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.”
That distance also has the effect of making the play more about the mother than the child, specifically about Mary Jane’s grace and resilience, and the community she builds around her—home health aides, other mothers at the hospital, doctors, visiting chaplains, all bolstered by Mary Jane’s optimism and fundamental good cheer. Hers is an immensely difficult life: She lives in a state of suspended animation, long-term plans on hold, but also one of perpetual motion, never able to let her vigilance waver. The circle around Mary Jane, all women from their 20s to their 60s, from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, allows Herzog to probe varied manifestations of caregiving and duty. “I’m wary of having written a play about a Madonna who’s defining femininity as motherhood,” Herzog says. She was reading the memoir of social activist turned nun Dorothy Day before she wrote Mary Jane, she tells me, and she wanted to evoke, as she puts it, “how women live so many lives in their one life.”
A few days later, I meet the woman who will embody this rich role, Rachel McAdams. I had been asked to arrange the meeting at a quite specific Midtown restaurant—it turns out I have caught the actor just before an apartment viewing around the corner. She is in New York with her partner, screenwriter Jamie Linden, scoping out housing that she might move into a few weeks later, when she transplants her two small children, ages three and six, from where they live now (outside a large southern city that the very private McAdams does not want to name). She’s less concerned about schools at the moment—“going from country living to New York living will be an education,” she says—than the choice of neighborhood. The crosstown traffic and throngs of pedestrians seem a lot for the 45-year-old, who has built a quiet life out of the spotlight, in a house across the street from her sister, her kids attending a local Montessori school and running over to play with their cousins whenever they feel like it. But now the family is ready for an adventure. “Every time I meet a stranger on this street, I’m like, ‘Where do you think I should live?’” she says, laughing.
McAdams has a warm and inviting demeanor, her beauty somehow surreptitious, more and more striking as you spend time with her. She has none of the hard edges and gum-cracking ferocity of Regina George in 2004’s Mean Girls—McAdams’s breakout role—nor the gauzy sentimental romanticism of Allie Hamilton in The Notebook (also 2004). Instead, McAdams gives off softness and earned wisdom, akin to what she brought to her role in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the lauded Judy Blume film adaptation from last spring. “The incredible thing about Rachel,” says its director, Kelly Fremon Craig, “is how much she can transform. She has played so many different roles, but the common thread, the DNA of all of them, is that you feel her heart. It comes up from the soles of her feet.”
Mary Jane marks a departure for McAdams—her first play in 25 years. “I started in theater as a kid. I did theater camp with my sister, and then I became a counselor and sort of grew up with this theater company,” she tells me. This was in the Canadian town of London, halfway between Toronto and Detroit, where her father was a mover, her mother a nurse. She acted through high school and attended the conservancy program at York University in Toronto, studying drama. Theater is a deep-seated love, and she’s been looking for a way to return to it. “I would read something every so often and think, Oh, I’m not quite right for this, or this isn’t a great time to do this. But this play grabbed me. It just got its hooks in me.”
Herzog and Anne Kauffman, who directed Mary Jane’s first outing at the Yale Repertory Theatre, then the NYTW version, and will be bringing it to Broadway, scheduled a Zoom call with McAdams once she’d read the script. The critical thing, they knew, would be finding someone who could encapsulate the main character’s optimism amid hardship. “It’s a very specific disposition—and that’s the trap: to try to find a naturally positive dramatic actor who can illuminate that sensibility,” says Kauffman. “There were some actors who read it and loved it, but they felt they couldn’t deal with the darkness of it, as mothers.” A weekend with McAdams at her home followed, where the New Yorkers ate food cooked by McAdams and Linden and drove around the neighborhood in the family golf carts. “When we were hanging out, I felt like she was a mother and a sister and a friend who just happens to act,” says Kauffman.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1450523735/1713786224/articles/RerVaH26y1713865829086/0738688386.jpg]
McAdams quickly began preparing, working with a movement coach and a voice coach so that she would be able to deliver Herzog’s long lines without sounding out of breath. (“My kids are wondering, ‘What’s Mommy doing in the basement blowing through those funny straws?’”) But she has also been making real-world connections with other parents to gain insight into what someone in Mary Jane’s position might go through. That exposure opened her up to the lived reality of parents caring for sick children. “You are suddenly part of a completely different world,” she says. That world can be very full, but “it can also be very cut off.”
Weeks before I meet Herzog, I s...
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.”
