Review by Stuart Miller…

When “We had a World” opens, Josh (Andrew Barth Feldman) is in his underwear when he gets a message from his grandmother encouraging him to write a “bitter” and “vitriolic” play about family. There’s no dramatic reason for this lack of clothing, nor is it a play dealing with sex and sexuality. 

The best I can figure is that playwright Joshua Harmon was actually in his underwear when he had this conversation in real life. After all, this play is nakedly autobiographical: in 2018, Josh writes a play called “Skintight,” which Harmon did; at the end of the show, Josh admits to recording his final conversation with his grandmother and the show’s three actors read that scene from a transcript. (Afterwards, we hear a snippet of the real conversation.)

And that’s ultimately the problem at the core of “We Had a World.” Harmon gives us plenty of family drama– some of it’s moving and some of it’s funny and all of it’s realistically messy– but he seems too content to recount what actually happened. The play lacks the art that comes when a writer does soul searching and then uses his or her life to create something fresh, something that stakes out a point of view. 

In this memory play Josh takes us through the years of being doted on by his grandmother Renee (Joanna Gleason), who exposes the suburban kid to New York’s culture– museums, theater and R-rated movies. He’s quite frequently in conflict with his mother Ellen (Jeanine Sarelles) while she is constantly battling his Renee. (Ellen also refuses to be in the same room as her unseen sister but despite the epic nature of this feud, it frustratingly is never explained.) 

We find out that Ellen’s distrust, even disdain, for her mother’s behavior is hard-earned– Renee is an alcoholic and when Ellen was young she was often her caretaker, cleaning up her vomit, even as Renee and Ellen’s father denied any problem and castigated Ellen for implying there was one.

So Harmon effectively gets the play’s emotions in motion, especially when Renee’s drinking resurfaces and threatens to cause a rift with teenage Josh. But too often he skims past the interior life of the characters’ conflict and pain and while there are still some effective scenes in the aftermath of that moment, in the end Harmon seems to lack the courage to offer a strong take on his family dynamics and the impact of generational trauma. 

Feldman is fine as Josh, but fine won’t cut it when a play doesn’t get underneath the skin and he ultimately feels too vanilla in the role. Joanna Gleason is good as Renee, although her affected accent is a distraction. (I’m sure Harmon’s grandmother had adopted the same posh airs, but real life is not art.) Sarelles, however, is the standout, bringing a self-awareness about the hardened shell over her layers of anguish to Ellen– she elevates every scene she is in.

At the climax (spoiler alert), a dying Renee betrays Ellen and then physically attacks her in front of Josh. The scene is heart-wrenching but then immediately undercut by the lack of emotional turmoil for Josh in the aftermath– just days later he’s back visiting his grandmother on her deathbed, sharing photos and fond memories. Even that conversation read from the transcript lacks any emotional confrontation or explosive revelation. It falls flat and feels like a gimmick, a distraction that takes us out of the moment. 

(Harmon also gives Renee a couple of lines attacking Donald Trump, which, while deserved, is the worst sort of pandering. It’s not relevant in this moment dramatically and none of the characters have uttered a word about politics in the previous 90 minutes; it’s clearly meant to win approval from New York theater crowds.)

Afterwards, my friend suggested that the play needed another draft and immediately came up with a suggestion that would have lent heft to the final scenes– if Ellen had, all along, tried to draw a line for Josh, saying her fight with Renee was her own and that she wanted the trauma to end there and that Josh should have a good relationship with his grandmother, then there could have been a moment after Renee’s attack where he was genuinely torn about what to do. 

Sadly, however, Harmon has a more pat ending, including an imagined conversation with Ellen and her dead mother. That tactic is also used a few blocks away in “Liberation” but in that play the scene is touching and insightful. Here it feels like Harmon is writing for an audience of three– his mother, the ghost of his grandmother and himself. While that catharsis might feel good to him and might appeal to audiences looking for easy emotional satisfaction, it is, in the end, another example that the world Harmon writes is not as deep or powerful as it could have been. 

“We Had a World” is playing at Manhattan Theatre Club, 131 W. 55th Street through April 27th. Run time is 100 minutes with no intermission.