Jeanine Serralles (left) and Joanna Gleason give memorable performances as a sparring daughter and mother in the Manhattan Theatre Club production of Joshua Harmon’s We Had a World.
Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Leo Tolstoy famously wrote in his opening line of Anna Karenina, and Joshua Harmon shows that every unhappy family member is unhappy in her own way in We Had a World, his stirring new play that gets at universal truths through a very personal story.
Andrew Barth Feldman plays a character named Joshua in Harmon’s autobiographical play, with Jeanine Serralles as his mother, Ellen. Photographs by Jeremy Daniel.
Tumult within a Jewish family has become a hallmark for Harmon, the heralded playwright of Prayer for the French Republic and Bad Jews. In the autobiographical We Had a World, he digs into memories of his mother and grandmother, and his realization over the years of how much discontent they carried.
Nana—aka Renee—is portrayed, wonderfully, by Joanna Gleason, returning to the New York stage for the first time in more than a decade. Though the character is based on Harmon’s grandmother, she feels like a wholly original invention, so attuned is Gleason’s performance to details of Renee’s personality and mannerisms. With long white hair and a wardrobe of animal and floral prints, speaking in an affected, wispy lilt, this lover of the arts is an almost ethereal presence, particularly in comparison with her serious, pantsuit-wearing daughter Ellen, played by Jeanine Serralles.
Renee is free-spirited and kind of flaky, while Ellen is a hard-driving control freak, so Gleason has the showier role, but Serralles is outstanding as well. She projects the brusque efficiency of this self-proclaimed bitch (“It’s one of my best qualities”) but also captures Ellen’s vulnerability and hurt at the tensions with her mother.
Joanna Gleason briefly steps out of Nana character to play the manager of a hostel where Joshua (Feldman) stays on a trip to Europe.
In good times, Renee and Ellen speak on the phone six times a day; in bad times, they don’t speak at all for a couple of years. Ellen still seethes with resentment about having to tend to her often drunk mother throughout her childhood—and that everyone else in the family ignored the problem—while Renee often dismisses any concerns of Ellen’s and tends to break promises to her.
The lifelong battles between the two women, and their individual relationships with Joshua (Andrew Barth Feldman, also excellent), form the plot of We Had a World. Nana never treated her grandson like a child and started taking him to museums, movies, and plays when he was little; Joshua traces the impetus for his playwriting to seeing the Diana Rigg Medea with Nana at 10. His mother, too, was hugely influential and supportive—the most “giving, generous, loving, thoughtful member” of the family, Joshua writes.
We Had a World is, to an extent, an egotistical effort by Harmon. It is about his life with his mother and grandmother, and leaves unexplored some aspects of their lives that he wasn’t privy to. A few anecdotes suggest that Renee had thwarted ambitions and an ambivalence toward motherhood (and maybe that’s why she drank), but Harmon apparently never asked her about it, so it’s not part of the play.
Ellen (Serralles) and her mother “are dancing a very old dance, and no one can stop them,” according to her son.
While he looked no further than the people closest to him for material, Harmon still hits on fundamental realities of family life. “This thing we were all in, this family, is just a collection of individuals … [who] can look at the same thing and see something entirely different,” Joshua observes. Like many people critical of their parents, Ellen can’t recognize how much she has in common with Renee—both have a sibling they don’t talk to; both of them try to sound like they’re not from Brooklyn; and both of them rebuff the idea that they need therapy.
Joshua narrates the play, as if he is writing it while he recalls assorted episodes from his life involving his mom and/or grandmother—which are reenacted by the cast. Its staging has the look of a rehearsal: Actors retrieve props and costume changes from chairs and a clothes rack lined up against the back wall, and pieces of furniture onstage are like placeholders for the real scenery a production would have. This is most noticeable with the two mismatched, neutral-colored settees that are supposed to be a matching pair of green silk-covered loveseats that Joshua mentions repeatedly—purchased in Paris, they were his favorite things in his grandmother’s home (and are connected to a revealing anecdote about Renee).
Really, the scenery is beside the point in We Had a World (not what one usually says about set design by Theater Hall of Famer John Lee Beatty), because the characters—so meticulously written and embodied—command such attention. The indelible performances by Gleason and Serralles and Harmon’s relatable insights on family widen the appeal of his origin story, even for those from households unaccustomed to so much infighting.
We Had a World runs through May 11 at City Center Stage II (131 W. 55th St.). Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, with matinees at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday; nycitycenter.org.
Playwright: Joshua Harmon
Director: Trip Cullman
Sets: John Lee Beatty
Costumes: Kaye Voyce
Lighting: Ben Stanton
Sound & Music: Sinan Refik Zafar
