Theater review: A mother’s love takes on profound disability
“Mary Jane” at Bridge Street Theatre is a compelling, timely look at the strain of long-term care for a child destined for early death
By Steve Barnes, Senior Writer
May 27, 2025
CATSKILL — The curtain speech prior to the opening night of Bridge Street Theatre’s regional-premiere production of the heart-rending play “Mary Jane” contained a warning: You’re probably not going to enjoy yourself.
You’ll feel a lot of things — impressed, moved, disturbed, saddened and emotionally walloped — that rarely accompany conventional enjoyment, except in the sense of intellectually enjoying a well-made production of an anguishing play.
A character study of a woman whose identity is subsumed by caring for a toddler born with profound birth defects, “Mary Jane” was written by Amy Herzog, inspired in part by her experience raising a daughter with a multisymptom neuromuscular disease, who died at age 11. Best known locally for productions of her 2011 intergenerational dramatic comedy “4000 Miles,” Herzog has been seen on Broadway with near-simultaneous productions last spring of “Mary Jane” and her adaptation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.” (Another Ibsen update by Herzog, of “A Doll’s House,” ran off-Broadway in 2023.)
As in “4000 Miles,” Herzog’s best work in “Mary Jane” is in the everyday-ness of her dialogue: It’s buzzy, colloquial — the way real people talk, not showy in the manner of David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino. Whether the title character, played superlatively by Amy Crossman, is idly chatting with her building superintendent in circa-2017 New York City or helping a new mother of a similarly disabled child navigate health care and social services, the dialogue skips along, discreetly seeding important information and sometimes turning corners you didn’t know were there.
Mary Jane has adapted to the weightiness of her care burden by becoming supremely adept; she holds things together because she must, because handling daily tasks and her son’s medical needs both chronic and acute gives her at least a small sense of control of a situation that, we understand early on, seems sure to end tragically — and sooner than she’s willing to acknowledge.
She also apologizes and excuses endlessly and needlessly, explaining that she understands why her husband left when faced with the child’s condition, that she’s sorry for creating problems for her super, that her boss isn’t to be blamed for being frustrated by her work absences. She absorbs all available fault and guilt, and her love for little Alex — forever plugged in and monitored, unable to sit up or speak, subject to breathing disruptions and seizures — is so encompassing that it crowds out an independent identity for Mary Jane. (Everyone in the hospital calls her “Mom” instead of using her name.)
Bridge Street Theatre has been trying to get the rights to present “Mary Jane” for four years, finally securing them after the Broadway production closed last June. The delay means the production opened in Catskill the weekend after the House of Representatives passed a bill that imperils Medicaid funding for, among others, the estimated 53 million Americans who use its federal aid for home and community-based care for loved ones.
Many of those are aging relatives, who differ from children like Alex in a key way: They’ve lived their lives, while some of the kids never will, leaving discussions limited to speculative hypotheticals of the years that will never be. Bridge Street’s promotional material doesn’t make such a connection; nor does Herzog’s play, under the direction of Bridge Street first-timer Zoya Kachadurian, leading an all-female cast of five. (Four play double roles.)
But it’s there, hauntingly resonant, as Mary Jane tries not to acknowledge ultimate outcomes, instead redirecting focus on things like why a music therapist has yet to visit Alex and whether repeated X-rays during pneumonia treatment are exposing Alex to dangerous radiation.
The doctor explains that any possible ill effects of such radiation would not appear for 20 or 30 years, adding, “Let’s just say that’s a very long time.”
Mary Jane pauses as she absorbs the implication. And then she pivots, asking that the X-ray technician not come so early in the morning, among the few times she and Alex can both sleep. She’s back to solving the problems within her control, asserting what little is left of herself.