We Had a World Off-Broadway Reviews

Harmon’s script doesn’t feel as didactic or self-consciously stagy as many contemporary memory plays can be; it strikes an impressive balance of negotiating a story with many adverse emotional perspectives and moving parts while also maintaining a sense of honesty. I don’t just mean honesty in the sense of facts — though the verifiable biographical facts in Harmon’s story, and a bit of recorded material at the end, lend a gravitas to the characters and occurrences. I mean honesty in the sense of emotional transparency, the very real mix of love and resentment and insecurities and doubts that define all relationships, especially those within a family.

For all its affectionately nostalgic, piquant details, however, the play never quite coheres dramatically. Its episodic, non-linear structure frequently proves confusing, and such tangents as an account of Renee’s solo trip to Paris when she was 35 feel like minor anecdotes barely explored. For every powerful moment— as when Ellen informs us that she had told her mother that if she ever drank in front of her grandson, she would never be able to see him again — there are more that feel like filler.

Playwright Harmon himself seems to inhabit the character Josh, pulling strings and shifting time not only from scene to scene and exchange to exchange but sometimes within the words of a sentence. The sense of where and when and what, though, remains clear from moment to moment. The cast is abetted in this by the unseen hand of director Trip Cullman (who also guided Choir Boy and Harmon’s Significant Other). We Had a World proceeds without a forced moment, without a time lag, without a moment where attention starts to lap.

Too much of We Had A World is taken up with plaintive anecdotes and petty squabbles. Some of these are amusing. Some exhibit a refreshing self-awareness, such as the time when Josh in college was irrationally ranting against his mother for having bought him a mirror when she noticed the one in his dorm was broken. But the scenes play out over three decades (more in a hodgepodge than with a clear chronology), and start to feel not exactly redundant, but static.

Tonally, the play dances between comedy and tragedy, with the family matriarch’s battle with the bottle leading the way. Director Trip Cullman navigates this balance with scenes of tearful outbursts working alongside humorous bits. In some scenes, though, the dance feels out of step. And for audience members with alcoholics in the family tree, the play’s comedic treatment may come across as off-putting.

Harmon explores the complex feelings ignited by that compromise, and by the subtler trade-offs all family relationships are built upon, with his usual sophistication and knack for engaging dialogue. In its brief 100 minutes, he presents a searingly fleshed-out portrait of a family throughout the years, colored with the emotions of their saga’s sharpest moments.