Crazy Mary: One Flew Over The WASP's Nest

A.R. Gurney's latest may not rate up there with his high-caliber works like The Dining Room or the recent Indian Blood, but Crazy Mary is a rather sweetly off-beat near-love story.  Perhaps it's a little more lightweight than he intended and perhaps the humor could be a little less obvious, but in the end it adds up to an entertaining tale made all the more enjoyable thanks to a heartwarming turn by Kristine Nielsen as the central character.  You can do a lot worse.

As is the custom with Gurney's plays, those WASPs from Buffalo are at it again.  Lydia (Sigourney Weaver), a divorcee from a well-to-do background now struggling to make ends meet while her son, Skip (Michael Esper), works part time while attending Harvard Med, has wound up the trustee of a large estate belonging to her distant cousin Mary (Nielsen), who has spent the past thirty years in a luxuriously furnished former Boston mansion (an impressively stately set by John Lee Beatty) converted into a high-priced sanatorium.  Overseeing Mary's wealth is a responsibility that has bounced from relative to relative whenever the current trustee dies and Lydia, who has not seen her since they were children in Cooperstown, has arrived in Boston so that she and Skip can size up the situation.

The genial doctor who prefers to be called by his first name, Jerome (Mitchell Greenberg), can't offer a satisfactory analysis of Mary's mental state and chances for recovery, though he's writing a book about her.  The motherly nurse, Pearl (Myra Lucretia Taylor), who refers to Mary as her baby, says she stays in her room most of the time listening to classical music on the radio.  Lydia is surprised to discover that the money the home receives for Mary's care is often more than they can spend on the patient, so it's used for the facility's general improvements.

Mary is non-responsive in her first meeting with Lydia and Skip, but with subsequent visits from the boy, her mental state improves miraculously and we start getting clues as to why she was institutionalized in the first place.  Feeling needed and appreciated, Skip develops the confidence to act on his dissatisfaction with his mother's pressuring him to attend Harvard.  He and Mary eventually discuss using her wealth to help him fulfill his dream of becoming a farmer.  When Lydia returns to Boston, concerned that her son has been continually cutting classes, she finds the friendship between Mary and Skip has headed into a direction she'd never imagined.

Director Jim Simpson keeps the evening moving at a pleasantly brisk pace until the meatier scenes with Skip and Mary lend a chance to savor some lovely moments that combine bonding and mental delusions.  Taylor and Greenberg are very appealing with their essentially one-note characters.  Weaver's tactfully overbearing mother is written as more of an obstacle than a person, but she handles the humor well, especially when praising the "Jewish qualities" of her son's girlfriend.  Skip's growth from a snarky wise-cracker to an optimistic dreamer is nicely done by Esper.

But it's Kristine Nielsen's performance that's the main reason to see Crazy Mary.  A superb comic actress who can combine pathos with broad shtick, Nielsen makes Mary's growth a funny and believable evolution full of gleefully wide-eyed discovery and a child's vulnerability.  Whenever she's on, Crazy Mary evolves from a light diversion into a genuine charmer.

Photos by Joan Marcus:  Top:  Kristine Nielsen and Myra Lucretia Taylor

Center:  Mitchell Greenberg, Kristine Nielsen, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Michael Esper and Sigourney Weaver

Bottom:  Sigourney Weaver

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