The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: MTC’s We Had A World
By Ross
He strips down, like this play, to his vulnerable self wearing a pair of tighty whities, and sits, asking the air, and his grandmother, played to glorious heights by the always impressive Joanna Gleason (Broadway’s Into the Woods; Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), for permission to do the thing he has secretly wanted to do for a long, long time. To write about his family, with as much bitterness and vitriol as possible, so he promises her that, with a lot of fighting and even more hurt, anger, and love than can be placed inside that small stage. The emotional core is big and impressive, unwrapped and presented in a reshuffled manner in the back of New York City Center‘s Stage II where the new play by Joshua Harmon, We Had A World, is being played out by Manhattan Theatre Club. Harmon (Prayer for the French Republic) in layers has a lot he wants to unveil for us in this small family drama. But first, he wants to start with something more gentle and caring, giving us an unmasked clue that what will follow will be the opposite, and if Ellen has anything to say about the storytelling, we’d be diving into the hard stuff right off the bat.
Yet Marmon has a plan, and his performing stand-in, Joshua, played with cunning vulnerability and emotionality by the engaging Andrew Barth Feldman (“No Hard Feelings“; off-Broadway’s Little Shop of Horrors), dutifully leads us on a memory road trip through the streets of Manhattan with his captivating grandmother, Nanna on his arm, and his mother standing nervously by, knowing the pain that will come but helpless to prevent it. Gleason’s Nanna opens up the world to him, gorgeously taking him to his first play and to museum exhibits that might have been a bit too sexually enlightening and mature for the young boy. Or maybe not, as Joshua seems to have found his own way through, as he is reminded by his mother, Ellen, played with clever tenseness by Jeanine Serralles (“Inside Llewyn Davis“). I know that I sat there wishing I had had a woman like Nanna to guide me through this complicated artistic world, thinking it would have made life easier. But Ellen knows a thing or two that we aren’t privy to yet about the ways of Nanna, yet we feel it in her rigidity, struggling to go along with Joshua’s gentle, nostalgic unravelling, mainly because of the pain and anger that still, ever so obviously, live rent-free inside her tight, tense frame.
It’s a powerful, compelling formula, this Harmon family drama, and as directed with a cool, slow hand by Trip Cullman (Broadway’s Cult of Love), We Had A World finds its footing in as mesmerizing a way as the way Nanna altered and expanded the mind of Joshua. But the clean-up that is held and remembered by Ellen is also as important and traumatizing as any of the one-sided Paris stories told to Joshua about his fabulous Nanna. And they pack a punch, especially when the flip side of that recording is played back from a different vantage point and angle by mother Ellen, on that open wide stage, designed with crowded deliberation by John Lee Beatty (Broadway’s Sweat), with simplistic lighting by Ben Stanton (Broadway’s Maybe Happy Ending), tender costumes by Kaye Voyci (MTC’s Morning Sun), and a solid sound by Sinan Refik Zafar (Broadway’s English).
These two women; daughter and mother; mother and grandmother, dance an old familiar dance, yet foot twitching with judgments thrown out and shamed by those who hold similar judgments tight to their chest. It’s enough to make a man a playwright, one might say, and Joshua does, along with discovering love, disappointment, compassion, and heartbreak, wrapped Skintight in the transcripts of life and death. “That was comforting?” one character asks the other, as drunken anger beats up the conflicted and judgmental in a moment that should have been about something else, something more comforting, familial, and ceremonial. We Had A World drives and drags itself through to the touching end, an engagement between the three that we all know is coming, albeit a bit slowly. Yet, the final unpacking carries a weight that is true and complicatedly authentic, delivered by a trio of actors who find all the conflicted pain inside a not-so-good person, and present it handsomely in the most touching manner possible.
