The Waverly Gallery

[edjames]

http://www.theatregold.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/the-waverly-gallery-broadway-theatregold.jpg

 

The Waverly Gallery is a play by Kenneth Lonergan. It is considered a “memory play”. The show, first produced Off-Broadway in 2000, follows a grandson watching his grandmother slowly die from Alzheimer’s disease. The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2001.

 

Dramatic. Compelling and extremely well-acted!

 

Much like last year's tour de force performance by Glenda Jackson, venerable Elaine May takes the stage by force in her role as Gladys. Real life Elaine and Gladys are the same age, 86. Gladys owns a small art gallery in Greenwich Village but in Act 1, she is showing signs of Alzheimers. Her family checks on her frequently, but she is becoming a handful, plagued with bouts of forgetfulness and repetitive questions/stories.

 

Gladys' grandson (Lucas Hedges) lives next door to her, and her daughter/son-in-law live on the upper West side. Her grandson bears the brunt of grandma's disease and he tries to keep and eye on her. A struggling artist (Michael Cera) arrives and Gladys provides him with the gallery space he needs to display his work, for a brief period of time, he provides a much needed distraction for Gladys.

 

Gladys finally descends into the awfulness and cruelty of Alzheimers, and the family must make some hard decisions for her care and well being.

 

For those who have gone through this disease with loved ones, it hits home, and rings true.

 

Tony to Elaine for her magnificent performance!!! Bravo!!! Great supporting cast.

[edjames]

Good reviews!

 

NYTIMES SAYS:

 

Review: Elaine May Might Break Your Heart in ‘Waverly Gallery’

 

By Ben Brantley

From the moment Gladys Green opens her mouth — which is the moment that the curtain rises on Kenneth Lonergan’s wonderful play “The Waverly Gallery” at the Golden Theater — it’s clear that for this garrulous woman, idle conversation isn’t a time killer. It is a lifeline.

 

An octogenarian New Yorker, former lawyer and perpetual hostess for whom schmoozing and kibitzing have always been as essential as breathing, Gladys operates on the principle that if she can just continue to talk, she can surely power through the thickening fog of her old age. That she has clearly already lost this battle makes her no less valiant.

 

That it’s Elaine May who is giving life to Gladys’s war against time lends an extra power and poignancy to “The Waverly Gallery,” which opened on Thursday night under Lila Neugebauer’s fine-tuned direction. Long fabled as a director, script doctor and dramatist, Ms. May first became famous as a master of improvisational comedy, instantly inventing fully detailed, piquantly neurotic characters who always leaned slightly off-kilter.

 

Her

for such quick-sketch portraiture. And their appearance on Broadway together in the early 1960s is recalled by those who saw it as if they had been divine visitations, blazing and all too brief.

 

One can imagine Gladys Green having attended “An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May,” and saving the program. She might even have perceived a glimmer of her own vivacious self in that couple’s determined loquacity.

 

In any case, the Gladys we meet in “The Waverly Gallery” — the title comes from the small rented Greenwich Village space where she shows art of dubious distinction — is conducting what might be called extreme improvisation. She’s bluffing, fabricating, groping for a direction in what must often seem like a void.

 

 

Trying to convince her family and herself that she’s still capable of navigating the flux of urban life, Gladys always fills in the verbal gaps that confront her, even with words that may not be the right ones. At 86, Ms. May — in her first Broadway appearance in more than 50 years — turns out to be just the star to nail the rhythms, the comedy and the pathos of a woman who’s talking as fast as she can to keep her place in an increasingly unfamiliar world.

 

First staged Off Broadway in 2000, with a very fine Eileen Heckart as Gladys, “The Waverly Gallery” was inspired by the final years of Mr. Lonergan’s own grandmother. It is a memory play in both its structure and its subject.

 

Rendered through the retrospective gaze of Gladys’s grandson — Daniel (a first-rate Lucas Hedges), who lives down the hall from Gladys — it recalls Tennessee Williams’s guilt-drenched “The Glass Menagerie.” But Mr. Lonergan’s lens on the past is sharper and harsher.

 

He is trying to capture, with almost clinical precision, the patterns of speech of a willful woman sliding into senility. At the same time, he is assessing the impact of such disjointedness on the helpless members of her family, who without even being aware of it sometimes find themselves adopting Gladys’s fragmented worldview.

 

In other words, “The Waverly Gallery” is very much a group portrait, in which everyday life is distorted to the point of surrealism by the addled soul at its center. And Ms. Neugebauer has assembled a dream cast to embody the collective madness that seems to descend on those closest to Gladys.

 

 

They include Gladys’s daughter (and Daniel’s mother), Ellen (Joan Allen, who wrenchingly combines filial devotion and resentment); her psychoanalyst husband Howard (an impeccably tactless David Cromer); and Don (Michael Cera, doing confident but clueless), a young painter from Massachusetts who stumbles into Gladys’s gallery one day and winds up showing — and living — there.

 

Part of the painful pleasure of “The Waverly Gallery” is listening to how these characters listen to Gladys, and how, in responding to her, they come to question the reliability of their own words. As a screenwriter (“You Can Count on Me,” “Manchester by the Sea”) and dramatist (“This Is Our Youth,” “Lobby Hero”), Mr. Lonergan has always portrayed human communication as an imperfect compromise.

 

“The Waverly Gallery” is his most literal presentation of that inadequacy. Gladys crams all silences with increasingly disconnected bits of autobiography and with peppy questions and catchphrases that she has probably used for decades. (“Got any coffee lying around?”)

 

She’s so convinced that Daniel writes for a newspaper (he’s a speechwriter) that he no longer bothers to correct her. By the end, the identities of those around her blur with those of people long dead. But that doesn’t stop Gladys talking, even in her sleep.

