Review: Elaine May Might Break Your Heart in ‘Waverly Gallery’

NEW YORK — From the moment Gladys Green opens her mouth — which is the moment that the curtain rises on Kenneth Lonergan’s wonderful play “The Waverly Gallery” at the Golden Theater — it’s clear that for this garrulous woman, idle conversation isn’t a time killer. It is a lifeline.

An octogenarian New Yorker, former lawyer and perpetual hostess for whom schmoozing and kibitzing have always been as essential as breathing, Gladys operates on the principle that if she can just continue to talk, she can surely power through the thickening fog of her old age. That she has clearly already lost this battle makes her no less valiant.

That it’s Elaine May who is giving life to Gladys’ war against time lends an extra power and poignancy to “The Waverly Gallery,” which opened Thursday night under Lila Neugebauer’s fine-tuned direction. Long fabled as a director, script doctor and dramatist, May first became famous as a master of improvisational comedy, instantly inventing fully detailed, piquantly neurotic characters who always leaned slightly off-kilter.

Her partnership with Mike Nichols remains the gold standard for quick-sketch portraiture. And their appearance on Broadway in the early 1960s is recalled by those who saw it as if they had been divine visitations, blazing and all too brief.

One can imagine Gladys Green having attended “An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May,” and saving the program. She might even have perceived a glimmer of her own vivacious self in that couple’s determined loquacity.

In any case, the Gladys we meet in “The Waverly Gallery” — the title comes from the small rented Greenwich Village space where she shows art of dubious distinction — is conducting what might be called extreme improvisation. She’s bluffing, fabricating, groping for a direction in what must often seem like a void.

Trying to convince her family and herself that she’s still capable of navigating the flux of urban life, Gladys always fills in the verbal gaps that confront her, even with words that may not be the right ones. At 86, May — in her first Broadway appearance in more than 50 years — turns out to be just the star to nail the rhythms, the comedy and the pathos of a woman who’s talking as fast as she can to keep her place in an increasingly unfamiliar world.

First staged off-Broadway in 2000, with a very fine Eileen Heckart as Gladys, “The Waverly Gallery” was inspired by the final years of Lonergan’s own grandmother. It is a memory play in both its structure and its subject.

Rendered through the retrospective gaze of Gladys’ grandson — Daniel (a first-rate Lucas Hedges), who lives down the hall from Gladys — it recalls Tennessee Williams’ guilt-drenched “The Glass Menagerie.” But Lonergan’s lens on the past is sharper and harsher.

He is trying to capture, with almost clinical precision, the patterns of speech of a willful woman sliding into senility. At the same time, he is assessing the impact of such disjointedness on the helpless members of her family, who without even being aware of it sometimes find themselves adopting Gladys’ fragmented worldview.

In other words, “The Waverly Gallery” is a group portrait in which everyday life is distorted to the point of surrealism by the addled soul at its center. And Neugebauer has assembled a dream cast to embody the collective madness that seems to descend on those closest to Gladys.

They include Gladys’ daughter (and Daniel’s mother), Ellen (Joan Allen, who wrenchingly combines filial devotion and resentment); her psychoanalyst husband Howard (an impeccably tactless David Cromer); and Don (Michael Cera, doing confident but clueless), a young painter from Massachusetts who stumbles into Gladys’ gallery one day and winds up showing — and living — there.

Part of the painful pleasure of “The Waverly Gallery” is listening to how these characters listen to Gladys, and how, in responding to her, they come to question the reliability of their own words. As a screenwriter (“You Can Count on Me,” “Manchester by the Sea”) and dramatist (“This Is Our Youth,” “Lobby Hero”), Lonergan has always portrayed human communication as an imperfect compromise.

“The Waverly Gallery” is his most literal presentation of that inadequacy. Gladys crams all silences with increasingly disconnected bits of autobiography and with peppy questions and catchphrases that she has probably used for decades. (“Got any coffee lying around?”)

She’s so convinced that Daniel writes for a newspaper (he’s a speechwriter) that he no longer bothers to correct her. By the end, the identities of those around her blur with those of people long dead. But that doesn’t stop Gladys talking, even in her sleep. Daniel’s crystalline monologues of recollection aside, “The Waverly Gallery” often has the ostensible waywardness of recorded conversations. But no word is randomly chosen here, starting with Gladys’ opening line: “I never knew anything was the matter.”

She’s talking about the end of Helen’s first marriage, to Daniel’s father, but it comes to suggest a more willful oblivion. And when she describes the loneliness of Ellen’s dog, who just wants a little attention, you know exactly what Gladys really means.

Always stylishly dressed (Ann Roth did the costumes), May’s Gladys retains her coercive hostess’ charm. She ends most of her sentences with a practiced winning smile that now seems to be searching anxiously for affirmation.

All the cast members function beautifully as quotidian detectives, looking for the patterns in the pieces. In a shattering moment, a teary Daniel hugs his mother tight, and you know that he’s wondering if his relationship with Ellen might one day mirror that of Ellen’s with Gladys.

As near perfect as the performances are, the physical production occasionally lets them down. David Zinn’s urban set, with its vistas of the city beyond, weighs heavily on the playing area. And the intervals between scenes — which feature vintage street photography projections (by Tal Yarden) — feel ponderously long.

Such objections dissolve as soon as Gladys and her clan reassemble into groupings that convey both claustrophobic intimacy and tragic, unbridgeable distance.

Cera’s homey painter may be no Picasso. But in describing his domestic portraits and local landscapes, he sums up the essence of the play. “I tried to get the details right,” he says, “because that’s what you remember when you think about something, so I tried like hell to get them the way they are.”

So did Lonergan. That’s what makes “The Waverly Gallery” a work of such hard, compassionate clarity.

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Production Notes:

‘The Waverly Gallery’

Tickets: Through Jan. 27 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, thewaverlygalleryonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

Credits: By Kenneth Lonergan; directed by Lila Neugebauer; score by Gabriel Kahane; sets by David Zinn; costumes by Ann Roth; sound by Leon Rothenberg; projections by Tal Yarden; hair and makeup by Campbell Young Associates; production stage manager, Charles Means; production management, Aurora Productions; company manager, Liz Cone. Presented by Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, The John Gore Organization, Len Blavatnik, Columbia Live Stage, Stephanie P. McClelland, James M. Nederlander, Universal Theatrical Group, Eric Falkenstein, Suzanne Grant, Benjamin Lowy, Peter May, Al Nocciolino, Tulchin Bartner Productions, Patty Baker, Wendy Federman, Barbara H. Freitag, Heni Koenigsberg, David Mirvish, True Love Productions, Roxanne Seeman and Jamie deRoy, Jason Blum, The Shubert Organization and executive producers, Joey Parnes, Sue Wagner and John Johnson.

Cast: Elaine May (Gladys Green), Lucas Hedges (Daniel Reed), Joan Allen (Ellen Fine), Michael Cera (Don Bowman) and David Cromer (Howard Fine).