The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: MCC’s Caroline
By Ross
Suitcases, Tylenol, and pancakes in a corner booth of a diner outside of Cleveland — that’s how MCC’s Caroline begins. New clothes and a new name are what’s asked for by the newly annotated Caroline, played with miraculous depth by River Lipe-Smith (A Christmas Carol). “I want to be a girl,” Caroline states, matter-of-factly, tracing out an idea that slowly becomes clearer with each passing moment. We are given a returning troublesome daughter, now a worried, caring mother to a young trans girl trying to navigate the fragile edges of identity and belonging, seeking refuge at the familial home that was left a long time ago. She had left, not under the best of circumstances, but now she is in need, because of her trans daughter, and will do almost anything to find her some safety in this increasingly violent world. It’s both the play’s greatest gift and its small frustration that Caroline’s trans identity is treated with understated naturalism — movingly present, yet only mildly developed.
The play, written with quiet deliberation by Preston Max Allen (We Are the Tigers), unfolds with a steady, understated grace that lingers and rolls. It’s a beautifully performed new play, directed with a level of authentic insistence by David Cromer (PH’s The Antiquities) that captures the tremors of recovery, reconciliation, and growing up in an imperfect world. It’s a deeply moving drama, forged in a dilemma with authentic tenderness found in confrontation. Even if the play’s most charged subject, Caroline, the daughter of a recovering addict, a young trans girl in need of safety and security, feels like the secondary examined corner of its otherwise compassionate framing. But maybe that’s the point.
“Choices aren’t always nice,” we are told, and perhaps that restraint that I felt long after is part of the playwright‘s intention: to resist turning identity into spectacle, or to show that a trans child’s life can simply exist within the mess of ordinary family pain. Still, in the balance between subtlety and silence, Caroline sometimes pulls back just when it might lean in. The result is a play that feels truthful and humane, but one that skirts the full complexity of its own premise.
Rolling their bags into a sometimes clunky arrangement of safe spaces, courtesy of set designer Lee Jellinek (Broadway’s Sea Wall/A Life), Maddie (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young woman, returns home after years away dealing with the wildness of addiction, the clarity of sobriety, and the loneliness of familial disconnection. She’s come back with her daughter, Caroline, now old enough to sense both her mother’s fragility and her own difference in the world. The reason is brutal and clear, yet the reunion with her mother, the girl’s grandmother, Rhea (Amy Landecker), plays out in tense, tight ripples rather than warm, loving gestures. Cartigens are pulled and clutched close to her frame, like protective armour, well formulated by costume designer David Hyman (Broadway’s The Sound Inside). There’s care with a tight twist of compassion, but also a conditional kind of acceptance that grows more complicated as the play moves forward.
What works best in Caroline is its intimacy — the way the actors listen to one another, and the way the silences between them say what words can’t. Maddie’s recovery is written and performed with grounded realism by the wonderful Moritz (“Let Me In“; “The Miseducation of Cameron Post“), never sanctified or overplayed. The grandmother, too, as performed with clarity by Landecker (“For Worse“), feels heartbreakingly familiar: someone whose love is real but conditional, filtered through the fears of historical dishonesty and the rules of her generation. Lipe-Smith playing Caroline brings a beautiful, clever openness to the role — observant, tender, brave — though I wished the play had given Caroline a deeper voice in her own story. Her presence feels essential but sometimes peripheral, like a truth the play is still learning how to hold or what to do with.
The most unsettling and revealing moment arrives late in the play, after a phone call with the unseen grandfather. The grandmother’s tone shifts, almost too abruptly — the understanding curdles, the air thickens with formulations that hit hard — and the play pivots sharply toward the expected, but not exactly stereotypical confrontation. It’s a sharp and painful twist, one that captures how easily love can turn demanding and conditional. But the scene comes a bit too heavily, leaving the emotional fallout more implied than felt. The ending, though satisfying, feels slightly rushed — a culmination that lands before it’s had time to fully resonate.
And yet, Caroline’s heart beats strong. Its portrayal of a sober mother navigating shame and renewal feels deeply lived-in. Its depiction of three generations of women — each with their own limits, fears, and hopes — feels refreshingly honest. The play refuses to be a melodrama; instead, it offers something wiser and harder to define: the daily act of trying to connect when the past keeps slapping back.
MCC’s Caroline doesn’t always probe as deeply as it could, but what it offers is real — the ache of recovery, the ache of love, the ache of being seen only partially and wanting more. It lives in the spaces between what’s said and unsaid, becoming a tender, truthful experience that listens carefully even when it doesn’t speak every truth out loud. And maybe that, in itself, is the quiet bravery of Caroline. It knows that healing and security don’t always happen in the spotlight, but beyond what money can buy.
