At the onset of Joshua Harmon’s wonderfully textured new play, “We Had a World,” Josh (played by Andrew Barth Feldman) is in his tighty-whities, scribbling in a notebook with a mechanical pencil at a desk on a corner of the stage. Just then his Nana — his dying Nana, to be specific — shows up onstage with a request. She has an idea for a play her grandson should write, a vicious “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”-style work about their family.
The play we’re seeing, in the intimate basement-esque New York City Center Stage II of the Manhattan Theater Club, is the playwright’s answer to his grandmother’s request. It’s not as vitriolic as Nana had asked for, but it is an all too relatable unpacking of the longstanding resentments and challenging dynamics of a family, particularly the ones between two of the central women in his life, his mother and his grandmother. If there’s viciousness here, it’s the complex, often vicious nature of the truth.
“We Had a World” is a memory play in which Josh breaks the fourth wall to guide the audience through notable incidents of his childhood and adult life relating to his mother and grandmother. Though the play opens with a phone call between Josh and his Nana at the end of her life, he jumps back chronologically to explain growing up with his grandmother, Renee (Joanna Gleason), an eccentric Manhattanite who takes him to the theater to see “Medea” and to exhibitions of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. She sneaks them in to catch movies for free and they make regular visits at the Met Museum. He credits his grandmother with helping him find his future vocation in the theater. But it’s not long before he discovers a secret about Renee: she’s an alcoholic, which is the source of years of animosity between her and Josh’s mother, Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), a tough lawyer with a chip on her shoulder.
“We Had a World” gradually works its way back to, and a little bit past, Renee’s decline and death, though not in a way that’s at all predictable or even linear. Josh remembers and cleverly revises the story as he goes, with Renee and Ellen appearing onstage not just as puppets in his story, manipulated by his telling, but also as autonomous characters who express their own opinions (often, hilariously, at his expense) and intrude to offer their perspectives on events.
Harmon’s script doesn’t feel as didactic or self-consciously stagy as many contemporary memory plays can be; it strikes an impressive balance of negotiating a story with many adverse emotional perspectives and moving parts while also maintaining a sense of honesty. I don’t just mean honesty in the sense of facts — though the verifiable biographical facts in Harmon’s story, and a bit of recorded material at the end, lend a gravitas to the characters and occurrences. I mean honesty in the sense of emotional transparency, the very real mix of love and resentment and insecurities and doubts that define all relationships, especially those within a family.
Though the script successfully condenses several eras of Harmon’s life and captures the quirks and particularities of his mother’s and grandmother’s personalities, the performances really give the material its extra emotional heft. It takes less than 15 minutes to fall in love with Gleason as Renee, the native New Yorker with a dark sense of humor, a love for ornate French furniture and an inexplicable pseudo-British accent. And Serralles’s Ellen feels most real when she is at her most defensive and sardonic, though her shifts into the character’s more openly vulnerable moments still show some seams.
Feldman, who played the title role onstage in “Dear Evan Hansen” and starred opposite Jennifer Lawrence in the 2023 film “No Hard Feelings,” is fantastic throughout as Josh — awkward and earnest, often uncomfortable amid the drama, yet always attempting to view his loved ones with openness and fairness. The small thrust stage works well for Feldman, who effortlessly connects with the audience as he transitions from playing the innocent, wide-eyed young child tagging along with his offbeat Nana to the more self-assured, though still lost, writer of several acclaimed plays.
Trip Cullman’s understated direction and John Lee Beatty’s similarly bare-bones set design (a desk, a record player, two tattered love seats, some metal chairs) allow for the focus to remain on the actors and the material, while Ben Stanton’s lighting provides a subtle way to signal sudden switches in the story’s setting.
Harmon’s script so authentically re-creates his relationships and experiences that the play’s largest fault is how it leaves you wanting more from the tiny narrative wrinkles and secondary characters that are only partially explored.
The delightful surprise of “We Had a World” is not just its personal nostalgia but a more universal one: Josh isn’t just mourning certain eras of his relationships or his childhood with his grandmother; he’s mourning the New York City of his youth, a time before he felt the urgency of threats to the environment or to democracy. So “We Had a World” isn’t exactly the contentious drama Nana requested, but it’s something much more compassionate and real.
We Had a World
Through April 27 at New York City Center, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
