A dying woman calls her grandson and asks him to write a play about their family. “But I want you to promise me something,” she says. “Make it as bitter and vitriolic as possible." In this searing, funny and deeply personal play, the author of last season's Prayer for the French Republic recreates thirty years of family fights, monstrous behavior, enormous cruelty, and enduring love.
Harmon’s script doesn’t feel as didactic or self-consciously stagy as many contemporary memory plays can be; it strikes an impressive balance of negotiating a story with many adverse emotional perspectives and moving parts while also maintaining a sense of honesty. I don’t just mean honesty in the sense of facts — though the verifiable biographical facts in Harmon’s story, and a bit of recorded material at the end, lend a gravitas to the characters and occurrences. I mean honesty in the sense of emotional transparency, the very real mix of love and resentment and insecurities and doubts that define all relationships, especially those within a family.
Too much of We Had A World is taken up with plaintive anecdotes and petty squabbles. Some of these are amusing. Some exhibit a refreshing self-awareness, such as the time when Josh in college was irrationally ranting against his mother for having bought him a mirror when she noticed the one in his dorm was broken. But the scenes play out over three decades (more in a hodgepodge than with a clear chronology), and start to feel not exactly redundant, but static.
2025 | Off-Broadway |
MTC Off-Broadway Premiere Off-Broadway |
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