A profoundly sad reckoning with old age
NEW YORK — The 86-year-old Elaine May — who last appeared on Broadway 52 years ago in a show that ran for about 30 seconds — is gifted with a face formed in the shape of a smile. And anyone who remembers her iconic 1960s comedy routines with the late Mike Nichols knows that nobody, but nobody, listens to scene partners as intensely as May. Especially now, it is revealed. She absorbs the energy of other actors like she’s getting a blood transfusion, live on stage.
That grinning visage, and that palpable zest for life, combine to make May’s performance atop a starry new Broadway production of Kenneth Lonergan’s “The Waverly Gallery” (she’s working with those kids Michael Cera, Joan Allen, Lucas Hedges and David Cromer) both one of the most beautiful things you’ll ever see in a Broadway theater and one of the most profoundly sad.
The depressing part is a consequence of this closely observed play’s main theme: The progressive deterioration that comes from old age is no fun whatsoever, not for the senior and not for those family members on whom the oldster comes to depend. The power of this play, and specifically of May’s performance in director Lila Neugebauer’s production, is that we John and Jane theatergoers, assuming we’re still vaguely in our right minds, observe with dread that some version of the fate that befalls May’s Gladys Green is most likely also waiting for us. Half of us have been through it already with a loved one.
This, dear reader, is what old Aristotle meant when he talked about fear. Not the Halloween kind. Nope. The nagging-terror-inyour-gut kind.
As we all sat there in the aptly named Golden Theatre watching May’s Gladys go from the proud and independent owner of a small Greenwich Village gallery to a human who no longer recognizes her closest relatives, sending her family into a tailspin, I heard a spluttering voice somewhere in the row behind me.
“When I get like that, just shoot me,” it said.
Yeah, we all say that until we’re in something close to this situation. Then we usually find that even half an ongoing life is preferable to the abyss. That, of course, is the existential dilemma probed by Lonergan’s play, even though this particular writer (the Oscar-winning talent behind the movies “You Can Count on Me” and “Manchester by the Sea”) gets at philosophy through the application of everyday detail, in this case the comings and goings of a family whose members call themselves “secular Jews,” who oscillate between the Upper West Side and Greenwich Village and who are, like most of us, just trying to keep it all together.
“The Waverly Gallery” is a memory play, narrated by Gladys’ grandson, Daniel (Hedges), who is looking back on his grandmother’s demise. Neither Daniel nor Lonergan is an overtly sentimental sort, and Hedges is, of course, an immensely talented actor very simpatico with Lonergan’s writerly milieu. That said, his performance needs far more contrast between his narrative self and the version of his character struggling with his grandmother’s problems in real time. The piece is written as if the kid has learned something by experiencing the truth of mortality; he should not just always seem the same.
But that hardly torpedoes the night and nor do some scenic transitions that challenge the continuance of motion that the play needs.
For what Hedges does capture, as do the excellent Allen and Cromer, is the frustration family members feel when one of their own starts to decline. It’s often manifest in the play as emotionally wrought anger. As you watch, you want to tell all these characters to be a little kinder, a bit more generous and a whole lot more accepting. And here’s the cool part: You feel and think this, even though you would react in exactly that way yourself.
Lonergan, who wrote this piece around 2000 but set the action a decade earlier, wisely wrote in an outsider, an artist, played by Michael Cera, an actor with a particular talent for selfinvolved characters. At first, Cera’s Don just wants to exploit the vulnerability of Gladys to serve his own limited talent. But as things develop, you come to see that often the worst people to help those with dementia are the ones who love them the most. It’s one of the many cruel paradoxes of life that Lonergan and this cast of actors so fully and richly comprehend.
“The Waverly Gallery” plays at the Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St.; 212-239-6200 or www.thewaverlygallery onbroadway.com