‘Mary Jane’ review: Rachel McAdams is a strong mom in teary Broadway play

Rachel McAdams brings an promptly heartbreaking excellent to her performance in “Mary Jane”: Her steadfast optimism.

Author Amy Herzog’s impacting engage in, which opened Tuesday evening on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, is about a single mother whose two-year-outdated son Alex is chronically ill. 

The inadequate child, who the audience hardly ever thoroughly sees, spends most of the drama in a further home in bed, connected to displays and oxygen tanks that beep and hiss. At this position in his younger life, he cannot even management his head still.

His mom Mary Jane’s (McAdams) entire existence, with nary a break to take it easy, revolves all-around the boy’s care. Nurses, buddies and her superintendent quit by to speak and help her. And they aid, of course, but they never alter the challenging reality of the condition. Unlike Mary Jane, they have lives on the other aspect of the doorway.

One particular of the woman’s several unhappy-but-distinct-eyed observations is that she has grow to be accustomed to hardly ever sleeping in her very small New York apartment. “I employed to be somebody who treasured slumber,” she tells a nurse named Ruthie (Brenda Wehle). “Cherished it.”

Now, she can barely keep in mind the sensation.

The depth that McAdams presents Mary Jane, in the most purely natural way, is her positivity. In the movie “The Notebook,” in the Television set collection “Slings & Arrows” and even as the Plastic villain in the motion picture “Mean Ladies,” the actress has normally experienced a je ne sais quoi that goes over and above openness and vulnerability. She emanates a gentle from within.

And when it shines, not on a romance or teenager comedy, but a relatable mother’s helplessness, we’re shattered.

Compassionately explained to by Herzog, the enjoy is a tricky tale about a struggling solitary dad or mum of confined means muddling by means of one particular working day at a time. The show, I’ll acknowledge, usually takes much more than one particular day to completely sink in.

“Mary Jane” is not a automobile for showboating, or some explosive Mom vs. Society struggle, and rightly so. Herzog’s drama is relaxed, and produced up of slice-of-everyday living conversations acquainted to any person who’s been a caretaker or is familiar with 1. 

And at times, I located director Anne Kauffman’s output also silent for the Friedman, intimate however the location is. Even a simmering demonstrate demands to construct, and the center of “Mary Jane” leans static.

But the play achieves a devastating serenity in the finish when we depart the apartment and, in a scenically remarkable transition from designer Lael Jellinek, shift to the pediatric intense treatment device of a medical center, or PICU.

While Alex is in medical procedures, Mary Jane speaks to a comforting Buddhist chaplain named Tenkei, played by Wehle in a flip as stunningly transformational as the set. 

Tenkei asks Mary Jane to explain her son — I tear up just contemplating about it — and as the frightened mother talks about his stubbornness, his really like of animals and his smile, the stage’s brightness dims.

But McAdams’ mild does not.