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Review: Joanna Gleason Brilliantly Inhabits We Had a World
March 19, 2025, 9:05.50 pm ET

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Photo: Jeremy Daniel

By Brian Scott Lipton

Early on in Joshua Harmon’s clearly biographical “We Had a World,” now debuting at Manhattan Theatre Club Stage II at New York City Center, the onstage Joshua (played by a wonderful Andrew Barth Feldman, appearing first in nothing but tighty-whities) is instructed by his grandmother Renee (the always fabulous Joanna Gleason) to write a drama about his mother and her estranged sister that is so bitter that it will be like “Virginia Woolf Part II.”

Rest assured, though, the late Edward Albee has nothing to worry about. Harmon’s work – which instead turns out to be a rather clear-eyed examination of his own relationship with both his grandmother and his mother Ellen (the excellent Jeanine Serralles) as well as the women’s complicated relationship with each other – is occasionally scathing, but ultimately far more compassionate and often hilarious than that 1962 classic.

It's also a slighter play – both in length (110 minutes) and emotional depth – than Albee’s masterpiece. In fact, it even feels slight compared to what I consider Harmon’s masterpiece-to-date, “Prayer for the French Republic,” and part of me wished this piece had a greater scope (and larger cast of onstage characters) that would have more fully fleshed out this family’s dysfunctional dynamic.

Spanning 30 years, the play centers primarily on the changing yet unbreakable relationship between Joshua and Renee. As a young child, Joshua sees the somewhat pretentious and free-spirited Renee as a kind of Auntie Mame, who takes him to completely inappropriate R-rated movies, Broadway plays (“Medea, anyone?), and art exhibits (Mapplethorpe, anyone?). All of this is much to the dismay of Ellen, a hard-working lawyer and mother of three who can’t give Joshua that same level of attention, nor wants her pre-teen child treated like a full-fledged adult.

But when Renee unexpectedly leaves the teenage Joshua’s first professional play at intermission, Ellen is forced to remove her son’s rose-colored glasses: Renee has been a lifelong alcoholic, an illness that deeply affected her daughter’s own childhood -- and which has also resulted in an almost-violent estrangement from her siblings, Susan and Robert -- and her own outlook on parenting. (She becomes a bit of a smothering mother.)

Armed with all this new knowledge, Joshua becomes a bit more emotionally distant from Renee and a bit more protective of the seemingly high-strung Ellen. He also becomes painfully aware that these women do little to help themselves or each other. Neither believes in therapy (although both desperately need it) and both cling to a false sense of self-reliance that does more harm than good.

Director Trip Cullman makes good use of the tiny MTC stage, maneuvering his cast so the show rarely feels static and smartly utilizing the sparsely furnished but effective set by the great John Lee Beatty. But his cast are the ones most deserving of praise.

Gleason, the consummate actress, doesn’t shy away from any of the role’s challenges, including appearing as a 90-year-old in an unflattering gray wig and pink bathrobe. (The costumes are by Kate Voyce). If Renee can be mean, unfeeling or unreasonable, she can also be wonderfully charming and urbane, and Gleason uses all the crayons in her box to color inside Renee’s line. Her greatest gift as an actress – her impeccable comic timing – is put to excellent use by Harmon, so that lines that aren’t even funny on the page end up causing guffaws.

Serralles, occasionally overemphasizing Ellen’s “gift” for melodrama, is incredibly affecting as a six-year-old child stuck in a women’s body, while Feldman – burdened with an enormous amount of narration – is consistently likeable. Their “world” may be small, but all three actors give perfectly sized performances.

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