A moving portrait of a mind decline
Old age isn’t for sissies. Kenneth Lonergan faces that reality head-on in “The Waverly Gallery,” a funny-sad memory play about the wrenching and rapid decline of his feisty grandmother.
Granted, the play that opened Thursday night sounds like a total Debbie Downer, or a disease-of-the-week flick you’ve already seen. It isn’t. You haven’t.
Even in this early work, which played off-Broadway 18 years ago, long before Lonergan won an Oscar for “Manchester by the Sea,” his keen ear for dialogue is evident, as is his knack for coaxing humor from dark circumstances. Elaine May plays Gladys, a mover and shaker in her prime, now long past. It’s May’s first Broadway appearance in over 50 years. Now 86, she’s a petite, soft-spoken presence, whose wry performance recalls Ruth Gordon. It’s hard watching Gladys’ vigor and faculties fade within two years, as she loses her memory and, slowly, herself.
Her 20-something grandson, Daniel (Lucas Hedges), the playwright’s alter ego, bears the brunt of it. He lives on “the front lines,” down the hall from Gladys in an apartment building near the Greenwich Village art gallery she’s run for years. Hedges (“Manchester by the Sea,” “Boy Erased”) makes all the right moves as Daniel struggles not to blow his top when his grandmother asks the same questions over and over, or buzzes his doorbell late at night. Like Tom in “The Glass Menagerie,” Daniel steps in and out of scenes to comment on the proceedings, and his own shortcomings.
Just as exasperated and heartsick is his mother, an Upper West Side doctor, played as naturally as breathing by Joan Allen. David Cromer, better known these days as the director of “The Band’s Visit,” is sympathetic as her clumsy, well-meaning husband. Michael Cera, in his third Lonergan play in four years, completes the cast as an artist Gladys takes under her wing. Cera sheds his trademark tics and impresses as a naive New Englander who knows that details are everything.
Despite the interminable scene changes set against black-and-white video of the bygone New York of Gladys’ younger days, director Lila Neugebauer’s production boasts fine details of its own, including evocative sets and costumes true to the time, place and character. One small but essential detail comes when the four family members sit down for a meal. They face each other, not the audience, as in a real group portrait. And that’s what “The Waverly Gallery” is all about.