Alex, the two-year-old child at the center of Amy Herzog’s excellent play Mary Jane, is a constant presence on stage, despite never showing his face nor saying a word. Alex can’t, actually, vocalize anything – he was born with a paralyzed vocal cord, his endearingly peppy mother explains, along with other health conditions such as cerebral palsy, requiring round-the-clock care. We hear his machine’s beeps and whirs, see his mountain of stuffed animals on a hospital bed, jolt and hurdle along his journey from medical hiccup to crisis. He can’t communicate his pain or his joy. And yet, as Mary Jane – the titular mother so movingly, hauntingly embodied by Rachel McAdams – insists, he can understand her. She is the conduit, shield, giver.
Healthcare is a vast ecosystem of treatment, suffering and healing, of hospitals, bills and logistics. It’s often, rightly in the US, denigrated for its opacity, inequities and Kafka-esque absurdities. It’s a tricky system to capture in a tight play with a five-person cast and sparse, economical staging at the Samuel J Friedman Theatre, but it’s one this Broadway edition, directed by Anne Kauffman, manages to wrangle through the nucleus of Mary Jane. She’s the center of a network of women who help care for Alex, from contracted at-home nurses to emergency room doctors to supportive parents of fellow chronically ill children. Herzog based the play, in part, on her experience with her daughter Frances, who was born with Nemaline myopathy and died last year at age 11; the specificity of this work, from the dosages of anti-seizure medication to the type of generic coffee machine for a hospital lounge (scenic design by Lael Jellinek), feels born of experience – motherhood, and then a whole present shaped by intensive caretaking – that you can only ever truly imagine by going through it.
