune time; Brianne (Susan Pourfour), a Facebook friend with a similarly ill child whom Mary Jane counsels about navigating the healthcare system; Dr. Toros (Mathis), a pediatric doctor attending to Alex after he’s hospitalized; Chaya (Pourfour), a Hasidic woman whose child is hospitalized in the same care unit as Alex: Kat (Santiago), an overbooked music therapist at the hospital who goes out of her way to be helpful; and Tenkei (Wehle), a Buddhist nun with whom Alex has a meaningful encounter.
Some may find the play tedious in its studious avoidance of histrionics, but in its own quiet way Mary Jane proves heartbreaking in its depiction of the title character’s fierce motherly devotion and refusal to succumb to immobilizing despair, even when it involves carrying all that tension that occasionally results in migraines. She might as well be a character in Samuel Beckett play, unable to go on but still going on.
Anne Kaufman, repeating her staging from the play’s earlier NYC incarnation at New York Theatre Workshop, has delivered a beautifully calibrated production that expertly mines its subtleties. Featuring little blatant theatricality other than a stunning scene change (courtesy of Lael Jellinek), it features superb performances from its five-woman ensemble, all but the lead actress playing dual roles. McAdams, like so many film or television performers new to the stage, has difficulty with her vocal projection, making some lines unintelligible. But she’s such a warm, winning presence that your heart instantly goes out to her character who, somehow in the face of her anguish, achieves something akin to a state of grace.
Mary Jane opened April 23, 2024, at Samuel J. Friedman Theatre and runs through June 30. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
