Amy Herzog’s “Mary Jane,” an excellent play now at Northlight Theatre about a single mother coping with a seriously ill child with cerebral palsy, is at its core a tribute to human resilience. Its titular character, a New Yorker, fights for her child with every fiber of her being, batting away her own needs to ensure that her very young child remains front and center as she navigates a sometimes cruel, but also often kind, maze of medical professionals.
I’ve seen this 90-minute play twice now — it premiered on Broadway a little under two years ago with a heart-stopping central performance from Rachel McAdams — and each time, it has set me off thinking about the inequity of life, what mothers routinely sacrifice, the necessity of nursing professionals, and also the communities that invariably spring up around shared experience, however difficult.
I should note that Herzog’s play, which is never maudlin, was born out of the writer’s own personal experience and it is thus clear-eyed and detailed in its observations of what caring for a very sick child is really like, day to day (we never see the child, although actually we do). “Mary Jane” is fundamentally an observational play without an agenda to push, but one senses a palpable feeling of longing, in that the medical establishment offers all kinds of help but never can answer the core existential question of “why,” however hard its dedicated professionals try.
Thus, you watch everyone scurrying around putting out metaphorical fires each and every day, but it’s on Mary Jane (played at Northlight by Lucy Carapetyan) to deliver true love to her kid, even if she is never entirely sure what he does and does not hear. Deliver she does, and that force of a mother’s love is what makes this play so moving.
Anyone in a comparable situation who walks into the theater will, I think, recognize this authenticity.
The best moments in director Georgette Verdin’s production, which is solid but not all it could be, occur when Carapetyan’s Mary Jane is interacting in the play’s many small scenes with caregivers and peers. These include Chaya (beautifully rendered by Dara Cameron), a fellow mom at the hospital; Dr. Toros (Elana Elyce), a nurse and Tenkei, the Buddhist hospital chaplain (Mary Beth Fisher). A last scene between Carapetyan and Fisher worked better than on Broadway, because one had more of a sense of searching in the everyday sense.
Elsewhere, though, Carapetyan was still finding her way to real emotional vulnerability and a clear sense of a character’s journey on opening night. I suspect she will get there; this character is a tough lift.
She’d be aided, I think, by a better flow from scene to scene. This simply wrought production has a physically limited if workable design from A Inn Doo, but not everything moves through space and time with enough emotional resonance. The biggest element still needing work is the very rushed and uncertain ending, as we sit there wondering not so much what Mary Jane’s future will be, for we know no miracle cure is on the way, but how she will live on thereafter, as love inevitably turns to loss.
Everyone here needs to take a lot more time and thought with that; the search for such answers is why most people choose to go to the theater.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Mary Jane” (3 stars)
When: Through Feb. 22
Where: Northlight Theatre at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie
Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes
Tickets: $46-$98 at 847-673-6300 and northlight.org