Review: In ‘Mary Jane,’ a Young Mother Faces Her Worst Fears

Plays don’t usually come with content advisories, but “Mary Jane,” by Amy Herzog, should: Parents strongly cautioned.

Or maybe not just parents. “Mary Jane,” which opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop, is a heartbreaker for anyone human.

That’s in part the result of a very delicate sleight of hand Ms. Herzog executes in shaping the story, which at first seems to turn on a movie-of-the-week premise about a very sick child named Alex. Born after just 25 weeks of gestation, he was expected to die within days. That he has made it to 2 years old is a double-edged miracle, living as he does with multiple serious conditions, including cerebral palsy, that require round-the-clock attention and an armamentarium of specialized equipment.

But we never see or even hear Alex, who cannot speak; he is implied by the ping of his monitors and the slurp of his suction machine. Instead, the play is about (and is named for) his mother, a woman in her 30s who was working toward a teaching degree when the need to care for Alex put her plan “on hold for a minute.”

That chipper phrase is a clue to Mary Jane’s character. Though she has turned the bedroom of her Jackson Heights apartment into a pediatric ward, and makes do with a foldout sofa in the living room, she is so uncomplaining and willfully blasé that her refusal to surrender to distress seems almost pathological. She expresses more concern about the effects of heavy rain on a visitor’s garden than about her precarious income and Swiss-cheese sleep. Anger and why-me-ism are beyond her; she even forgives the husband who, unable to deal with the calamity, fled. “I hope he finds some peace; I really do,” she says.