THEATRE REVIEW

OCTOBER 2026 | Volume 268

 

Mary Jane is a beautiful, painful, heartbreaking little play with the finest acting I’ve seen on a Vancouver stage this year. Kate Craven’s quietly sensational performance in the title role and Aaron Craven’s note-perfect direction highlight this story of a single mother’s superhuman effort to raise a severely disabled child and maintain her own sanity.

In eight scenes, four other very fine actresses play the various women with whom Mary Jane shares her life in her daily struggle to keep her two-and-a-half-year-old son Alex functioning, or just alive—home care nurses, a doctor, her building superintendent, a music therapist, the mothers of other radically damaged young children. Mary Jane has no apparent family support so these women provide not just the help but the sounding boards, the company, and whatever little comfort she can get.

With each successive scene we learn a little more about the horrific health issues Alex, born months prematurely, faces. We also learn more about what New Yorker Mary Jane faces, juggling not just the around-the-clock care her son needs but also a full-time job, necessary for the health insurance the sick American medical system requires in order to afford any care at all.

We never see or hear Alex in the play. He remains offstage on David Roberts’ simple set which stands for both Mary Jane’s apartment and a hospital room, and with paralyzed vocal cords Alex makes no sound. Mary Jane or one of the other women will race offstage from time to time to check on him, administer medication or deal with his distress: vomiting, seizures. The effect of Alex’s offstage silence throws the focus entirely onto Mary Jane, who struggles to remain calm and even upbeat. But in Craven’s powerfully restrained performance her eyes, her hands, a slight crack in her voice show us how utterly overwhelmed she actually is, and the terrible effort she’s making to hold it all together.

Crystal Balint is superb as a home care nurse and a doctor, her unemotional professionalism in both roles providing solace and tough realism in contrast to Mary Jane’s desperate positivity. Sewit Eden Haile offers some welcome laughs as a student experiencing Mary Jane’s situation for the first time, and appears later as the sympathetic music therapist. Advah Soudack plays two different mothers, the first frantically gathering advice from Mary Jane about how to navigate the system. She’s especially terrific in her second appearance, in the play’s strongest scene, as a Hasidic mother of seven exchanging notes with Mary Jane at the hospital. Jennifer Clement opens the play as Mary Jane’s tough but empathetic superand closes it in a beautifully quiet appearance as a Buddhist nun.

This exquisite production runs only until Nov. 1 in tiny Studio 16. Run to get a ticket while they’re available. If there’s any justice, this show will get a quick remount in a larger venue. Great theatre.

 

 

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