McAdams rapidly started getting ready, working with a motion coach and a voice coach in order that she would be capable to ship Herzog’s lengthy strains with out sounding out of breath. (“My youngsters are questioning, ‘What’s Mommy doing within the basement blowing by means of these humorous straws?’ ”) However she has additionally been making real-world connections with different dad and mom to realize perception into what somebody in Mary Jane’s place would possibly undergo. That publicity opened her as much as the lived actuality of fogeys caring for sick kids. “You’re all of a sudden a part of a totally completely different world,” she says. That world might be very full, however “it can be very reduce off.”

Weeks earlier than I meet Herzog, I spent every week within the hospital with my very own son; he was despatched there with encephalitis, or irritation within the mind. It may be very severe, and within the first hours within the ER and the quick days that adopted, nobody would promise something. It was as if I had landed on one other planet, and I stored pondering of the Lorrie Moore brief story, “Individuals Like That Are the Solely Individuals Right here,” through which the mom of a child who’s recognized, abruptly, with most cancers narrates her fast slide into one other actuality.

After I point out that story to Herzog, she tells me she considers it one thing of a “biblical textual content.” Herzog has at all times written about her personal life in a technique or one other. In her performs After the Revolution (2010) and 4000 Miles (which earned her a Pulitzer nomination in 2013), she remodeled her communist grandmother right into a central character, even lifting her personal phrases for strains of dialogue. However Mary Jane is likely to be probably the most private excavation but. Herzog had a daughter who was born with profound well being challenges, and that daughter died final yr. “There have been sure issues that I learn earlier than having a sick youngster,” she says, “and I knew I needed to return to them.” Herzog as soon as met Moore at an occasion for the American Academy of Arts and Letters and made certain to inform her how deeply her brief story had resonated together with her. “It was virtually as if I knew I used to be going to wish it,” she says.

In most methods, she provides, the specifics of Mary Jane “don’t mirror my real-life expertise in any respect.” Nice artwork, after all, does this: It compels by means of its specificity, however appeals by means of its universality. “There are components of the play that can curiosity individuals who have gone
by means of what the character within the play goes by means of,” says Manhattan Theater Membership’s inventive director, Lynne Meadow, however it’s in the end about “optimism and braveness and humor—that’s how the character meets adversity.”

On the finish of our interview, I ask Herzog if there’s the rest she desires so as to add. “I believe there’s a deficit on the market when it comes to incapacity consciousness,” she tells me. “I need folks to be extra aware of their concern about incapacity, about sickness, about it clouding their means to enter a narrative with out the distancing sensation of pity. Pity is what means that you can be like: ‘That’s not me.’ ” She is conscious that the course of her personal life lately has doubtlessly added a layer of gravity to the manufacturing. “After I wrote the play, my daughter was alive. However my challenge was to jot down not concerning the tragedy of getting a sick child, however concerning the form of group and solidarity and unusual blessings, to make use of a tacky phrase, that emerged from caring for a sick youngster, and the way in which this lady is making which means and discovering group. And so my concern now could be simply that individuals proceed to see it in that gentle.”

When rehearsals begin in late February, there are icebreakers, tales instructed about previous jobs. “We simply form of frolicked collectively as a forged and sat round speaking,” says McAdams. She is clearly newly buoyed by the power of New York—seeing previous mates, having her youngsters go to the penguins on the Central Park Zoo, experiencing the pleasant clubbiness of backstage Broadway life for the primary time. “We went out to get some lunch yesterday between rehearsals and bumped into the forged of Cabaret on the line for the deli,” she says. Studying strains for a play—significantly when enjoying a personality who’s onstage for the whole lot of it—is not any small endeavor: “I’m glad we reside in a time when it appears like all people is speaking to themselves, as a result of I’m doing that always.”