For reasons unknown I was booted from the official press nights for We Had a World, the new play from Drama Desk winner and Tony nominee Joshua Harmon (Prayer for the French Republic), and a certain amount of FOMO kicked in. It’s one thing to miss the preview performances for critics and the “second nights” I get invited to, but I couldn’t see it until about a month later, making me a thirtieth-nighter. I needn’t have worried, though. Harmon’s show is splendid, aching and funny in equal measure, and the acting trio is that much better several weeks in. Playing a fracturing family not unlike the playwright’s own they’re uncannily attuned at this point.
We begin near the end, as Joshua (Andrew Barth Feldman) attends to his 94-year-old grandmother Renee (Joanna Gleason). She’s offering him the grist for a new play, which she calls “Battle of the Titans,” a searing look at her daughters Ellen, Joshua’s mother (Jeanine Serralles), and Susan, who we never see but, boy, do we hear about. It’ll commence at a Rosh Hashanah dinner that Renee has convened for the estranged sisters. And it must be written with complete bitterness, grandma insists. In time in the one-act, 100-minute play we get to this fateful celebration, or rather a version of it, as nothing is conveyed in a straight line as the story slingshots across three decades.
Renee presents herself as quite a delightful person, a bon vivant who takes her impressionable, arts-minded grandson to inappropriate movies, plays, and gallery shows throughout Manhattan (Robert Mapplethorpe is a particular favorite.) She’s the reason Joshua chooses to become a playwright and he regards her fondly. The sentiment isn’t shared by Ellen, which baffles her son, whose life is pushed and pulled by their tug of war. Ellen is an accomplished person who holds everything together (“a bitch who gets things done” in her estimation) but also holds everything in; when her dam of resentments collapses, trouble. And she has reasons to be upset. Renee, we learn, is a fearsome alcoholic, and worse, something Joshua never noticed. The play seamlessly shifts between perspectives of the same events, and Harmon uses the entirety of the stage space at Manhattan Theatre Club’s most intimate space to tell them. Every part of the set is pulled into the story, notably the two antique loveseats the characters sit on, the old records stashed away, a kitchen, and the scrapbooks produced as keepsakes and evidence. I was rapt, as wounds become scabs that get picked at over time. But there are healing moments and grace notes, too.
When a show comes together as strongly as We Had a World does there’s alchemy afoot. Harmon has written beautifully, creating a kind of followup to French Republic and adding another chapter to his ongoing inquiry into Jewishnness here and abroad. (The first play of his I saw was entitled Bad Jews, and there’s some not-great Jews here, too). The actors ping-pong off another with tremendous ease, as if they’re directing themselves (they play other small roles and banter with the audience, too) but of course it was the estimable director Trip Cullman who sculpted everything. Feldman, a former Evan Hansen (and the star of the charming coming-of-age movie No Hard Feelings), is our guide into Joshua’s life from childhood to adulthood yet not passive as revelations are lobbed at him like so many grenades. Never less than wonderful Gleason is a regal Renee until she isn’t, unable to keep her masks fitted. Serralles is particularly inventive, a proud woman reduced to childlike jelly around a mother whose affection skipped a generation and armoring herself for a son who can’t, and musn’t, understand why. The ensemble is complemented by a superior design that manifests numerous stage pictures of the eras the show takes place in–all credit due John Lee Beatty (set), Kate Voyce (costumes), Ben Stanton (lighting), Sinan Refik Zafar (sound and score), and Tommy Kurzman (wig and makeup).
As you exit the theater take note of the diorama that Harmon has put together of the photos, newspaper clippings, and other emphemera that consitute his life and that of We Had a World. It’s lovely to unpack on the heels of such a gripping, open-hearted piece. Don’t miss out; it’s on through May 11.
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