“I’ve got your next play,” Renee tells her writer/grandson Josh. “It’s called Battle of the Titans, it’s about your mother and your aunt.” It seems that said aunt is flying into New York as a Passover surprise, with Josh’s mother, Ellen, refusing to step foot in the apartment.
“It’ll be Virginia Woolf, Part 2,” grandma enthuses!
And so it is, although given the authorial voice Joshua Harmon has developed over his first five plays (starting with Bad Jews in 2012 and peaking—thus far—with the 2022 Prayer for the French Republic), playgoers can fathom that the jousts in this titanic battle will eschew Edward Albee-type venom in favor of kill-’em-with-laughter jabs in the mode of Neil Simon.
“Make it as bitter and vitriolic as possible,” Grandma entreats.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
We Had a World is indeed as bitter and vitriolic as possible, at least in the late-20th century, Upper West Side milieu of this autobiographical portrait. Over the course of the play’s 30-year span, tightly wound mother Ellen stays on the sidelines as Renee takes Josh to a Mapplethorpe exhibit at age 9 and to the Diana Rigg Medea at 10. So it’s Auntie Mame with a taste of Durang and maybe even a whiff of Kopit. Which makes it well-nigh impossible to approach bitter and/or vitriolic, not while you’re laughing so hard. I mean, what are we to make of such dialogue as this post-Medea exchange?
Josh (age 10): I don’t think my Mom would ever kill me.
Renee: No, I don’t suppose she would.
Josh: Would you ever kill your children?
Renee: It would depend on the situation.
This is Neil Simon territory, perhaps, but it’s Simon at his best. We Had a World is not dissimilar to Brighton Beach Memoirs, being a real-life, rear-view look at the struggles of a developing young writer. This sort of masterwork can be bitter and vitriolic, sure, if the protagonist has the temperament of Thomas Wolfe or Eugene O’Neill. In the deepest moments of We Had a World, in fact, there is something of a Long Day’s Journey Into Night (albeit in an intermissionless, 100-minute sprint of a play). But as we’ve seen in Harmon’s other work, the author’s natural inclination—even when addressing uncomfortable situations—is to leave us laughing.
Andrew Barth Feldman masterfully stands in for the writer, shifting from 5 to 35 and back with skill, charm, and pepper. Feldman, who got his Broadway start in 2019 as the first actual teenager to play Evan Hansen, is a natural actor and a natural comedian with all the promise of—yes—that young Matthew Broderick of Brighton Beach. (You might have seen Feldman in the 2023 Jennifer Lawrence film No Hard Feelings, in which he played the son of, well, Matthew Broderick.) Feldman is now 22, playing the 35-year-old Joshua, but no matter. He is believable and ingratiating, from the play’s unconventional and uncomfortable opening moment till the fadeout.
Renee is drawn as a warm but dangerous charmer with more than a touch of Medea-maternalism. We won’t say that Joanna Gleason is the only person who can perfectly essay this role—the likely success of the play will surely lead to many productions—but Gleason is as always a marvel to watch, spouting her dialogue with impeccable line readings which bring full value to the author’s thoughts while hinting at an unspoken reserve deep within the character.
Stationed between two such high-powered performances is Jeanine Serralles, who has done comparatively little stage work since her memorable performance as the title character in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ 2015 comedy Gloria. While the role of Ellen serves as a buffer between Josh and Renee, Seralles proves more than fully capable of holding her own against inveterate scene stealers Gleason and Feldman.
Playwright Harmon himself seems to inhabit the character Josh, pulling strings and shifting time not only from scene to scene and exchange to exchange but sometimes within the words of a sentence. The sense of where and when and what, though, remains clear from moment to moment. The cast is abetted in this by the unseen hand of director Trip Cullman (who also guided Choir Boy and Harmon’s Significant Other). We Had a World proceeds without a forced moment, without a time lag, without a moment where attention starts to lap.
Distinctive work is also done by John Lee Beatty, who provides one of those seemingly scenery-less sets that unobtrusively and instantly provide whatever might be needed; lighting designer Ben Stanton and sound designer Sinan Refik Zafar, who help assist in this sleight-of-hand; and costume designer Kaye Voyce, who seems to have rummaged through 30 years of the characters’ theoretical closets and time and again found just the right thing.
Harmon has composed his play like a spinning top; if any of this sounds disjointed, everything turns out precisely as promised. The Battle of the Titans and Virginia Woolf combined, with school recitals and Medea and peanut butter sundaes at Serendipity whipped into a frothy whole. We Had a World—a memory play stuffed with sometimes difficult memories—is wildly funny. Not black comedy, but warm, loving, family comedy albeit with blood in the sand.
Mostly, though, We Had a World is a field day for Harmon. And Feldman. And Gleason. And the audience.
We Had a World opened March 19, 2025, at City Center Stage II and runs through April 27. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