That distance also has the effect of making the play more about the mother than the child, specifically about Mary Jane’s grace and resilience, and the community she builds around her—home health aides, other mothers at the hospital, doctors, visiting chaplains, all bolstered by Mary Jane’s optimism and fundamental good cheer. Hers is an immensely difficult life: She lives in a state of suspended animation, long-term plans on hold, but also one of perpetual motion, never able to let her vigilance waver. The circle around Mary Jane, all women from their 20s to their 60s, from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, allows Herzog to probe varied manifestations of caregiving and duty. “I’m wary of having written a play about a Madonna who’s defining femininity as motherhood,” Herzog says. She was reading the memoir of social activist turned nun Dorothy Day before she wrote Mary Jane, she tells me, and she wanted to evoke, as she puts it, “how women live so many lives in their one life.”
A few days later, I meet the woman who will embody this rich role, Rachel McAdams. I had been asked to arrange the meeting at a quite specific Midtown restaurant—it turns out I have caught the actor just before an apartment viewing around the corner. She is in New York with her partner, screenwriter Jamie Linden, scoping out housing that she might move into a few weeks later, when she transplants her two small children, ages three and six, from where they live now (outside a large southern city that the very private McAdams does not want to name). She’s less concerned about schools at the moment—“going from country living to New York living will be an education,” she says—than the choice of neighborhood. The crosstown traffic and throngs of pedestrians seem a lot for the 45-year-old, who has built a quiet life out of the spotlight, in a house across the street from her sister, her kids attending a local Montessori school and running over to play with their cousins whenever they feel like it. But now the family is ready for an adventure. “Every time I meet a stranger on this street, I’m like, ‘Where do you think I should live?’” she says, laughing.
McAdams has a warm and inviting demeanor, her beauty somehow surreptitious, more and more striking as you spend time with her. She has none of the hard edges and gum-cracking ferocity of Regina George in 2004’s Mean Girls—McAdams’s breakout role—nor the gauzy sentimental romanticism of Allie Hamilton in The Notebook (also 2004). Instead, McAdams gives off softness and earned wisdom, akin to what she brought to her role in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the lauded Judy Blume film adaptation from last spring. “The incredible thing about Rachel,” says its director, Kelly Fremon Craig, “is how much she can transform. She has played so many different roles, but the common thread, the DNA of all of them, is that you feel her heart. It comes up from the soles of her feet.”
Mary Jane marks a departure for McAdams—her first play in 25 years. “I started in theater as a kid. I did theater camp with my sister, and then I became a counselor and sort of grew up with this theater company,” she tells me. This was in the Canadian town of London, halfway between Toronto and Detroit, where her father was a mover, her mother a nurse. She acted through high school and attended the conservancy program at York University in Toronto, studying drama. Theater is a deep-seated love, and she’s been looking for a way to return to it. “I would read something every so often and think, Oh, I’m not quite right for this, or this isn’t a great time to do this. But this play grabbed me. It just got its hooks in me.”
Herzog and Anne Kauffman, who directed Mary Jane’s first outing at the Yale Repertory Theatre, then the NYTW version, and will be bringing it to Broadway, scheduled a Zoom call with McAdams once she’d read the script. The critical thing, they knew, would be finding someone who could encapsulate the main character’s optimism amid hardship. “It’s a very specific disposition—and that’s the trap: to try to find a naturally positive dramatic actor who can illuminate that sensibility,” says Kauffman. “There were some actors who read it and loved it, but they felt they couldn’t deal with the darkness of it, as mothers.” A weekend with McAdams at her home followed, where the New Yorkers ate food cooked by McAdams and Linden and drove around the neighborhood in the family golf carts. “When we were hanging out, I felt like she was a mother and a sister and a friend who just happens to act,” says Kauffman.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1450523735/1713786224/articles/RerVaH26y1713865829086/0738688386.jpg]
McAdams quickly began preparing, working with a movement coach and a voice coach so that she would be able to deliver Herzog’s long lines without sounding out of breath. (“My kids are wondering, ‘What’s Mommy doing in the basement blowing through those funny straws?’”) But she has also been making real-world connections with other parents to gain insight into what someone in Mary Jane’s position might go through. That exposure opened her up to the lived reality of parents caring for sick children. “You are suddenly part of a completely different world,” she says. That world can be very full, but “it can also be very cut off.”
Weeks before I meet Herzog, I s...
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Vogue (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 2024