Mama Tried

Every Kenneth Lonergan production is, at its center, a story of nihilism resisted or indulged. Usually the characters engaged in these struggles haven’t yet made it out of their twenties. In his breakout play, This Is Our Youth (1996), about newly minted high school graduates wallowing around the Upper West Side, nineteen-year-old Jessica Goldman flirts at once with her crush and with the void. The fact that people change, sometimes dramatically, as they age distresses her to no end. “It just basically invalidates whoever you are right now,” she tells her love interest, local fuckup Warren Straub. “It just makes your whole self at any given point in your life seem so completely dismissable. So it’s like, what’s the point?”

Lonergan gave himself a bit part in his first feature film, You Can Count on Me (2000), as a chill small-town priest named Ron who makes house calls in a plaid shirt. Dropping in one day on aimless, troublemaking Terry (Mark Ruffalo), at the behest of his concerned older sister (Laura Linney), Ron urges the faithless young man not to get too hung up on religious precepts and asks him simply if he thinks his life is important. “I don’t particularly think that anybody’s life has any particular importance besides whatever, you know, like, whatever we arbitrarily give it,” Terry mutters defensively. 

Lonergan’s most fully realized aspiring nihilist, from his second feature, Margaret (2011), is a Manhattan prep school student named Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin). After being unwittingly involved in a bus accident that leaves a woman dead, Lisa, like Terry, is struck by the apparent arbitrariness of existence. Over the course of the film she tries with all her might, in ways both conscious and not, to destroy the close relationship she once had with her exhausted single mother (J. Smith-Cameron). Lucky for Lisa, her mother is an actress. She knows a thing or two about dramatic displays, not to mention the necessity of cobbling together a meaningful life out of passing illusions. 

“In some way,” Lonergan once told The New Yorker, “a teen-ager can be—in a play or a movie, anyway—a metaphor for a grownup, which is a half-formed person coping with the world.” That would make the thirty-nine-year-old protagonist of his play Hold On to Me Darling (2016) the real thing at last: a long way from his mother’s home and still not done growing. Yet he somehow feels less substantial than the other “half-formed” people in Lonergan’s oeuvre. His given name is Clarence McCrane and his stage name is Strings—as in always the one pulling them. Strings enjoys a large self-made fortune and the status of “third-biggest crossover star in the history of country music.” He’s shooting a movie that takes place in outer space by way of Kansas City when he gets the news that his mother has died of a stroke. Suddenly he finds himself regretting years wasted on flashy careerism, wishing he could start again from scratch.

At the Lucille Lortel Theater, where Neil Pepe’s revival of Hold On to Me Darling is underway, the show opens onto a well-appointed Kansas City hotel room where Strings (Adam Driver) and his unreasonably devoted assistant, Jimmy (Keith Nobbs), figure out how the star can pause his professional commitments to attend the funeral. Strings—dressed all in black, cowboy hat included—is in mourning for his mother but also, like any good Chekhovian prattler, for his squandered life. Driver is excellent, disappearing into this larger-than-life figure and imbuing him with adolescent gravitas. Later in the play his lover, Nancy (Heather Burns), refers to him affectionately as “baby man.” 

Strings’s mother, we soon learn, always disapproved of his celebrity lifestyle: the short-lived relationships with beautiful and accomplished women, the restlessness, the PR. She wanted him to settle down with an honest woman—whatever that means—and have kids. Now Strings reckons she was right all along and feels the weight of her disappointment. He confronts this challenge with a curious mix of down-home values and alienated ravings befitting an American sex symbol. 

Strings turns maudlin as he bemoans the shallowness of his past girlfriends: “All they see is Strings McCrane. How can you grab hold of a man who isn’t there? How can you touch something you don’t feel?…I been empty inside, I been dead inside for years.” His mother’s death, he says, has awakened him to his terrible, true condition. But one feels he’s cycled through such revelations before. Watch him for long enough and a Merle Haggard song starts playing in your head: “Despite all my Sunday learnin’/Towards the bad, I kept on turnin’/Til Mama couldn’t hold me anymore.”

