Caroline Off-Broadway Reviews

That’s why it’s refreshing to come across a play like Preston Max Allen’s Caroline, the assured, affecting three-hander now getting its premiere at MCC under the emblematically thoughtful and ungilded direction of David Cromer. Allen is writing about something that’s in our newsfeeds daily, but crucially, that thing doesn’t flatten or predetermine his people. What he’s actually interested in are relationships, the interconnectedness of messy human beings. His characters are grappling with the consequences of broken trust and the agonizing question of how much we can truly protect anyone we love. The political resonance of his project arises not from an explicit statement of values but from a tender demonstration of complex, undeniable humanity.

One 90-minute act is just the right length for Caroline, and thanks to David Cromer’s zoom-lens direction, we develop an instant attachment to these characters. Allen doesn’t tie anything up neatly, but somehow we know that Caroline will be just fine. She’s the smartest, most clearheaded one of them all.

Director David Cromer (Good Night, and Good Luck; Prayer for the French Republic) has a knack for extracting a kind of distilled specificity from his actors, and this trifecta rises to the occasion. Though a bit slowly paced in a preview performance I attended, the production has already been extended twice, perhaps driven by Moretz’s 23.8 million Instagram followers.

There are some plays which foster such a degree of intimacy that you feel like you’re eavesdropping on private interactions rather than watching a performance. Such is the case with Preston Max Allen’s drama receiving its world premiere at MCC Theater. Depicting the interactions between a young mother, her precocious 9-year-old child, and the child’s grandmother, Caroline is the sort of small-scale family drama that packs a big emotional punch.

Three powerful performances under the direction of David Cromer (Dead Outlaw) make up for the script's shortcomings. Stylish and steely, Landecker recalls the detached mom in Ordinary People. Lipe-Smith’s work feels natural, never forced. Moretz shines from start to finish as she summons a deep well of anxiety and hurt.

Which brings this review to River Lipe-Smith. If I’ve ever seen a more accomplished performance from a child actor on stage, I can’t think of it. Over and over again, this young actor delivers a zinger with the comic timing of a veteran stand-up comic. It’s one of the great things about Allen’s writing and Cromer’s direction: They know how to win an audience’s sympathy not through tears but laughter.

This is an absorbing play of fragments, absences, estrangements, and endurance. In its raw, concentrated authenticity, Caroline shows us that survival emerges not from traditional mainstream institutional support or the illusion of suburban safety, but from small acts of persistence like a handmade bracelet, a passionate promise, a chosen name spoken aloud.

There’s so much to admire about Caroline and how it skillfully raises issues about whether we can truly make amends for our past mistakes — or rebuild our trust in those who have betrayed it. In the end, it’s the precocious title character who has the most insightful read on the situation. Sometimes it takes a child to lead us.

The play’s attention to honesty may be why it is particularly vulnerable to any elements that ring false, like a couple of Caroline lines that seem less rooted in her thinking than in the playwright’s desire for a laugh. More harmful is a late-arriving plot twist so severe that it’s as if Allen has wrested the wheel from his characters.