'Mary Jane:' What happens when you give your self up?
'Mary Jane' runs through Feb. 23 in The Arts Factory at West End Studios, 1545 West Trade St.
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on February 9, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. And check out this link for Toppman’s archive of reviews in the Ledger.
Review: Three Bone Theatre’s ‘Mary Jane’ delivers a thought-provoking portrait of motherhood and resilience
The first half of “Mary Jane” takes place in the Queens apartment of a mother and her profoundly ill child; the second half is set in a hospital. (Photo courtesy of Three Bone Theatre)
by Lawrence Toppman
I can understand why “Mary Jane” lasted just 12 weeks in its limited New York run last year, despite having movie star Rachel McAdams in her Broadway debut. It begins in the middle of things — dire things — and, after 95 minutes without intermission, ends in the same place. It asks questions it doesn’t answer, because they cannot be answered.
I can also understand why Amy Herzog’s drama earned four Tony nominations, including best play. I have never seen, either onscreen or onstage, a more detailed and credible depiction of daily life for a parent with a profoundly ill child. If that sounds humor-free or didactic, believe me when I say it’s neither.
Alex, a boy born after 26 weeks with severe bleeding in his brain, now hovers between the ages of 2 and 3 and perennially on the brink of death. The first half takes place in the Queens apartment where he lives with his single mother and a series of caretakers, some more reliable than others. A visitor calls his condition cerebral palsy, but we’re never sure. (Frances Herzog, born with nemaline myopathy, died at 11 in 2023, six years after her mother’s play premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre.)
The second half, accomplished with barely a pause in the fast-moving production by Three Bone Theatre, takes place in a hospital where he spends several weeks. The question is not whether he will ever get better; it’s whether his mother, finally forced to accept that reality, can reclaim her full self after giving all her attention to Alex.
Nonye Obichere’s pitch-perfect Mary Jane veers at first between being cheerfully frantic in crises and frantically cheerful in moments of uneasy calm. Her character and her performance deepen simultaneously in the second half, as she tentatively probes the minds of a Hasidic Jew (Maci Weeks), a kindly but harried physician (Lisa Shacher), a novice Buddhist nun (Banu Valledares), even an emotionally tone-deaf music therapist (Cate Jo).
Does suffering have a purpose? Does religious faith make it easier? What kind of joy can Alex find in his limited and certainly brief existence? Yet the play is less concerned with big ideas than with small actions: gauging the importance of a daily seizure, getting around apartment house rules to improve Alex’s view of the city, talking a reluctant boss into letting you work at home when everyone has been ordered back to the office after the pandemic.
Robin Tynes-Miller directs with maximum emphasis on sisterhood: All the women in the cast gather to touch Mary Jane reassuringly from time to time, and we never see Alex himself, though he’s visible in photos from the Broadway production. I can’t help but wonder whether the character has been named Mary Jane because those demure shoes were emblems of childhood for multiple generations, and she has some growing up to do.
Everyone but Obichere plays two roles, and each actress successfully delineates the differences. The four supporting characters all help take care of Alex and his environment in the first act. But in the second, they spend more time easing the path of Mary Jane, a sign that she’ll have to be the focus of her own life from now on.
She’s still going to struggle, with the prospect of no long-term job and mounting bills. For the first time since Herzog wrote this play, the federal government is planning a massive cutback in Medicaid support that might cripple the Mary Janes of our country. The hopefulness in Herzog’s script looks bleaker when viewed in that harsh light.
If You’re Going: “Mary Jane” runs through Feb. 23 in The Arts Factory at West End Studios, 1545 West Trade St. Performances begin at 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews about two times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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