We Had a World

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Joshua Harmon’s latest family-oriented play We Had a World at Manhattan Theatre Club’s New York City Center theater complex (where his Prayers for the French Republic had its premiere three years ago) is a seemingly  autobiographical three-hander as the playwright hero is also named Joshua who went to college in Chicago where Harmon also attended. Whether all the details are the same has not been revealed as of yet.

This absorbingly untidy memory play begins when Joshua’s 94-year-old grandmother Renée calls to tell him that she has the idea for his next play: he should write a play to be called “Battle of the Titans” about the war between his mother Ellen and her sister Susan. Joshua responds that he has always wanted to write about their family but didn’t know if he had her permission. However, she wants him to promise one thing: “Make it as bitter and vitriolic as possible,” a “Virginia Woolf, Part II.”

In fact, the play Harmon has written is mainly about the conflict between the grandmother and the mother. While we are never really certain why Ellen and Susan refuse to be in the same room, we come to know all the details of the relationship between Renée and Ellen from three sides. The most entertaining parts of this long one-act delineate the relationship between Joshua and his Auntie Mame-like grandmother who did not believe in age-appropriate events: taking him at age seven to see Dances With Wolves, attending a Mapplethorpe exhibit (which he did not understand) at age nine, seeing Diana Rigg in Medea when he was ten, and a three-movie marathon during a snow day off from school: Secrets and Lies, Sling Blade and The English Patient. Joshua credits his grandmother with changing his life making him want to be a playwright after seeing Medea.

While Joshua worships his grandmother, he does not understand the animosity between his lawyer mother and her mother until at age 15 it is revealed to him that Renée has been a not so secret alcoholic but one who has been carefully hidden from her grandchildren by order of Ellen. This is what Ellen has long held against her mother, having had to be her caretaker as a teenager when her father and sister were out, and the times her mother was not there for her. The fight between Ellen, the dying Renée and Susan comes to a head during the last Passover Seder with a physical beating, food thrown onto the floor, and many of the family walking out.

The play also depicts Joshua’s growing up from joining an acapella choir, to his trip abroad to Italy, and his coming out as gay. We also learn about Ellen’s childhood including the trip to Switzerland where she and her siblings are abandoned for a month and her mother’s subsequent shopping trip to Paris. Joshua narrates all this talking directly to the audience as do both of the other characters occasionally. While the play is not told in chronological order and the time scheme is difficult to put in order, the events are always clear and straightforward if even told in a sort of stream of consciousness manner.

Trip Cullman, who previously worked with Harmon on Significant Other both Off Broadway and on, has staged the play in an unobtrusive way which allows it all to seem very real. As the fictional Joshua, Andrew Barth Feldman contains both the innocence and sophistication of youth as an outsider observing the behaviors of his elders, as well as an active participant. He is quite charming in his curious but adolescent way progressing from age five to 35. In a role she was born to play, Tony Award-winner Joanna Gleason as grandmother Renée gives one of those bravura performances that are talked about for years to come. With her wry and deprecating humor as well as inappropriate remarks only Renée can get away with, Gleason ages from mid-60’s to age 94, showing us the steps along the way. Jeanine Serralles as Ellen has the most difficult job as the toughminded, unsentimental and uncompromising lawyer who knows too much about her mother to give in to her demands and her evasions. While she seems to be disagreeable and unkind, we eventually know where she is coming from as she tries to protect her children from what she went through in her younger years.

John Lee Beatty’s clever set design has a great many items hidden in full sight on the thrust stage of New York City Center Stage II so that the transitions move quickly along while allowing the props and scenery to be already at hand. The many appropriate costumes by Kaye Voyce cover the 30-year time period for Joshua and Renée, while leaving Ellen in the same brown business suit throughout, a classy lawyer to the end.  Ben Stanton’s lighting design subtly shifts as the time and scenes move from one era to another in the family history. Tommy Kurzman is responsible for the wigs and make-up which help age the characters, particularly true of Gleason’s grey-white wig which disguises her from her acclaimed musical comedy performances in the past.

While We Had a World (an unwieldly title which is never really explained) is not as epic as the author’s Prayer for the French Republic, it is both entertaining and engrossing. The three-member cast makes the most of their opportunities playing the same characters over a period of 30 years. While We Had a World falls into the genre of dysfunctional family plays, there is a great deal of love depicted in the telling of reputedly the author’s own family story.

We Had a World (extended through May 11, 2025)

Manhattan Theatre Club

New York City Center Stage II, 131 W. 55^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-581-1212 or visit http://www.ManhattanTheatreClub.com

Running time: 100 minutes without an intermission