Ross Zentner
Clare Arena Haden plays the title role in Forward Theater Company’s "Mary Jane."
In a 2017 interview, prior to the opening of her new play, Mary Jane, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, playwright Amy Herzog compared her story of a mother struggling to care for a critically ill child to the biblical story of Job. But instead of a parable about enduring extreme suffering through faith that is eventually rewarded, Herzog’s main character faces “calamities that seem to pile on without purpose or cumulative meaning.”
This is precisely the drama that unfolds in Forward Theater Company’s production, which runs in The Playhouse at Overture through Sept. 29. An exceptional cast of four women, led by Clare Arena Haden, chronicles the struggle of a mom facing her young son’s overwhelming medical issues.
Directed with a sure and gentle hand by Mary MacDonald Kerr, the play unfolds in a series of realistic scenes that each feel like snapshots of a typical day in the last few months of Mary Jane’s parenting odyssey. This journey began with the delivery of her son Alex almost four months early. In the subsequent years that medical technology has kept this severely premature baby alive, Alex’s needs have devastated Mary Jane’s life and scared away her husband. Her tiny Queens apartment has been taken over by monitors and tubes, and she has been pushed out of her out of her bedroom and onto the couch. Her lack of sleep puts her job in jeopardy, and she spends time in artificial environments, where her only companions are her building’s super, those who care for her child, and fellow parents of ill children who cope by depending on family, their faith, their church community or other moms.
Mary Jane (the heart-wrenching Haden) doesn’t depend on family or church. She relies instead on her own mental, emotional and physical strength; her ability to control her environment; and her hyperfocus on Alex at the expense of all else. Her resolve feels superhuman at the top of the play, but as bad news compounds, Haden allows cracks to appear in her character — her face falls, while on the phone with Alex’s neurologist. Her nerves fray as she tries to remember which questions she has for the doctor.
This world is populated by women who are trying to keep it together while facing challenges. A genuine and promising Nadja Simmonds portrays a young woman wondering how to fit in with the other college students. Caron Buinis plays a novice Buddhist nun striving to communicate with a sick child’s mother. Tosha Freeman is refreshingly direct in both nurse and doctor roles, and Samara Frame is a brittle shell-shocked mom navigating a health care system that seems to be stacked against her. There are no simple answers for any of them, just as there are no easy responses to the larger questions the play brings up: medical ethics, the shortcomings of the current health insurance system, and the platitudinal rhetorical question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
A bleak color palette for both Mary Jane’s crummy apartment and the sterile hospital are interrupted by brightly colored squares that cover the stage floor (scenic design by Lisa Schlenker) These mirror the bright lights of an artificial aquarium that soothes Alex, the silent toddler, and the colorful auras Mary Jane sees when a migraine strikes. Marveling at the fractals that are closing in on her, Mary Jane’s spirit seems heroic. But if there is a message to the play, it’s that suffering — whether it has a larger purpose or not — will eventually take an enormous toll.
