Reviews: An Enemy of the People and Mary Jane (Broadway, 2024)
Amy Herzog is the leading playwright of this Broadway season.
The 2023-24 Broadway season will be best known for the abundance of new musicals it provided with 15 original musicals eligible at the Tony Awards, far more than the average offerings. With no clear frontrunner in just about any Tony category, the races are still tight and competitive.
However, I will always remember this season as The Season of Amy Herzog. Running just three blocks from each other, the playwright's work can be found in two star-studded productions, her domestic drama Mary Jane and her modern adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's 1882 play An Enemy of the People. On 47th St, Rachel McAdams plays the titular Mary Jane at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. On 50th, Jeremy Strong, Michael Imperioli, and others perform Herzog's Ibsen at the Circle in the Square.
Mary Jane is Herzog's most autobiographical play, a tale of a mother raising a chronically ill and often hospitalized son. Alex, the almost-three-year-old stand-in for her own daughter Frances (who was born with nemaline myopathy and passed away in 2023 at age 11) was born with cerebral palsy and a slew of other health issues. He requires constant care, overnight supervision, and extended hospital stays. At the time of Mary Jane's initial 2016/17 development, Herzog would have been experiencing similar things with a similarly aged child.
The primary difference, however, is that Herzog was raising her daughter with her husband and fellow theatremaker Sam Gold (who directs An Enemy of the People.) In Mary Jane, her husband left after being unable to handle the tall task. But she, being always understanding, swears she hopes that he "finds some peace, I really do.” She understands how hard it can be on everyone, but what she doesn't want to acknowledge is how hard it is on her. When looking at the New York apartment of Lael Jellinek's effective scenic design, you may find yourself asking where Mary Jane's room is. She runs in and out of Alex's (the audience rarely sees him, often just hearing the beeps of monitors and the sucks and slurps of a feeding tube - though his liveliness is made clear through Herzog's dialogue, particularly the final scene), but it isn't until she begins to take the cushions off the couch that you realize she sleeps on a sofa bed in the living room.
Rachel McAdams makes her Broadway debut in the role and makes natural sense for the part. She's warm, caring, and thoughtful, and her performance in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. is nothing but pure motherly love. Those are her, at least in this era of her career, movie star superpowers. On stage, she seems well-rehearsed but perhaps too much so. It's a play built on the interactions that Mary Jane has with the people who take care of her and Alex, from home nurses to doctors to chaplains to music therapists, and almost every scene is a two-hander. She has chemistry with all of the ensemblists (Lily Santiago and Brenda Wehle are highlights), but Herzog's affinity for the em-dash, ellipses, and dialogue interruptions of all punctuation types rarely feels like realistic conversation but instead dramatic, dialogue-halting pauses when coming out of their mouths. Anne Kaufman's direction leaves the characters feeling muted.
In one of her earliest roles, McAdams played a budding Shakespearean on the Canadian television show Slings & Arrows, all about the backstage at a fictional preeminent regional theatre. In the pilot, her character is offered a nerve-calming tidbit of theatrical wisdom before an opening night when her director says, "Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing." At MTC (which I believe stands for Matinee Theatre Club if you see the show with their senior subscriber base on a Wednesday afternoon as I did), there was plenty of coughing. And yes, even though she shouldn't be, McAdams seems nervous in this debut. But we know how great she really can be.
Meanwhile, Herzog's adaptation of Ibsen (who she also adapted last year in the Jessica Chastain-starring A Doll's House) and his classic play An Enemy of the People, under the direction of Gold, is anything but understated. Jeremy Strong plays a doctor in a small Norwegian community who discovers that the town's water supply is contaminated. He suspects that the bacteria present in his samples could lead to an abundance of sickness at least, the occasional death at worst. Although it will be an intimidatingly expensive and time-consuming fix (it will require an entire reroute of the water), he rejoices in the fact that he has at least identified the issue and that the town's council can now begin swift and immediate action.
While he anticipates action on this cut-and-dry issue, he's surprised by the politicking and reputation-saving that begins right away from those who once applauded his forward-thinking practices. The worst of it comes from his brother, the town's mayor, played by Michael Imperioli. Every time he walks on stage, the audience grumbles. You have to wonder if Imperioli is such a convincing antagonist or if it's solely because he's playing a slimy politician. Spending money on this means higher taxes and bad optics and he can't have either, so he takes it upon himself to make the doctor look like a madman. Simultaneously, a whole town's worth of lobbyists, coalitions, and journalists take this opportunity to make their own political, social, and economic gains. Strong's character is less concerned that he's been caught in the crossfire but that the truth is being distorted into fake news.
The modern-day parallels are obvious and Herzog and Gold's adaptation needs little updating and really just revising. You can't help but think of Dr. Fauci or Greta Thunberg or any one person who has stood up in front of an angry mob that is hypocritically accusing them of revising the facts for political point-making. Similar stand-takers from Extinction Rebellion disrupted the first press performance of the show in a protest so theatrical that not only was it fodder for the critics in attendance (the protest dominates the ledes of the reviews), but many members of the audience didn't completely realize what was happening. "There's no theater on a dead planet!" they yelled while being escorted out by the same actors playing the characters unable to listen. History is cyclical, we get that. Good on them for proving a point, but perhaps it was preaching to the choir. This was a crowd of people who bought a ticket to the mob mentality play (if they weren't buying a ticket for Jeremy Strong alone) and more than likely a crowd who understands their concerns. They could've tried it at The Heart of Rock & Roll, but then no one would have been there to see it, I suppose.
I was hoping to be the unbiased critic, not present at that performance and therefore able to judge the play without outside influence. That was thrown out almost immediately, however, when I was invited to sit on the stage for the town hall scene, the one where Strong makes a stand and the ensemble (highlights include Matthew August Jeffers and David Patrick Kelly) bullies him into silence. With my shot of Akvavit and a handful of pretzels, some eight feet away from another excellent Jeremy Strong performance, I realized that I too was unable to disconnect my personal experience from the play itself. When the angry mob stones Strong with ice remnants from the bar and tortures him with liquor down his gullet and through his eyes and ears, there's no such thing as disconnection. It's a visceral, terrifying moment that leaves the on-stage bystanders like myself feeling complicit when they don't do anything to stop it.
But luckily for Gold and his penchant for gimmicks, the play still works well enough without needing to sit next to Imperioli on stage, (at Circle in the Square, the farthest seat is eight rows back - everything is intimate.) The play feels significantly larger than just eight speaking characters and a sparse, lantern-lit staging.
And yes, that's Ibsen's timeless writing. But between Mary Jane and An Enemy of the People, it also shows that Amy Herzog can do it all, big and small, classic and contemporary. Audiences are finally getting to see those strengths on Broadway stages.
Mary Jane runs through June 16th, while An Enemy of the People runs through June 23rd.
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