Theater Review: The Waverly Gallery features a stunning Elaine May, a ghost from the past

The Waverly Gallery

Written by Kenneth Lonergan

Directed by Lila Neugebauer

Starring Elaine May, Lucas Hedges, and Joan Allen

Golden Theater, Broadway, Manhattan

January 20, 2019

American writer Kenneth Lonergan (b. 1962) is best known for his masterful Oscar-winning screenplays for You can Count on Me (2000), Gangs of New York (2002) and Manchester by the Sea (2016), but he has also written nine plays, the best known of which are the award-nominated This is our Youth (1996), Lobby Hero (2001), and The Waverly Gallery (2000). This star-studded revival of the latter play brought out all the things I admired in Manchester by the Sea: a restrained, realistic ability to shine a lens on everyday family trauma, featuring characters that evoke people you have met in real life. The clear star of this production was the wonderful Elaine May, an 86-year-old uber-New Yorker best known first for her satiric improv comic turns in the 1950’s (!) paired with Mike Nichols, then later for screenplays for Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Primary Colors (1998). Her limited acting turns are linked to Yiddish theater, perhaps explaining why she never became an acting star. She was the child of Philadelphia Yiddish theater pros, and toured with the family in the 1930s, acting all the while. She was always know for her irrepressible wild side; even now her current boyfriend claims to have proposed marriage "about 172 times." So The Waverly Gallery, documenting the decline into senility of a spunky, funny Manhattan intellectual, is the perfect role for her, and is her last public acting role since Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks (2000). From what I saw on stage, we have all been missing a unique, funny, and profound talent.

The two-hour play is a series of scenes separated by formal curtain drops (a rarity these days) portraying episodes from the Manhattan Green family over a 3-4 year period. The episodic nature of the play was a clear structural choice of the playwright, since there were not many difficult scene changes. The Greens are an “intellectual, atheist Upper West Side family” that has to deal with their aging mother Gladys (Ms. May). She lives in Greenwich Village and maintains an un-visited art gallery whose pictures have not changed in years, admittedly as a hobby to keep her mind occupied. Each member of the family has their own style of interacting with the irrepressible, but increasingly confused Gladys. The outstanding Joan Allen (The Contender, The Ice Storm) plays Gladys’ daughter with fraught frustration mixed with love. Quirks that seem endearing to us, like Glady’s comic inability or unwillingness to use her hearing aid correctly, or her obsession about feeding the (unseen) family dog, become overwhelming sources of stress and frustration for her daughter. I remember these emotions well as my mother’s Parkinson’s Disease worsened, and I tried to be patient and sympathetic, yet was constantly faced with frustration as my mother’s affect and conversation did not match what I remembered of her from past years. Allen’s performance radiated honest emotion. This is 22 year-old Lucas Hedges’ (Manchester by the Sea, Lady Bird, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri) second play, after gathering critical acclaim in Yen (2017), and is his first on-Broadway effort.  His role here as Glady’s grandson who lives down the hall from her, and so who needs to deal with more of her eccentricities than any other person, confirms Hedges’ reputation as the go-to actor to play the non-exotic, average young guy. 

Directors like his unforced, calm projection, yet he is still able to rouse anger or angst as needed. This was a very demanding role, as the playwright asks him to be present in nearly all the group scenes and also narrate the course of Glady’s history with a series of monologues delivered in front of a closed curtain between scenes.  These interludes were perhaps Lonergan’s autobiographical memories of his own family. I could have used a bit more emotion and range from Mr. Hedges in these…at this stage of his development he seems to need others to play off of, and could not quite carry these solo aspects of the play. That said, his family interactions and touching interactions with Gladys were wonderful. A great sequence occurred as Gladys, now completely disoriented, repeatedly wakes him up late at night with a series of random requests. He tries to be helpful, but finally loses it and uncharacteristically barks at her, tortured by lack of sleep. I remember this kind of experience from a visit to my mom soon before she died. Hedges was a perfect contrast to Allen, playing a nice kid not quite assertive enough to stand up for himself, who has trouble figuring out where to draw boundaries. A nice bonus in the cast was Michael Cera (Arrested Development, Juno) as a clueless, quirky artist who briefly connects with Gladys as she agrees to let him display his paintings in her gallery (no one comes to the opening).

Elaine May was a revelation as Gladys. She balanced tragedy, comedy, and intellect beautifully. Somehow her performance never slipped into bathos, and her comic turns with the hearing aid, the dog, and her repeated schticks asking the same forgetful questions over and over of her family never seemed forced, repetitive or vaudevillian. I suspect her origins in the tragicomedy of Yiddish theater prepared for just this sort of complex role. Her comic timing was dead on, just what one reads about and sees on YouTube from her comic improv with (soon to be famous director) Mike Nichols in the 1950s (see one here, noting the Death of a Salesman reference at the end!). She was onstage for pretty much the whole play, requiring Shakespearian endurance at age 86, much as King Lear requires of its protagonists. In this play she created an unforgettable, sympathetic, and funny portrait of a smart, vivacious woman losing her mind, and finally her independence and dignity. Lonergan’s writing mixed with this outstanding performance produced probably the best portrait of the ravages of dementia that I have seen, possibly excepting the more epic and symbolic King Lear. I did not care for the frequent pauses and “scene changes” with Hedges’ narratives…I think that broke the dramatic flow too much and could have been handled better by both playwright and director. It was also an interesting choice to present the events of Glady’s final days as a narrative of the grandson, rather than showing it to us. Perhaps this was the playwright not wanting us to leave with a depressive view of this irrepressible character, but it made for a slightly anticlimactic ending for me. Sets and lighting were routine portrayals of Manhattan apartments and art galleries, and young (b. 1984) director Lila Neugebauer, whose work I enjoyed in recent off-Broadway productions of the family dramas Mary Page Marlowe and Peace for Mary Frances did her usual expert job in managing group interactions, now on the larger Broadway stage.  This was a compelling evening of theater, and I was honored to be able to see such a performance by Ms. May.