The Waverly Gallery
Written by Kenneth Lonergan
Directed by Lila Neugebauer
Golden Theatre
October 27, 2018
Production website
💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

From its start, I did not think I was going to like this experience at all.  The beginning of the play was so such of an obvious, relentless set of jokes about having a mother that is VERY hard of hearing and goes about repeating herself time after time.  It was funny for a few minutes then it just became relentless.  I thought I was going to be in for entire afternoon of cheap jokes on aging.  But then the play changed.

As we experienced the mental decomposure of the matriarch, Elaine May, the jokes about poor hearing and poor memory went from tediously funny to quite biting and upsetting.  It hurt to watch this decline.  It really hurt when she had those brief glimpses that her memory and her world around her was slipping away from her quickly.  Those moments when she could remember how bad off she was – really hurt.

What surprised me so much about this play is how much I loved the writing and the family around this grandmother.  TheirTheir struggles and anxiety were just so believable and beautifully under-played.  The most haunting moments to me were in a short section in which the grandmother, who lived merely down the hall from her grandson, spent all night going over to his son’s door, ringing the bell, and asking/telling him all the craziest and sad, tearful thoughts of what her brain told her she was experiencing in the middle of the night. The narrator/grandson expressed his fear and frustrations so simply.  THAT is what tugged at my heart.  How do you, as a care-giving family live like this everyday (often sad and guilty – often angry and resentful)  The vivid, simple and unsentimental writing behind this play was truly uplighting.  I thought it was going to be a TV-illness-of-the-week event but it was so much more.  It was theatre – in the best way possible. 

I expected to see a tour-de-force for an aging actress that has been away from the stage for so long – and what I got as a surprise was the wonderful story of the family around her.  It did not leave me in tears.  There were several sitting near me that were not tears.  We had actually been down this road.  We knew the struggle with each step.