Theatre in Review: Caroline (MCC Theater) One of the greatest pleasures the theatre offers is when a new writer appears, offering a fresh, distinctive voice. So it is with Preston Max Allen, author of Caroline, which, in David Cromer's tightly controlled production, bristles with brutal honesty. The title character is the nine-year-old trans daughter of Maddie, a recovering alcoholic with a lengthy trail of disasters in her past. When the lights come up, they are on the lam from Maddie's ex-partner, a cop, who, in a moment of fury, broke Caroline's arm. Fleeing West Virginia and heading for points west, the plan is to stop off at the home of Sam's parents, pick up some financial aid, and start a new life somewhere. This wing-and-a-prayer plan stalls upon arrival in the Chicago suburbs, where Rhea, Maddie's mother, offers a distinctly chilly reception. To be fair, Rhea hasn't seen Maddie in more than a decade, around the time she assaulted her father. There's also the little matter of $70,000 Sam owes her parents. ("Um. I used some of it for the rehab program when I was pregnant," Maddie bristles. "So you can feel good about that.") Then again, Maddie has spent the last ten years building a decent life, working as a pet store manager, and raising a child under difficult circumstances. She can fend for herself and her daughter, and she doesn't take to being treated as a clinical case by the suspicious Rhea. Add to this combustible mix the presence of Caroline, a sweet-looking, sweet-voiced moppet who doesn't miss a trick. Coming upon Rhea alone in the kitchen, consoling herself with a glass of wine, she says, "We don't have alcohol in the house." The pregnant silence that follows causes Rhea to beat a retreat, storing away her bottle for the duration. A just-us-girls museum trip finds Rhea uncomfortably peppered with questions from her granddaughter. Maddie, she notes defensively, "was nothing like me. Or her father." "Did you have an affair?" asks Caroline. "God, no," Rhea replies, adding, "You're very...mature." The best thing about Allen's script is that, instead of pleading the case for trans people in TED Talk fashion, as other recent shows have done, it simply accepts Caroline's trans nature as a fact of life, using it to increase the dramatic stakes. Maddie is only facing her humiliating parental gauntlet because she needs help finding a community (and school system) where the girl won't be bullied or subject to wrangling about her bathroom choice. Rhea, who is remarkably okay with Caroline's status -- "We're not Republicans," she says, with some asperity -- has nevertheless been burned too many times by Maddie, who, admittedly, brought home no end of trouble and strife. But it's also likely that Rhea's frosty affection triggered Maddie's rebellious instinct, and even now she presides over a household with a glaring shortage of grace. Their conflict over Caroline's future is really a proxy battle over years of accumulated emotional scars. In Cromer's intensely nuanced production, you'll feel the anger and pain lurking behind the most casual remark. Chloe Grace Moretz, not known for her stage work, is an effectively weary, wounded survivor as Maddie, deflecting each of her daughter's comments and provocations, girding herself for battle with her mother, and painfully owning her truckload of bad choices. Most of all, she knows the score: "Would you have let me in, if [Caroline] wasn't here?" she quietly asks Rhea, knowing that no answer will be forthcoming. Amy Landecker, an ice sculpture draped in matching beige tones, is ideal as Rhea, a world-class underminer with no need to spell out her insults. "You were dating a cop?" she asks Maddie. "Did you meet him when you were...." She trails off, making a helpless gesture that Maddie instantly gets. "No, Mom, we met in AA," she says, offended at the implication that she was manhunting behind bars. At the same time, it's impossible not to feel for Rhea, baffled that her comfortable, conventional life has brought her to this stark place. And when she makes a proposal that is both coldly practical and psychologically disastrous, she has no real answer when Maddie asks what might happen if Caroline "has a drink one day? And she has a problem, like I do, and you don't get the second chance you think this is?" Pacing this understated, yet devastating, standoff is River Lipe-Smith as Caroline, making an Off-Broadway debut and handling a complex role like a longtime pro. Lee Jellinek's set design initially depends on several small arrangements of furniture, then executes a small coup when the upstage wall of Rhea's house flies in; the resulting interior is cold and empty, a perfect staging ground for family ghosts to run around Tyler Micoleaus lighting is sensitively handled, especially a striking tableau when Maddie, caught in a cold downstage wash, smokes a cigarette as, upstage, light spills through a door into an otherwise dark kitchen, as an offstage Rhea confers on the phone with her husband; it's a strikingly lonely image. David Hyman's costumes and Christopher Darbassie's sound design are both solid. Caroline takes a little while to get going, and its wrap-up is arguably too brusque, if only because one is eager to know what happens next. But Allen is one of the biggest finds MCC has brought us in several seasons. He's a dramatist through and through, and he has probing access to each of his characters. We can expect great things from him. --David Barbour 
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