Death Watch
From left, Natalie Gold, Lois Smith and Heather Burns in the world premiere production of "Peace for Mary Frances."
LOIS SMITH’S FIRST “LINE” in “Peace for Mary Frances” is a moan. She's barely visible, semi-crumpled on the living room sofa. Her second line is “hmmmmm.” (The script doesn't even uppercase it, so it's more a sound effect than a statement.) Her third line is one word: “Alice?”
Stage Mother
Smith and Paul Lazar, who plays her son, on opening night.
Sitting in the audience at the Pershing Square Signature Center, we're getting impatient. When will this 87-year-old acting dynamo, this revered stage-and-screen treasure (who matched James Dean's intensity in their "East of Eden" screen test and Saoirse Ronan's irreverence in "Lady Bird"), show the fire and strength that constitute her core? Happily, the answer to that question is this profoundly stirring play’s pain, joy and remarkable power.
In honor of the end (June 17) of the show's world-premiere limited run, Press Nights adds its praises.
Screen Sister
Smith as a nun who can take a joke in the film "Lady Bird."
I WENT TO SEE “Mary Frances” because of Smith. I knew her from stage performances like "Marjorie Prime," "After the Revolution" and "The Trip to Bountiful." My out-of-town guest, SS, knew her as Aunt Meg from "Twister." We both felt that she could be counted on to knock our socks off. And she did, but not in the way I expected.
Death Bed
From left, Smith, J. Smith-Cameron and Lazar. Notice the son's disrespectful feet invading his mother's space.
The play's premise is fairly oxymoronic: Mary Frances Davidian's "last wish," the publicity release says, is "to die peacefully at home surrounded by her family."
Team
Lily Thorne, left, the playwright, and Lila Neugebauer, the director.
"Family" and "peacefully" in the same sentence? Have these people ever been to an intergenerational Thanksgiving dinner? Very little is peaceful about the action of Lily Thorne's comic drama, which is directed by Lila Neugebauer, this season's "it" person ("At Home at the Zoo," "Miles for Mary").
Mary Frances (Smith) is 90, tired of battling terminal pulmonary disease and very much ready to leave this world. She has one daughter (Fanny, played by Johanna Day) who is a heroin addict -- she's recovering, but the methadone keeps making her fall asleep while she's driving -- and one (Alice, played by J. Smith-Cameron) whose occupation is astrologer. She has no money, but she's responsible, serious and always knows when Mercury is in retrograde. Alice also has two daughters: One is a television star, who taps and vapes for stress reduction, and the other is defined by having a breast-feeding baby.
So the lucky people who saw "Peace for Mary Frances" during its all-too-short (six and a half weeks) Signature run, did get to see and hear Smith sing "You Great Big Beautiful Doll" to an infant she clearly adores. And to speak the line “Everything hurts” with an understated gravity that few actors could grasp, much less convey. To cry gently when two female relatives cannot lift her, even when they try together. And to give an appropriately thoughtful answer to the hospice representative who mentions that many times people don’t die because they have unfinished business. Well, says Mary Frances, “I want the windows washed.”
The Living
Lazar, Gold and Smith-Cameron on the downstairs half of Dane Laffrey's set.
Mary Frances has a son too, but Eddie (Paul Lazar), a lawyer who suffers from male entitlement syndrome, considers being present for the death of the woman who raised him a lower priority than his next court date in Boston.
You Can Count on Her
J. Smith-Cameron, who plays the responsible daughter, is an Obie winner for "As Bees in Honey Drown." She is married to Kenneth Lonergan.
Mary Frances's children and grandchildren (well, most of them) are there, as everyone says, to "honor her decision," which is to die without further medical intervention. But there’s so much to do and decide. Whether to follow Mom's instructions on where she wants her ashes scattered. Whether she can take morphine and Percocet at the same time. (No.) Who's to blame for little caregiver mistakes like “the oxygen’s not on right.”
That would be enough, but the family members are also acting out their childhood rivalries and going into panic mode whenever Mom mentions spending their precious inheritance. As Helen (Heather Burns) says to her mother, Fanny, “You’re torturing her with your petty shit.”
Handlers
Melle Powers, as Mary Frances's home health care aide, and Johanna Day, as the daughter with the drug problem.
Good Job
Powers, who plays Clara, is a veteran of "Chappelle's Show."
You've got to admire Mary Frances for trying to take care of everything. If, when I am on my death bed, anyone comes to me and reminds me of a tax deadline, I will vow to haunt them personally, horribly and nightly for the rest of their miserable lives.
It’s probably no surprise to anyone reading this that Mary Frances dies at the end. At one point, her confusion and clarity meet in the middle. “I keep wondering why my mother’s not here taking care of me,” she says.
Do genuine works of art have simple Aesopian morals? This play’s lesson may be: Sometimes it’s better to die alone. Near the end of “Peace for Mary Frances,” Smith turns to Clara (Melle Powers), her Ghanian-born home health care aide, and says: “I always thought it would be sad, having a stranger take care of me. But this is so much better."
"You don’t want anything from me," Mary Frances continues, almost in wonder. "You’re here to do a job. And you do it well.”
Everybody Dies
Barbara Bush (1925-2018)
Everybody
Orson Welles (1915-85)
Thorne’s first play wants to show us what death looks like. All that ferocity, and then nothing. To remind us that even men and women who were hailed as “forces of nature” breathe their last and are heard no more. Orson Welles is dead. John Wayne. Katharine Hepburn. Stephen Hawking. Tom Wolfe. Barbara Bush. The guys who commissioned the Pyramids. Anthony Bourdain.
And who better to play Mary Frances than an actress who shows every sign of being a force of nature herself?
Too bad The Times didn't love it. Jesse Green's review found it overlong and the adult children tedious. But Green did acknowledge Smith's greatness: "She dominates the action as if a secret close-up camera were always aimed at her." Mary Frances's recollections of the past, he wrote, "are so fully imagined and freshly delivered, so full of sorrow and wonder, that you forget or stop minding that she isn't." (Mary Frances isn't full of sorrow and wonder? We must disagree.)
Maybe it takes a critic of more advanced age to see the bigger picture clearly. Writing in The Observer, Rex Reed, 79, compared Thorne to the playwright William Inge "at the top of his form" and gave the production something close to the ultimate compliment: "the kind of moment-to-moment realism we haven't seen since Elia Kazan." The headline that ran with the review: "Peace for Mary Frances Is So Good It Will Shatter You."
The character's final line is "Is that mine?" She's pointing to the baby in her bedroom. Mary Frances's granddaughter answers, "Yes."