urban excavations

Caroline
Featuring Amy Landecker, River Lipe-Smith, Chloë Grace Moretz
MCC Theater
September 12, 2025 – November 16, 2025 [extension]
production site

Caroline

The resonance of the story in Caroline, three generations and a gender divide that may surprise you, is familiar to anyone who has had a mother, has had a grandmother, has had a family of any stripe. The story feels like dropping in on a private conversation, in quiet tones, directed with customary detail and tenderness by David Cromer. Yes, there is the revelation of a young child certain in her gender transition story (she has no doubt in what is right for her) but this is only part of the ground we cover together in this play.

Preston Max Allen’s play opens with Maddie (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her young daughter Caroline (River Lipe-Smith) in a diner booth ordering breakfast on a road trip. We see that Caroline’s arm is in a sling, we soon learn that it had been broken by Maddie’s partner she has now left, in the West Virginia home they have left behind. Mother and daughter are tender (“tender” is a word that comes to you constantly while viewing this production).

Maddie asks Caroline what she wants her name to be, our first clue that we have an identity transition in process, which is soon clarified to be a gender transition in process. They are on their way to the home of Maddie’s estranged mother Rhea (Amy Landecker, chilly, well groomed, careful) in Illinois, and we know what the main plot lines of this story might be. There is class (working class West Virginians traveling to Midwestern Evanston affluence) and lurking old hurts and harms to work through. And then there is Caroline.

This is not a play of major plot developments but, as is perfect for Cromer’s nuanced directorial skills, a story of subtle and short exchanges, and compelling characterizations and realizations. Moretz is warm, engaging, empathetic as a recovering drug user whose past behaviors and misbehavior have perhaps forever frayed her relationship with Rhea. And while that mother daughter relationship is important to this story, it does not feel like the essential plot line. All points of focus continue to return, even after old battles are re-ignited, to the well-being of Caroline, the astounding Lipe-Smith, who is assured, has pitch perfect comic timing, who knows who she is, perhaps more clearly than her mother or her grandmother.

Cromer’s direction is quietly operatic, Lee Jellinek’s set crafts surprises in the smaller MCC theater space that caused me more than once to gasp.

Caroline is intimate, closely observed, and clear about transgender identity, acceptance, addiction and recovery, class and family dynamics. And then, there’s Caroline. This family comes to a conclusion to best serve her interests that may not please everyone, but it will work for them.

© Martha Wade Steketee (October 1, 2025)

Playwright | Preston Max Allen
Director | David Cromer
Set Design | Lee Jellinek
Costume Design | David Hyman
Lighting Design | Tyler Micoleau
Sound Design| Christopher Darbassie