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.
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The post ‘Caroline’ Review: Chloë Grace Moretz as a Mother Starting Over appeared first on New York Times.
