Review: Amy Herzog’s Mournful Lullaby Mary Jane Comes to Broadway With Rachel McAdams

Feminist literary scholar Talia Schaffer describes care as the action of “meeting another’s ‘need,’ no matter what the ‘need’ is.” While most theorizations of care focus on it as a two-person relationship (the caregiver and the cared-for), Schaffer proposes the idea of a community of care, an enmeshed web of people that look after each other. Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane, which premiered at Yale Rep and New York Theatre Workshop in 2017 and now comes to Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Friedman Theatre, is all about care, specifically the coterie of women that surround the title character, single mother Mary Jane (Rachel McAdams), and her disabled two-and-a-half-year-old son Alex.

Care, as the play reveals, can take on many forms and can come from unexpected sources. In addition to Mary Jane there are eight supporting characters played by four women, each double cast with a pairing that offers a structural parallel. There are medical professionals like home nurse Sherry and Dr. Toros (April Matthis), fellow mothers of disabled children Brianne and Chaya (Susan Pourfar), ancillary supporters like Sherry’s daughter Amelia and music therapist Kat (Lily Santiago), and mostly functional assistants like building supervisor Ruthie and Buddhist hospital chaplain Tenkei (Brenda Wehle). Each helps meet a need; together, they form a community.

Herzog’s strategically elusive and elliptical writing gradually reveals details, including the fact that Alex exists (he’s never seen on stage). Despite Alex’s lack of physical presence, we get a great sense of him through Mary Jane’s many descriptions of his personality, temperament, interests, and health. Only slowly do we learn that he was born at 25 weeks and that he has cerebral palsy, a seizure disorder, lung disease, and a paralyzed vocal cord. The various breadcrumbs alerting us to his worsening condition, eventually landing him in the hospital, are deceptively (and intentionally) easy to miss.

Mary Jane works within a well-established genre of stories about (and often by) mothers of disabled children: Herzog, herself, lost her 12-year-old daughter Frances (who had nemaline myopathy, a muscular condition) in the summer of 2023. But Herzog and director Anne Kauffman deftly avoid every ableist trope (particularly the bitterness and centering the suffering of the able-bodied mother), instead masterfully capturing the experience with hyperrealism and empathy. Mary Jane is fiercely dedicated, with an armor-like bubbliness, constantly fighting against brain fog, fatigue, and migraines, and often taking a business-like approach to the more logistical aspects of care. Through it all, she is ceaselessly selfless, always putting her own needs aside.

In addition to pushing back against tropes, the play actively counters widespread ableist and eugenic rhetoric about disabled people. A day after Alex is born, Mary Jane is told he won’t live; instead of saying goodbye, she tells him “You are wanted, you’re wanted, know that you’re wanted.” This mantra has a simple but radical message, and makes a large political point, asserting that there is value in disabled lives.

The play is structured by the temporal contours of caregiving — repetitive tasks like changing diapers, medication timetables, machines beeping, anticipatory waiting, and the decelerando of prognosis. The passage of time is purposefully hard to judge; sometimes things move glacially, sometimes alarmingly rapid, and sometimes entire chunks disappear altogether. Part of the genius of Herzog’s text and Kaufman’s direction is that we experience time as Mary Jane does, warped and in waves.

Just when things start to feel comfortable within Mary Jane’s apartment, Lael Jellinek’s set slides up, like a dollhouse puzzle, to reveal the hospital. The apartment lingers above, taunting us with the possibility that we may return, that Alex might be discharged, that it will slide back down. It’s a trenchant symbol for the hope demanded in such situations. Mary Jane is never short on hope, even as hospital staff endlessly and exclusively refer to her as “mom” (dripping with meaning and pressure) and speak to her in coded euphemisms about managing expectations.

McAdams, in her Broadway debut, does a commendable job in an extremely difficult role. She performs Mary Jane’s long arc, especially her mind and body’s gradual wearing down, with minute attention to detail. However, I can’t help feeling that a different performer could have been stronger and rawer. The supporting cast is, without exception, exceptional. Sanitago is tender and sincere, Wehle sturdy and wise, Pourfar overwhelmed and stalwart, and Matthis intimate and distant. It is no coincidence that the cast is all women, and that the two professional caregivers are played by a Black actor. As Mary Jane highlights, care almost always falls on the shoulders of women, particularly women of color.

In Pourfar’s latter scene, Mary Jane asks Chaya (who is Hasidic) if her faith makes coping easier. Chaya responds, “my community makes things easier,” noting that if Mary Jane had a faith community, even as a single woman, she would never be alone. But the unspoken beauty of the moment, the thing that both fail to realize, is that Mary Jane is far from alone. She does have a community of care around her, one that includes friends, nurses, doctors, and even acquaintances like Chaya, who all care for her and for Alex.

Herzog has written a mournful lullaby, somehow simultaneously upsetting and soothing, thoughtful and gut-wrenching. It’s difficult to sit through, and yet, there is something consoling about it. Perhaps it is the comfort of seeing how people can come together to meet another’s need, no matter what the need is.