Review: Chloë Grace Moretz and River Lipe-Smith Play a Family in Transition in Caroline

Some kids just get it. Caroline (River Lipe-Smith) may be 9, but she’s a droll old soul. “I want you to decompress,” she tells her mother Maddie (Chloë Grace Moretz), passing the aux to let her mom play her own favorite music.

Caroline’s figured herself out too. At the start of Preston Max Allen’s new play Caroline, she’s just begun living publicly as a girl. In the first scene, she tells her mom the new name she’s chosen and buys a whole new wardrobe, adorable Lilo and Stitch sweater included. And though Maddie’s fully accepting of her transgender daughter, it’s not been a smooth transition: Caroline has a broken arm, punishment from Maddie’s now ex-boyfriend for wearing girls’ clothes, and the mother-daughter duo is on a days-long road trip to seek a new start with Maddie’s estranged parents.

Allen most prominently wrote and composed the cheerleader slasher musical We Are the Tigers, which showcased a catchy score despite its unconvincing tragicomic tone in a 2019 off-Broadway run. (Check out the track “Wallflower,” a delightfully barbed bop, on the cast album.) But if We Are the Tigers felt bold but unfinished six years ago, Caroline, directed with a light touch and characteristic clarity by David Cromer, is a more complete and carefully wrought work.

That care comes across most clearly in the tenderly wry scenes shared by Caroline and Maddie, whose relationship is terrifically specific. We meet them at a moment of great transition, but Allen eases us into the relationship, supplying rich details within their shared routines, like how they tease each other for their music choices (Caroline loves JoJo Siwa, Maddie has to stop herself from singing along with the grown-up lyrics of prog rock band Coheed and Cambria) or collaborate on making bracelets. Maddie’s the kind of mom who open-heartedly follows her daughter’s lead, piecing together how to answer her questions about cremation and meth even as she marvels how she’s let the conversation go down this road.

And because Allen introduces us to Maddie after she’s come to realize that “it’s not protecting her anymore to force her to be something she’s not,” mother and daughter can have more nuanced discussions about trans childhoods beyond the search for familial acceptance. Caroline doesn’t want anyone else to know she’s trans, and she doesn’t understand why her mother can’t just forge a birth certificate when she enrolls her in a new school. “You did illegal stuff,” Caroline reminds her mother, citing Maddie’s rap sheet. “Can’t you do an illegal good thing?”

Though Allen dedicates much of the play’s real estate to Maddie’s grappling with the long tail of her adolescent addictive and criminal behavior, those sequences never fully click into place alongside the sparkling scenes with Caroline. From the jump, Maddie’s mother Rhea (Amy Landecker) has a calculated austerity, a Stepfordian quality that Caroline, meeting Grandma for the first time, describes skeptically to her mother: “She was kind of, like, too nice. She seemed stressed about being nice.”

But Landecker’s performance is so enshelled and poised that her exchanges with Maddie grow increasingly unconvincing: there’s vast reservoirs of pain provoking the icy ultimatum she offers, but Landecker never lets the audience glimpse beneath the surface. Some people are frustratingly impermeable like that in real life, sure, but Rhea registers more as a sticking point for Maddie’s self-actualization than a full human being.

Still, any false notes in the knockdown, dragout quarrels between Maddie and Rhea are overshadowed by Moretz’s anchoring performance; it’s clear from the way her body language and vocal pitch switch depending on who she’s sharing a scene with that Maddie’s mother drives her crazy and her daughter helps her see straight.

Us too. Lipe-Smith is Caroline’s champion, a child actor who, like the brilliant kid they play, totally gets it. There’s a natural onstage ease here, an unpredictable quicksilver pacing of dialogue that suggests that Caroline, who’s faced bullying from kids and grownups in the past, remains the most caring, thoughtful person in any room she enters.

She’s also the canniest. “You should get me a Switch,” Caroline says, after Maddie tells her she won’t be able to receive permanent gender-affirming care until she turns 18. “Cause it’s a lot cheaper than surgery and it’ll distract me for years and years.”

Like many smart 9-year-olds, Caroline delivers a convincing argument. (“I’ll look at it as an investment into your career as a lawyer,” Maddie replies, acquiescing.) But so too does Allen in a play that’s ultimately making a powerful case for sticking with the people you love and who love you back, no matter the cost.