 

Daniel’s crystalline monologues of recollection aside, “The Waverly Gallery” often has the ostensible waywardness of recorded conversations. But no word is randomly chosen here, starting with Gladys’s opening line: “I never knew anything was the matter.”

 

She’s talking about the end of Helen’s first marriage, to Daniel’s father, but it comes to suggest a more willful oblivion. And when she whimsically describes the loneliness of Ellen’s dog, who just wants a little attention, you know exactly what Gladys really means.

 

Always stylishly dressed (Ann Roth did the costumes), Ms. May’s Gladys retains her coercive hostess’s charm. She ends most of her sentences with a practiced winning smile that now seems to be searching anxiously for affirmation.

 

All the cast members function beautifully as quotidian detectives, looking for the patterns in the pieces. In a shattering moment, a teary Daniel hugs his mother tight, and you know that he’s wondering if his relationship with Ellen might one day mirror that of Ellen’s with Gladys.

 

As near perfect as the performances are, the physical production occasionally lets them down. David Zinn’s urban set, with its vistas of the city beyond, weighs heavily on the playing area. And the intervals between scenes — which feature vintage street photography projections (by Tal Yarden) — feel ponderously long.

 

Such objections dissolve as soon as Gladys and her clan reassemble into groupings that convey both claustrophobic intimacy and tragic, unbridgeable distance.

 

Mr. Cera’s homey painter may be no Picasso. But in describing his domestic portraits and local landscapes, he sums up the essence of the play. “I tried to get the details right,” he says, “because that’s what you remember when you think about something, so I tried like hell to get them the way they are.”

 

So did Mr. Lonergan. That’s what makes “The Waverly Gallery” a work of such hard, compassionate clarity.

[edjames]

NYPOST says:

 

Elaine May leads a strong ensemble in heart-wrenching ‘Waverly Gallery’

By Joe Dziemianowicz

 

October 25, 2018 | 10:52pm

 

 

THEATER REVIEW

THE WAVERLY GALLERY

Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes, one intermission. 252 W. 45th St.; 212-239-6200.

 

Old age isn’t for sissies. And as painful as that reality is, Kenneth Lonergan faces it head-on in “The Waverly Gallery,” his affecting, funny-sad memory play about the wrenching and rapid decline of his feisty grandmother.

 

Granted, the play that opened Thursday night on Broadway sounds like a total Debbie Downer, or a disease-of-the-week flick you’ve already seen. It isn’t. You haven’t.

 

Even in this early work — which played off-Broadway 18 years ago, long before Lonergan won an Oscar for “Manchester by the Sea” — his keen ear for dialogue is evident, as is his knack for coaxing humor, warmth and humanity from dark circumstances.

 

In a brilliant stroke, Elaine May plays Gladys, a liberal lawyer and mover and shaker in her prime, now long past. It’s May’s first Broadway appearance in 50 years, since she and Mike Nichols first established themselves as an iconic comic duo. Now 86, she’s a petite and soft-spoken presence, whose wry, endearing performance recalls Ruth Gordon. It’s hard watching Gladys’ vigor and faculties fade within two years, beginning in 1989, when her hair turns from auburn to white, since dyeing it is the least of her concerns.

 

Although May anchors the show, it feels more like an ensemble piece — even the curtain call is designed that way; there’s no solo bow. That works, as Gladys loses her memory and, slowly, herself.

 

Her 20-something grandson, Daniel (Lucas Hedges), the playwright’s alter ego, bears the brunt of it. He lives on “the front lines,” down the hall from Gladys in an apartment building near the Greenwich Village art gallery she’s run for years. Hedges (“Manchester by the Sea,” “Boy Erased”) makes all the right moves as Daniel struggles not to blow his top when his grandmother asks the same questions over and over, or buzzes his doorbell late at night. Like Tom in “The Glass Menagerie,” Daniel steps in and out of scenes to comment on the proceedings, and his own shortcomings.

 

Just as exasperated and heartsick is his mother, an Upper West Side doctor, played as naturally as breathing by Joan Allen. David Cromer, better known these days as the director of “The Band’s Visit,” is sympathetic as her clumsy, well-meaning husband. Michael Cera, in his third Lonergan play in four years, completes the cast as an artist Gladys takes under her wing. Cera sheds his trademark tics and impresses as a naive New Englander who knows that details are everything.

 

Despite the interminable scene changes set against black-and-white video of the bygone New York of Gladys’ younger days, director Lila Neugebauer’s production boasts fine details of its own, including evocative sets and costumes true to the time, place and character. One small but essential detail comes when the four family members sit down for a meal. They face each other, not the audience, in what recalls a real group portrait. And that’s what “The Waverly Gallery” is all about.

[foxy]

I saw The Waverly Gallery today and certainly related to the plot. Many people today have a relative slipping into Alzheimer’s and it’s a tragic thing to watch and be a part of. But what I enjoyed about today’s performance was all the funny stuff. I guess that’s what’s called seriocomic. Wonderful to see Elaine May still performing at 86.

[Muscle Lover 2]

Loved this play. Saw 5 plays recently while in NYC. This was, by far, my favorite (despite the heavy subject matter). Elaine May deserves a Tony!

[Doe Be Doe]

I saw this last night. It was one of those situations when I thought about backing our since I thought I'd find it boring. Then, I really enjoyed it. The acting was amazing as was the writing. It had very funny lines yet still dealt with a serious and sad plot. Well done.

[Cooper]

"Growing old is no fun".... I join the chorus of others in singing praises for this play. First, I knew I was seeing great acting, then, as the play develops, you feel part of the story. Excellent connection between the cast and the audience. If you haven't heard of this play or Elaine May, you will once the Tony nominations are announced.