In a long life of choosing what to see in the world of the arts, I have learned that it is important to follow people. If Vladimir Jurowski or Simon Rattle is conducting a concert, I try to be there. If Mark Morris or Alexei Ratmansky has choreographed a new dance, I do my best to see it. And if David Cromer directs a play, I go to it, whether it is a new play or an old one, in a tiny theater or a larger one.
He first came to my notice when he directed an obscure 1923 play called The Adding Machine (obscure to me, anyway) in a small downtown theater. I don’t even remember what made me go see it—proximity, perhaps—but I was greatly impressed with the way all his directorial decisions brought this expressionist and somewhat programmatic work by Elmer Rice to life. So it was with serious interest, not to say anticipation, that I bought tickets to his next production in my neighborhood, of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
Since most of us in America have actually performed in Our Town sometime during our childhoods, it’s a very difficult work to see or present anew; it has been so ruined by accumulated sentimental guff that one can barely perceive it any more. What David Cromer did with it was miraculous. Casting himself in the role of the Stage Manager, with his un-actorly yet warmly sympathetic voice, and setting the audience in pewlike rows in amongst the actors, he made it seem like the finest play that had ever been written in—and about—America. He brought out the best in his actors, so that they actually seemed to be these strange, sometimes unreal but at the same time ever-so-real characters; and at the end of the play, when Emily’s voice spoke to us from beyond the grave, I saw tears in the eyes of all the audience members sitting across from me, even as I felt them on my own cheeks.
I have been to at least six or seven more Cromer productions since then, all of new plays, and while none was as good as Our Town (mainly due to the fact that almost no new play approaches that level), they were all worth seeing for the directorial choices he made. Working with new plays by living playwrights is always a risk, and sometimes Cromer’s gamble doesn’t quite pay off. But in Caroline, which I just saw over the weekend at the small MCC Theater on West 52nd Street, that gamble finally yielded tremendous returns.
The play itself, by Preston Max Allen, is competent without being necessarily great. If I read it on the page, I would no doubt find it too schematic: Single mother (and former drug addict) who is raising a trans kid finds that her angry boyfriend has broken the kid’s arm, so she has to flee to her long-abandoned hometown, where her rich-bitch of a mother tries to take the kid away from her… Too much topicality here, I would have said; too many flashpoint issues. But Cromer has taken this unpromising material—which, granted, is written with a certain humanity and indeed humor—and shaped it into something nearly perfect. He is aided by the three incredible actors (Chloë Grace Moretz as the single mother, Amy Landecker as the bitchy grandmother, and especially River Lipe-Smith as the remarkable trans girl, Caroline) and also by the small size the MCC theater, which made us all feel like silent onlookers watching a real family drama in a living room. And silent we were (except when we laughed aloud at Caroline’s humorous, insightful remarks)—during the intensely emotional scenes between each mother and each daughter, you could have heard a pin drop. For those of us lucky enough to be there, it was ninety uninterrupted minutes of pure receptivity, pure emotional openness: a rare enough gift anywhere these days, but especially in the theater, which always invites a sense of falseness if it is not done absolutely right.