Caroline is 9 years old, bright and curious, with the precociousness of an only child and the precisely tuned alertness that comes from growing up with an addict in the house. Though her mother, Maddie, has been sober since Caroline was a baby, this is a kid who can sense an eggshell cracking the millisecond someone sets a toe on it.
Still, it never occurred to Caroline to question the basic fact of her not having grandparents on her mother’s side. They were dead, weren’t they?
“Metaphorically,” Maddie says, revealing their existence only because she and Caroline — whose father died when she was tiny — have been plunged into a quietly desperate emergency. They need safety, and they need a place to start over. Maybe, Maddie hopes, her comfortably moneyed parents will help.
Preston Max Allen’s new play, “Caroline,” at MCC Theater, opens on Maddie (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Caroline (River Lipe-Smith) in a booth at a diner in Ohio. They seem like any weary working-class mother and daughter on a road trip, ordering from an all-day breakfast menu — except that Caroline’s arm is in a sling. That freshly set bone, broken in a fit of fury by Maddie’s now ex-partner, is the injury that sent them fleeing their home in West Virginia.
In David Cromer’s sensitively judged production, we pick up on the particulars of their situation bit by bit. What we grasp immediately, though, from Maddie’s protective attentiveness and Caroline’s regular-kid ease, is the strength of the bond between them. They are as precious and necessary to each other as the air they breathe.
At that table in the diner, Caroline asks the waitress for a brownie (no problem) and her mother for a Nintendo Switch (nice try). Then Maddie asks her child, with such gentleness: “Do you have any thoughts on what you want your name to be?” Which is how we learn that Caroline — the name she picks — is trans, and only now being allowed to live fully as herself for the first time.
Soon they show up on the doorstep of Maddie’s childhood home in affluent Evanston, Ill., just outside Chicago. (The set, with its muted tones, is by Lee Jellinek.) There, Rhea (Amy Landecker), Maddie’s mother, is just as surprised to learn of Caroline as Caroline was to learn of her. Any bridges between Maddie and Rhea (and Maddie’s unseen father, away on a business trip) had been torched before Caroline was born.
As Maddie has told Caroline, she fell into addiction as a teenager and stole from her parents more than once, not trivially. Rhea, emotionally chilly and expensively groomed, recalls those times as the most difficult of her life, when she was terrified for her daughter and could not save her. (Costumes are by David Hyman, hair and wigs by Robert Pickens, makeup by Suki Tsujimoto.)
There is no residual trust between Maddie and Rhea. But maybe, for the sake of the waifish Caroline, they can drain some of the poison that floods their every interaction. They do try.
The play’s attention to honesty may be why it is particularly vulnerable to any elements that ring false, like a couple of Caroline lines that seem less rooted in her thinking than in the playwright’s desire for a laugh. More harmful is a late-arriving plot twist so severe that it’s as if Allen has wrested the wheel from his characters. (Warning: vague spoilers ahead.)
We don’t know Rhea well, really; maybe she has always been a steely apparatchik in her marriage. Maybe her agreeing with her husband’s radical terms for helping Maddie and Caroline is to be expected. But it shatters credibility that Maddie doesn’t leap to point out the obvious harm that her parents’ plan would do to Caroline.
Dramaturgically, it is too easy: tension ginned up, humanity permitted on just one side. “Caroline,” so beautifully nuanced until then, deserves better than that.
Caroline
Through Nov. 16 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.