Not ten minutes into the play Strings locks eyes with the woman he will eventually marry. This is Nancy, who works in the hotel as a massage therapist. (“I can feel my tissues expellin’ them negative toxins,” Strings exclaims during their first meeting.) She is already married with kids, but that’s no serious obstacle. Walt Spangler’s folksy set pieces rotate by like pages in a jukebox, and before long Nancy has joined Strings in his hometown of Beaumont, Tennessee, for his mother’s funeral. Once there he also has a fling with his second cousin twice removed, a good-hearted schoolteacher named Essie (Adelaide Clemens) whose husband and father have recently died in a drag racing accident. The nostalgia tour continues when Strings pressures his brother, Duke (CJ Wilson), into purchasing the local feed store and running it alongside him. Strings backs out of his singing and acting commitments and flirts with another version of the void: bankruptcy.

For all its manifold story lines Hold On to Me Darling feels light on conflict and consequence. Strings may be a loser, but he’s a tall, handsome, rich, famous loser. That, and talented. We have to take everyone’s word for it, since he never sings or even recites any of his beloved lyrics. In fact Lonergan pokes fun at his verbal clumsiness. As Strings wipes up some coffee he’s accidentally spilled on Essie’s hand, he describes her tender appendage as “red like a rose in the shape of a hand.” 

The rest of the characters, with the exception of Duke, bend over backward to please him, flattening out their own personalities in the process. Strings isn’t as interesting as he could be either. He can be entitled and vain, a bit too successful for his own good, but these aren’t such formidable demons, and the show doesn’t do all that much with them. Nancy, fashioning herself as another censorious mother figure, encourages Strings to think of himself as a soldier in the war against American immorality: “Every time a man like you, whose every move is watched over by millions of adoring fans, every time you go to jail, or crash a car, or get some poor girl pregnant, or transmit filthy electronic photos of yourself through cyberspace…this whole country gets a little more cynical, a little more dirty.” Strings takes Nancy’s pious admonishments as encouragement to leap into the minor role of upstanding small business owner, work for which he is not at all suited.

Some aspects of the proceedings never add up. Essie is portrayed as the play’s meekly moral heart, but many of her lines are bolder and more world-weary than the production gives her credit for. When Strings shows up at her house in the middle of the night, she spends most of the scene dismissing his goofy advances. “Is my powers unbalancin’ your agency?” he asks, using parlance of a recent HR training. “That’s very thoughtful,” Essie replies, “but this is Beaumont, Tennessee, and I’m a grown woman. You just keep your powers where they are.” In the second act Nancy and Jimmy, who have previously been nothing but cordial toward each other, are suddenly transformed into enemies vying for Strings’s affection. “I’m tired of that little sycophant,” Nancy declares. “I’m not goin’ to let him undermine our relationship.” 

The biggest head-scratcher is the final scene, in which Strings’s father, Mitch McCrane (Frank Wood), invoked only once so far, turns up at the feed store. Jimmy tracked him down at Strings’s request, but everyone else, surely including most of the audience, had long forgotten that subplot. Strings hasn’t seen Mitch—now settled in California with a second wife and family—since he was eight. If Strings has dominated and charmed the world, then Mitch has been humbled and used by it. Mild by nature, he says he stayed away in deference to Strings’s strong-willed mother, but he’s kept a loving eye on him ever since. He’s even brought along a scrapbook full of his son’s media clippings. When father and son embrace at the end of the play, its effect is muddled. Does the scene represent real closure for Strings? Or is Mitch just another sentimental swell in the ballad of his infamous life?

Lonergan’s masterpiece, Margaret, ends with a similar but far more successful image of parent reuniting with child. Its setting is a performance of The Tales of Hoffmann at the Metropolitan Opera House. Throughout the film, Lonergan favors a heady rush of short scenes featuring Lisa at school and at home, with lovers and friends, modulated by the occasional lingering shot of a skyline or street. Each time Lisa or her mother appears onscreen a variation of moral conflict plays out: in classrooms, in bedrooms, in rooms with lawyers present. After many screaming fights, Lisa has reluctantly accepted her mother’s invitation to the opera, but the two remain on shaky ground.

A shot of the sunburst chandelier that hovers over the opera house puts one in mind of an earlier scene, in which Lisa’s English class discusses Gloucester’s lines from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods/They kill us for their sport.” The light seems to look down upon the theatergoers no less indifferently. When it dims, the audience members clap; in a way Lisa and her mother are greeting the curtain that still rises each day on their lives. As the third act commences, Lisa, tears streaming down her face, can no longer indulge nihilism. She reaches out to embrace her mother, and her mother embraces her back. They have everything to hold on to.