MARY GETS HERS
Playwrights Realm @ MCC Theater
511 W. 52nd Street, New York
Through Oct. 14
Mary is 8 years old, and everyone she’s ever loved is dead. She’s been alone since her parents died in the last plague, the one that turned people into foam. When she misses them, she tries to remember what they smelled like. Mary closes her eyes, crinkles her nose, tenses her shoulders, curls her toes, and sniffs, hoping that somewhere in the air, she’ll find something that smells like love.
Mary Gets Hers is an unabashedly wacky new play by Emma Horwitz running at MCC Theater in conjunction with The Playwrights Realm through Oct. 14. It follows Mary, a plucky medieval orphan, who gets taken in by two hermits, Abraham and Ephraim.
For four years, the hermits raise Mary in Abraham’s cell, making it their mission to help her live up to the “Mary-ness” of her Biblical namesake and protect her from “the taint of sin.” When the years of isolation grow unbearable, Mary runs away. She finds an inn, where a sleazy innkeeper gives her a room and a revolving door of suitors, and stays for a while.
Eventually, Abraham ventures to the inn, hoping to rescue Mary and return her to a life of chastity. But when faced with a choice between continuing on the innkeeper’s path and following Abraham’s, Mary decides to forge her own.
A self-aware send-up of an obscure devotional drama by Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, the 10th-century canoness often credited as the first Western playwright since the fall of Rome, Horwitz’s medieval drama is more winkingly self-conscious than didactic.
While Hrosvitha’s Mary learns to repent, this Mary’s journey is ostensibly one of feminist self-actualization by way of teen-hermit angst, a few years of implied prostitution, and, ultimately, a musical number with a disco ball.
The play works best when it trusts itself enough to be earnest. Abraham and Ephraim, the pair of hermits who make it their mission to protect Mary from “the taint of sin,” are a highlight throughout, ridiculously sanctimonious as they shuffle from psalms to dinner in their very monastic Crocs. When Ephraim (Octavia Chavez-Richmond) talks to God with the frustrated fervor of a middle schooler nerd asking out the most popular girl in school, it’s hysterical because it’s also heart-wrenching. However, by keeping itself at an ironic distance from other messy emotions, Mary Gets Hers undermines its reach for comedy – and thematic resonance.
As Mary, Haley Wong is wiggly and precocious. Faced with the task of activating the play’s long, montage-like stretches of narration, she adopts a breathlessly confessional, childlike inflection. She breezes through lines like “We love God so much he is our father and our husband,” punctuating their absurdity with a little shrug. Initially defined by her isolation, it makes sense that Mary looks for solace in the audience. But as the play goes on, Mary’s position as the narrator of her life story prevents her from connecting to the other characters who shape it. By spending so much energy emphasizing how Strong, Spunky and In Control Of Her Destiny, Mary is, the play inadvertently flattens her.
Perhaps for that reason, it’s the play’s supporting characters who carry the bulk of its humor and heart. Kai Heath is delightfully awkward as a knight who can only draw his sword when he’s afraid. Claire Siebers moves at an impressively glacial pace as the decrepit hermit, Dominic. And as Abraham, the tender yet bumbling hermit, Susannah Perkins commits hard to some of the play’s broadest comedic bits without losing hold of the character’s well of deep, sincere grief.
Despite its slapstick humor, the medieval world of Mary Gets Hers is powered by mysticism and inexplicable tragedy. The production’s scrappy, black box aesthetic strikes an ingenious balance between silliness and terror. You-Shin Chen’s set wraps the theater in an intricate cocoon of shimmery curtains that doubles as a backdrop for the spooky shadow play in Cha See’s lighting. Meanwhile, the hermits wear tonsure wigs straight from the back of an off-season Party City, which just feels right.
Josiah Davis’s inventive direction harnesses the play’s whirlwind pace while carving out room for some truly off-kilter moments. In one wonderfully kooky transition, the hermits dance to solemn, Gregorian music as their angular, Fosse-esque choreography casts sinister shadows around the space.
At one point late in the play, Horwitz’s disparate ideas begin to crystallize. Mary, now 14 years old and enraged by Abraham’s plea for her to return to the monastery, rebels. “It’s kind of upsetting to be told ‘I love you’ over and over and over again when no one really knows you,” she says. “It kind of makes me feel like God.” Abraham, staggered, recovers his relationship with Mary by finally beginning to get to know her, rather than molding her into the chaste, devout Mary he thinks she could be.
Ultimately, Mary Gets Hers is a play about how to love someone you can’t see – someone you aren’t even sure is listening – and what you do when you need to know they’re still there to love you back. But once that need for love gets filtered through irony, its scent gets hard to trace.
