Review: Joanna Gleason as a Nana With a Secret in Joshua Harmon's We Had a World

You think you know a person…

Going into a play by Joshua Harmon—from Significant Other to Admissions to Prayer for the French Republic—one expects an epic centerpiece rant, a bravura monologue where a character just talks and talks and talks for pages about politics or relationships or both without taking a breath to the amazement of the audience and the bewilderment of their onstage companion.

There is no such diatribe in We Had a World, Harmon’s latest play for Manhattan Theatre Club, which explores how thinking you know someone inside and out often leads to the realization that you couldn’t possibly understand every single facet of their identity. That’s fine when it’s an impersonal relationship like playwright and audience member, but when it’s you and your grandma, the effect could reshape your whole life.

Such is the case in this delicate and extremely moving three-hander, which is written with an uncommon level of sympathy and is incomparably performed by Andrew Barth Feldman, Joanna Gleason, and Jeanine Serralles. Perhaps nakedly autobiographical, it explores the three-way relationship between Joshua (Feldman), an aspiring playwright, Renee (Gleason), the Auntie Mame-esque grandmother with a secret, and Ellen (Serralles), Joshua’s burdened mother, whom Renee spent her whole life abusing.

As the play begins, 94-year-old Renee is dying of pancreatic cancer. “I have always wanted to write about our family,” the adult Joshua tells her as she makes him promise one thing—”Make it as bitter and vitriolic as possible.” And so, Joshua looks back on the life-shaping experiences he shared with Renee over the course of his youth: going to the Met and asking inane questions about the light fixtures, seeing Dances With Wolves at the cinema, watching Diana Rigg in Medea on Broadway, attending a Mapplethorpe exhibit (“I was only nine,” he recalls. “I didn’t yet grasp the concept of fisting”).

When Joshua is a teenager, he uncovers the secret about Renee that has shaped Ellen’s entire life (no spoilers here). In doing so, Harmon challenges his eponymous protagonist to confront his feelings for the two people he loves most—whom he thought he knew completely—only to realize that one can never truly understand what’s happening in someone else’s mind. Throughout, you get the sense that Harmon is compelling himself to interrogate the depths of human nature, grappling with the question: “How can someone you’ve known forever be a total stranger?”

In Feldman, Harmon has a compassionate, open-faced alter ego who allows his humor to shine even as his heart is broken. Serralles expertly conveys the many dimensions of Ellen, with a tough-as-nails exterior that’s just as thin as glass (there are so many decades of wounds in her smile). And Gleason, in a stringy gray fright wig, is irreplaceable, simultaneously the nana of our dreams and nightmares. She lands punchline after punchline, bringing down the house every single time while wielding her words like a scalpel that inflicts pain with precision. Trip Cullman directs them with specificity as exacting as Kaye Voyce’s costumes but he stays out of their way—a great choice when you have three pros operating at the top of their game.

Much as Renee requested it be “Virginia Woolf, Part II,” Harmon doesn’t let We Had a World consist solely of backbiting and resentment. His deep well of love and protection for Ellen, and his extraordinary compassion for Renee shine throughout. At times, you get the sense that he’s taking himself to task when he really shouldn’t be—the trauma of the past is not his fault. In that sense, We Had a World is one of the more relatable plays of the season, a story of family in all its wonderful, terrible splendor, and one that will resonate deeply with anyone who’s ever had to figure out how to love someone despite the knowledge of their past.