WE HAD A WORLD: A Terrific Family Trio — Review

Joshua Harmon taps into a childlike state, of both wonderment and confused disappointment, in We Had a World, an exceptional new autobiographical play at City Center’s smallest stage. Director Trip Cullman harnesses the space’s intimacy while teasing a terrific trio of decades-spanning performances from Andrew Barth Feldman, Joanna Gleason and Jeanine Serrales.

Late in her life, Joshua’s grandmother Renee (Gleason) invites him over to a family reunion she knows will be explosive: it’ll be the first time his mother, her daughter Ellen (Serralles) is in the same room as her estranged sister. Renee grants him permission to write a play about their clan, so long as it’s “as bitter and vitriolic as possible,” but something happens as Joshua (Feldman) prepares to tell that tale. He realizes he must first describe his peculiar grandma – a bold, zany Manhattan broad from the same tragically shuttered factory as Auntie Mame – and his story quickly becomes about his and Ellen’s fraught relationship with her.

How could it not? Renee was the type to whisk the young lad through each new cultural scene, age-appropriateness be damned. Exposed to Robert Mapplethorpe exhibitions and Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, the suburban, pre-adolescent Joshua clung to their dates as any wide-eyed kid would (in this case, a clearly nascently gay one). But it was her taking him to see Diana Rigg’s Medea on Broadway that most endeared him to her, and set his life on its course.

The distance between his matriarchs comes into focus when he eventually learns Renee is a lifelong alcoholic whose behavior during Ellen’s childhood drove an irreparable wedge. When she became pregnant with him, they reached an agreement that Renee was never to drink with Joshua around.

Harmon explores the complex feelings ignited by that compromise, and by the subtler trade-offs all family relationships are built upon, with his usual sophistication and knack for engaging dialogue. In its brief 100 minutes, he presents a searingly fleshed-out portrait of a family throughout the years, colored with the emotions of their saga’s sharpest moments.

He also could not have hoped for a better cast to enact their every nuance. Serralles is heartbreaking in capturing the moment a mother’s protective walls suddenly shatter, and her relationship to her son becomes not colder, but (time to grow up!) equal. Feldman remains the pre-eminent young, awkward charmer; a natural who, in a just world, will grow up to channel his Matthew Broderick charisma into a career of that stature. And Gleason, in her first New York stage role since 2012, is simply transcendent. In an increasingly fabulous display of old lady couture (designed by Kaye Voyce), she embodies both the rose-tinted memories of a favorite relative and their shadier realities with warmth, wit and ease.

Apparently an avid environmentalist, Harmon and his younger avatar occasionally weave ecological critiques into their conversation. Nana shouldn’t run the water while she brushes her teeth, and Reagan shouldn’t have taken down the solar panels his predecessor had installed on the roof of the White House. Through this play, Harmon expresses a profound disillusionment with grownups’ ability to fuck things up, be it family ties or the planet’s fate. If the thread linking the younger and older Harmons ability to express shock at this truth, and this thematic throughline in the play, is sometimes tenuous, it is nevertheless honest. We Had a World might be an elegy, but it is never an apology, and is mostly a celebration of the beauty that keeps us going.

We Had a World is in performance through April 27, 2025 at New York City Center Stage II on West 55th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.