“We Had a World” at New York City Center Stage II (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)
At Joshua Harmon’s Significant Other in 2015, I saw myself so clearly in Gideon Glick’s Jordan that it was like he was holding up a literal mirror. Harmon’s dialogue and the relationships between Jordan and the other characters reflected my own life back at me and it was terrifying. As I sat in the Laura Pels so intensely connected to the play, I felt an urge to shout, to get up there, to help him. I didn’t, of course. Instead, I became so still I fused with the theatre seat, the only movement coming from my tear ducts. When it ended and I scraped myself up the stairs to 46th Street, I realized that my urge to help Jordan was actually an urge to help myself.
I’ve never been so connected to a play and, as a result, have never felt so connected to a playwright. Sure, I love other plays and, absolutely, I think other plays are better than Significant Other, but that kind of raw emotional identification is singular and I have been chasing it ever since.
Harmon’s new play We Had a World got me there. A remarkably personal excavation of his relationship with both his mother and his grandmother, Harmon has gone for naked truth. Where Significant Other’s central character is named Jordan (close enough), here his name is explicitly Joshua and the play begins with its own conception. A phone call from his grandmother towards the end of her life gives him permission to write about the family in all its complicated degrees. The collage-like play that comes of it, though, is not the living room drama his grandmother is picturing. Instead, it’s a play about a young man learning – about art, theatre, and movies from his grandmother and about how (and how not) to conduct yourself in the world from his mother.
Early on, we hear that Joshua’s grandmother, Renee, grew up in Brooklyn, but now lives on the Upper East Side and thinly tinges her voice with a British accent. When this happened, I felt that rush of Harmon’s magic sweep over me. My own grandmother is from West Virginia, but, as children, my sister and I frequently witnessed her adopt a British accent when ordering at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Joshua’s grandmother takes him to a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition, to see Cherry Jones in The Heiress, and to Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, long before he can grasp their full breadth. But she sees him, in a way that no one else does, and elects to foster this love of art in her grandson instead of quash it.
Grandparents can sometimes see their grandchildren in ways their parents are unable. Parents are often busier than grandparents, concerned more with raising their children than taking them to see Diana Rigg in Medea. My own grandparents are the people who took me to the theatre as a child but, although my parents were encouraging, it’s not where their interests lie.
The same is true of Joshua’s supportive, hard-working mother, Ellen. By Joshua’s own account, they have a close relationship, but it’s more domestically-based. Ellen is a provider and a problem solver. She’s also a self-described bitch, a moniker she wears with pride. As the scenes of Joshua’s childhood collect in the first part of the play, it becomes clear that Ellen and Renee have a strained relationship, something a pre-teen Joshua doesn’t really understand. But when he gets old enough, Ellen reveals that his grandmother is an alcoholic and that she was her primary caretaker as a child, cleaning up her mother’s vomit and bearing the brunt of her drunken anger.
The revelation is rattling to Joshua. He’d never seen her drink because Ellen made Renee promise she wouldn’t around her grandson. But Renee has slipped and sent the whole precarious house of cards tumbling. Joshua begins to see his grandmother differently, in the way his mother has always seen her, and has to reconcile how inspiring she was to him as a child with what he has now learned.
The play’s non-linear structure allows all of this information to seep in, slowly shifting the colors of every character as we learn more about them. Andrew Barth Feldman is extraordinary as Joshua, addressing the audience with a welcomeness that is key to the play’s success. He’s so naturally Joshua, so easily telling the story from the present while jumping into and out of the past as those moments appear in Harmon’s collage. His prior work on stage and, particularly, in the film No Hard Feelings were glimpses at what a talent Feldman is, but in We Had a World, he further cements his status as an actor to watch.
Jeanine Serralles, as Ellen, has her own Herculean feats to achieve. The part is tough, both in terms of difficulty and in terms of Ellen’s hardness. She is open and loving to her son, but her tight reticence with her mother drives a wedge between them until Joshua sees the effect of Renee on Ellen himself. Serralles walks that line and becomes lovable to the audience in the way Ellen is to Joshua. Harmon’s dialogue is finely tuned to his mother’s self-protective tricks that keep her from exposing her vulnerabilities, and to the way those vulnerabilities can spill out even as she tries to stuff them back inside. And in Harmon’s deeply humanist depiction of his mother, warts and all, I saw my own.
As Renee, Joanna Gleason is giving a restrained performance, underplaying nearly every moment to thrilling effect. Aside from a single eruption, Renee never even raises her voice. Even when she’s drunk, she’s a slow, quiet drunk, stabbing barbed comments, but letting you feel every inch of the knife. For such a theatrical woman, Gleason chooses to play her without any exaggeration. Renee believes the outlandish things she says; she wouldn’t say them any other way. It’s the kind of performance that only an actor of Gleason’s caliber can give: still, confident, and emotionally absorbing.
The three actors have palpable chemistry, which is why the play works so well. Director Trip Cullman, reuniting with Harmon after Significant Other, keeps the staging simple and lets the acting shine through. It doesn’t need anything else. The play is strong, the acting is strong, and it’s admirable of a director to fine tune them both to the degree that it can be done on a nearly bare stage. There is, though, one theatrical flourish at the end that is so beautifully tied to the rest of the play that I gasp-sobbed.
We Had a World is about this family, yes, but it’s also about the passage of time. It’s about the wasting away of days and years that could have been filled with joy, but were filled with acrimony. It’s about the abuse of our planet and the wreckage to come. It’s also about falling in love with the theatre and making art from pain. It’s about fictional Joshua, and real Joshua, and about me, in the audience, and the overwhelming emotional connection I had to this fantastic play.