The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘Mary Jane’ explores joy & endurance
Amy Herzog play at Yale Rep through May 20
To hear Emily Donohoe and Anne Kaufman talk, playwright Amy Herzog has cooked up quite a different dish that Yale Repertory started serving its hungry theatergoers Friday night.
The play, “Mary Jane,” which runs through May 20 at the Rep, doesn’t exactly conform to Aristotle’s traditional rules of storytelling.
“I think that the form of this play is different from most plays that have a protagonist with an objective and tries to gain something, or solve something,” said Donohoe, who plays the titular protagonist in Herzog’s play. “What the play is about, from scene to scene, isn’t some metaobjective as much as it’s about the joy she finds in the present.
“I feel like Amy is doing something totally new,” she said.
“Mary Jane,” which was commissioned by Yale Rep with Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre providing support, concerns a mother who cares for her chronically ill young son. Mary Jane, with the support of her female friends — played by Kathleen Chalfant, Vella Lovell, Miriam Silverman and Shona Tucker — experiences her share of setbacks with stretches of relentless pain and, as Donohoe said, finds happiness where others might likely despair.
“I feel that with this play,” said Kauffman, who directed Herzog’s “Belleville” at Yale Rep in late 2011, “Amy is sort of exploring a kind of endurance, and how much we can endure. What’s so incredible about the play, and what Amy is doing, is showing how life is an endurance project.”
Donohoe, who is new to New Haven and had not previously performed in a Herzog play, says Mary Jane craves understanding. “There’s a lot of spiritual kind of questioning that comes up in the play over and over again,” she said. “She’s looking for something.
“And I think that, unlike any character I’ve ever played, she wants her son to be healthy, to be happy; she certainly doesn’t want him to suffer,” Donohoe said. “She is very much in the moment.”
This, Donohoe said, is one of the key elements that drew her to the material.
“The first time I read it, it knocked my socks off,” she said. “I love the character of Mary Jane. Considering what’s going on in the play, her relentless sense of joy — true joy — and how much she loves her child and how close she is with him; it really affected me.
“As someone who’s the mother of a relatively small child, one of the things that really rang true was that it’s largely women who you meet in these circles of caring for children of this age,” said Donohoe, who, with her actor-husband Michael O’Keefe, have a 4-yearold son. “... Of course there are men there, but most of the relationships in my experience are with women. I think it’s great to take this story that we think we know and really step inside each of these relationships, scene by scene.”
Kauffman, who, like Herzog, earned her MFA from Yale School of Drama, said Herzog is a “deceptive writer.” “She is sneaky in that people can read her plays and think they are straightforward and naturalistic when, in fact, she’s doing something quite subtle and insidious,” said Kauffman, praising the playwright as “the bees’ knees.”
“I find that what she does so beautifully is examine the everyday world in such a way that highlights its strangeness,” she said.
The play thus says that we should not take life for granted. Donohoe said her reaction to the play and her appreciation
FROM PAGE 1 for it would certainly be different were she not a mother. “Mary Jane,” however, is not exclusively for procreators.
“The play is about something, in a way, so much bigger than motherhood,” she said. “I think it’s about love: how we cope and deal with suffering.”
Said Kauffman: “I’m not a mother. I’m not a parent. What I find so extraordinary is that she’s a mother, yeah, but she’s taking care of another human being. I took care of my mother when she was dying. There is this incredible pain next to improbable joy one feels when taking care of another human being. That is universal.”
Both Donohoe and Kauffman have worked on new plays with some of today’s hottest playwrights. Donohoe cites Herzog’s attention to detail among her most distinguishable traits.
“I love the characters she writes, her dialogue,” she said. “I’m often blindsided by something, in the best way. There will be some kind of mystery to it, you know? Kind of like, ‘What are we watching?’ Then something would happen that I didn’t see coming and I’m just blown back by it. There’s no better experience than seeing a play that does that.”
Kauffman said that Herzog is “a very delicate presence who really respects the rehearsal process and who understands the play one way. The actors, the designers and I understand it slightly differently, and she’s actually interested in that. It’s one of the truest collaborations I’ve experienced. She’s interested in our views as she her own.
“Amy is an extraordinary thinker,” Kauffman said. “An extraordinary human being.”