We Had a World – 18 March 2025

From the beginning, Joshua Harmon’s We Had a World gripped me in the ache of its familiar intergenerational embrace. Told primarily from the voice of Josh (Andrew Barth Feldman), the youngest of the three depicted generations, this tale of two matriarchs sought to understand how the choices one might make as an individual can influence others in extremely unexpected ways – in this case those individuals are people one might not even have made exist yet (one’s offspring and one’s offspring’s offspring). Renee (Joanna Gleeson) as the oldest generation begets Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), an anxious, angry daughter who is smart and accomplished, but living with an undeconstructable pain. Ellen in turn begets Josh, who is trying to fathom the unfathomable as he strips bare his experiences of his grandmother compared to his mother’s self-described experiences with his grandmother in an attempt to understand the broken pieces of his family and how they may have broken something in him. In the end, the conclusion seems to be the Josh turned out right, which shifts the conversation to every child’s nightmare: does Josh have a personal responsibility to fix what he inherited?

We Had a World was touchingly personal: specific enough to have substance but universal enough to evoke emotions – in many cases, actual tears. The pain was immediate and tangible, primarily because of its commitment to evaluating and reevaluating moments of joy as Josh as the protagonist gained context on experiences that seemed simple to a child but were filled with anger for his mother and fraught with complexity for his grandmother, who is always trying to give her grandson good experiences to stay in her daughter‘s good graces, never realizing that her daughter wanted love and good experiences for herself also. Ellen, for her part could not acknowledge any growth in Renee, which drove a wedge between them and prevented Ellen from addressing her own trauma, despite Josh’s very clear ability to identify his mother’s very pressing need to work with a professional.

The staging (Trip Cullman) of this production is brilliant, as was playwright Joshua Harmon‘s bold choice not to put any other characters (mentioned or appearing) on stage. This production stripped away the shroud of a family to unmask and isolate individual roles – in the end it showed that enmeshment cannot stand as an individual moment. At the end, the audience is left with a profoundly moving sadness, and also an impulse to check in with their own families. Many left the theater talking in hushed voices of wanting to do good for their (possibly) neglected or estranged family members in a sincere desire to learn from trauma rather than pass it on and make it someone else’s problem. The greatest accomplishment of We Had a World was watching audience members leave desiring to change their own.

I attended this performance on a press pass from The Press Room.