By Samuel L. Leiter

March 19, 2025. We Had a World, the new, three-character, autobiographical dramedy by Joshua Harmon, Off Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center Stage II, is like the play many of us have in our heads when we think about how we might put our own family stories into writing. We may even think that the next time the family gets together, we’ll record the conversations, transfer them to the page, and make a play out of them. In fact, such a transcript is enacted late in We Had a World, which concerns Joshua, a gay, Jewish playwright growing up under the influence of a grandmother, Renee, and mother, Ellen, who never stop bickering, often because of grandma’s drinking.

Harmon, of course, is a professional playwright (mentioned in the play) with a strong track record (Skintight, Bad Jews, Prayer for the French Republic) with the skills most of us lack to shape his memories into a framework that holds our interest for an hour and a half. His material and characters are not unfamiliar (apart, perhaps, from the alcoholic Jewish grandma), but his dialogue—infused with snarkily comic throwaways—has the ring of authenticity, the acting is mostly effective, and Trip Cullman’s directing keeps everything humming.

Renee (a.k.a. Nana), played with just the right amount of eccentricity by the wonderful Joanna Gleason, wearing a shoulder-length gray wig, is a kind of Auntie Mame to the fascinated Joshua (Andrew Barth Feldman, effectively transitioning from early childhood to maturity and in between). The boy loves escaping from his suburban home to visit her at her tastefully decorated Upper East Side apartment, sparingly reflected in John Lee Beatty’s set, nicely lit by Ben Stanton, a more-or-less open space on a wooden platform, allowing for multiple locales. 

Notable are a carved, wooden loveseat and a chair, representing, but in no way replicating the two high-backed loveseats prominently mentioned in the play. Kaye Voyce’s costumes are otherwise appropriate, but the idea of having young Joshua seen at the opening in nothing but his jockey shorts as he takes a phone call from Nana is both ridiculous and exploitative.

Harmon pours into the blender his memories of Ellen and Nana over the years from 1988, when he was around five, to 2018, when Renee, at 93, was fatally stricken with pancreatic cancer. The mixture is a nonlinear play that moves freely—and sometimes hazily—back and forth in time, as Joshua narrates the events while also living through them. Renee and Ellen also get to narrate bits and pieces, so the acting requires rapid emotional transitions from scene to scene, going from dialogue to direct address, often in the voice of other (unseen characters). You must listen closely, as it’s easy to get confused, especially when only the context reveals when there’s a time and place shift. 

Harmon’s premise is that the ailing Renee asked him to write a play about the family called Battle of the Titans, and to make it “as bitter and vitriolic as possible.” She hoped it would be Virginia Woolf: Part II.  It does reach that toxic goal here and there, but it’s also infused with warm affection for the boy’s beloved grandma, a flashy Hungarian immigrant who nonetheless affects a posh British accent. She introduces grade school-aged Joshua to avantgarde exhibitions of X-rated artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, a Broadway revival of Medea, and R-rated movies like Dances with Wolves. Her quirky proclivities include badgering museum personnel with questions. In return, Joshua teaches Nana things she finds useful, like saving water by turning the faucet off when brushing your teeth.

Ellen, a busy attorney, is played by a fiery Jeanine Serralles with chip-on-her-shoulder bitterness (which she sometimes overdoes). She bears a deep-seated grudge against her sister, Susan, for a reason that seems trivial but, within the painful dynamics that alienate so many family members from one another, is perfectly plausible. (I speak from experience.) So harsh can such feelings be that siblings will not only speak to one another but refuse to be in the same room. Ellen lashes out at Renee for her boozy lapses (like when she walked out of a school show in which Joshua appeared), or for inviting Susan to a family seder. Still, despite saying her mother “is not a good person,” she does manage to maintain her daughterly responsibilities when Renee goes on hospice care.

The play tosses bits and piece of the past into the blender, summer camp in Switzerland, a family book club, the above-mentioned loveseats Nana bought in Paris in 1960, Joshua’s internship with Miramax (run by Harvey Weinstein!), therapy, study in France, a lost backpack in Italy, and so on. The characters talk about relative Jewish piety, Joshua’s coming out, a secret about Renee’s past, parental responsibilities, Joshua’s boyfriend, dealing with imminent death, and so on, the discourse sometimes enhanced by revelatory letters Joshua discovers. There’s even room for political jabs, like Renee’s, “The great United States is at the mercy of this idiot.”

All this, and more, adds up to, not so much a conventional play, but a catalogue of tiffs and disagreements, anecdotes and recollections that remind us of our own families, and, perhaps asks us to contemplate our own mothers, and the role they played in our lives. But be reminded, We Had a World is not I Remember Mama.

We Had a World ***
City Center Stage II
131 W. 55th Street, NYC. www.nycitycenter.org
Through April 27, 2025
Photo Credit: Jeremy Daniel