A Mother's Story

In a Broadway revival of Amy Herzog's play Mary Jane, Rachel McAdams finds uncommon grace in an account of parental struggle and pain.

- Chloe Schama

I didn’t know it was going to be quite so…wet,” says the playwright Amy Herzog as she arrives at a Brooklyn café, shaking a slushy mix of rain and snow out of her hat. Herzog, 45, has delicate but pointed features and a kind of immediate intensity and focus that she’ll need to draw upon in the weeks ahead. This is the month her adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People opens, directed by her husband, Sam Gold, and starring her old college friend Jeremy Strong. And at nearly the same time, in a quick shift in tone and material, rehearsals begin on a Broadway revival of her play Mary Jane, with Rachel McAdams in the titular role.

I was pregnant when I first saw Mary Jane in 2017, at the New York Theater Workshop (NYTW), starring Carrie Coon, and was taken aback by the intensity of my emotions. How embarrassing, I thought, how hormonal. But when I read the play again this year (decidedly not pregnant), I was shaken all over again. Mary Jane tells the story of a mother confined in the first act to her Queens apartment and in the second to the hospital where her unwell toddler, Alex, is being treated for cerebral palsy among several other serious conditions, though he remains offstage. “It’s extremely simple,” Herzog says when I ask her why. “You just never put a twoand-a-half-year-old child onstage.”