Caroline
Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo
Three generations of women navigate intense, complex mother-daughter bonds in Caroline, an alternately quiet and explosive drama by Preston Max Allen. At the center is doting, determined single mom Maddie (Chloë Grace Moretz, marvelous), who’s taking her 9-year-old daughter, Caroline (River Lipe-Smith), out of a clearly dangerous domestic situation; Caroline’s broken arm is our clue. Their destination: Maddie’s parents’ home in Illinois. “You have parents?” Caroline asks. “I thought they were dead.” Grandma Rhea (Transparent’s Amy Landecker) welcomes the pair, but with extreme caution. Her last glimpse of Maddie was about 10 years and $70,000 ago—long before Maddie got sober, or became a mom herself.
Caroline | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
Maddie swallows her pride because she needs her parents’ assistance: Caroline is trans, and day-to-day life has been getting complicated—and dangerous—back home in West Virginia; she needs to find a school, doctors, therapy. “I just need help. I need help, with this. I need you to help me,” Maddie pleads. Rhea’s reaction is surprisingly nonchalant: “Sylvia Defret’s grandson is transgender. He’s in college now, he’s doing very well. We don’t have any sort of problem with this.”
One wonderful thing about Allen’s play is that Caroline’s transness isn’t a source of rancor or debate—only of practical questions, mostly from Caroline, who’s in a question-everything phase: “Where am I gonna go to...