Review: Jessica Hendy’s Memoir, Walking With Bubbles, Is Not as Bubbly as It Sounds

Next to the jukebox musical there are few theatrical genres more formulaic than the solo memoir: A dream, a dream deferred, a hard-fought victory, and a lesson learned. It’s enough to make you wonder whether the form itself is a storytelling toxin. And then lovely surprises like Jessica Hendy’s Walking With Bubbles slip into the AMT Theater on 45^th Street and become a welcome exception to the rule.

Hendy is a musical theater actor who was building a career on Broadway in the early 2000s. She was one of Cats’ last Grizabellas (the first time around), she played Amneris in Elton John’s Aida, and understudied in the short-lived but impressively cast musical Amour (Christian Borle was a fellow understudy for the show’s 48 performances). You could say Walking With Bubbles explains the 14-year gap on her Broadway résumé that followed these early credits, but that would be a reductive framing of a memoir that refuses to make hay of anything resembling self-importance or vanity. Those 14 years were indeed filled with devastation and destruction, but the derailment of a Broadway career was the least of the wreckage.

We meet Hendy piled high with grocery bags and speaking vagaries about her “unconventional” life in New York City with her young son, Beckett, whom she has affectionately nicknamed Bubbles. It resonates with a preciousness portended by the show’s diary aesthetic of cursive handwriting and scribbles bordering set designer Mark Halpin’s azure centerpiece. She sings “Just Saturday,” the first of Brianna Kothari Barnes’s serviceable musical numbers that takes us through a bit of Hendy’s life as a single mother. We then come to find that a homeless man she offers a sandwich to in Central Park is in fact her ex-husband and the father of her child who is there for a scheduled playdate. Preciousness obliterated.

Walking With Bubbles is that rare story that keeps you riveted from start to finish, because chances are, you’ve never heard another one like it— even if, as Hendy notes in one of her more lecturing moments, struggles like this are more common than you think. She takes us from her life in New York City with her handsome writer husband Adam, to their unusual move to St. Thomas to help fight Adam’s “winter blues,” to their more conventional relocation with their new son to Hendy’s home base of Ohio where Adam’s depression devolves into harrowing episodes of mania and psychosis.

Hendy occasionally assumes Adam’s voice to convey a few of his more vicious statements, but largely sticks to her side of the street as the primary witness to and one of the biggest casualties of his illness. She demonstrates impressive restraint in both her writing and performance, never sinking into depths of self-pity nor shooting off into the stratosphere with the righteousness of a survivor. The climactic song “A Man I Used to Know” is by far the most theatrical, with dramatic lighting by Aiden Bezark and Richard Hess’s most embellished directorial choices. But even as the piece teeters on the edge of too much, Hendy grounds it all in honesty, warmth, and hard-earned perspective. And if any story warrants a bit of melodrama, it would be this one.

The ease with which a high-functioning creative can lose every shred of control over their nuclear lifestyle; the highwire act of co-parenting with someone suffering with mental illness; the permanent knots a family member’s sickness can tie deep inside the flesh of everyone in their orbit. Every move is life or death and none of them are telegraphed. Hendy ties up her open-ended story with a wholesome bow of acceptance of her life’s erratic trajectory — an unavoidable landing pad for most retrospectives. But I suppose we can afford her a moment of cliché in a story that is otherwise unrelentingly uncharted.