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The subtext of the scene is that the doctor, leaving room for hope, is gently trying to get the mother to realize the bleakness of her child’s prospects and thus better weigh the risks and benefits. Herzog’s skill as a writer means that you feel the conversation alongside McAdams’ character, you are alongside her on a journey no one wants to take. As the 95-minute show progresses, the audience becomes oriented on Mary Jane’s world and gets up to speed on her son Alex’s condition. Mary Jane’s daily schedule revolves around medications, machines, timers and very little sleep. Alex has been assigned a fleet of night nurses, but Sherry (April Matthis), who has worked with the mother and son for the past year, is the most consistent and dependable. Her nurturing energy extends beyond the young boy to Mary Jane, making the trio a makeshift family.
Designers
Jane Quimby (Erica Dasher), an average, everyday 16-year-old girl, winds up with a job at the prestigious fashion company Donovan Decker and a chance to work with a world-famous designer, Gray Chandler Murray (Andie MacDowell) and her quirky co-workers, Jeremy Jones (Rowley Dennis), India Jourdain (India de Beaufort). They do not know how old she is or that she is still in high school. Here you will find an overview of the cast & crew of the Jane by Design series from the year 2012, including all actors, actresses and the director. When you click on the name of an actor, actress or director from the Jane by Design series, you can view more films and/or series by him or her. A teenager leads a double life as a high-school student and an assistant to a fashion executive. And so much does she desire Alex’s comfort, his fleeting moments of child joy, despite tubes and immobility and illness.
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But the takeaway from time spent at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre goes beyond even that realization. You leave after 90 minutes with a near-crushing awareness of the unfairness of life, how some moms with a well of parental love inside get to stand in playgrounds on gorgeous fall afternoons while their kids run around and laugh. Meanwhile, others are forced to deal with hospital beds and code blues, the ups and downs of shifting diagnoses, live-in nurses, drug regimens and hospital music therapists who cannot be tracked down in time.
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A teenager lands a job at Donovan Decker, a hip fashion house, when they mistake her for an adult. Jane soon finds herself juggling life both as a regular high school student and as an assistant to a high powered executive in the cutthroat world of fashion... It’s McAdams’s Broadway debut, and though she started the play, in my viewing, a bit jittery and unnaturally rhythmic, she soon settled into her role as the linchpin in this young’s boy curtailed life with magnetic ease.

The play, to be clear, is not about the kid (who we never fully see), but about his mom and her experience caring first for her child at home and then in the hospital. The writer draws from her own experience with a sick child and as you watch this journey you constantly think to yourself that Herzog must have had that very conversation. They’re all too visceral to have been made from whole cloth.
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Season 1 of Jane by Design premiered on January 3, 2012. The following is a table with the average estimated number of viewers per episode of Jane by Design on ABC Family.
Series Cast 11
MovieMeter aims to be the largest, most complete movie archive with reviews and rankings, in the World. Our team of journalists delivers the latest news for movies and TV shows. Before landing the the role of Suzanne Sugarbaker on Designing Women in 1986, Delta Burke, now 67, had earned several television roles starting in the late 1970s.
Season Info
All this happened without a major overhaul to Michael Greif’s production, which has a book by Kristoffer Diaz. The cast and creative teams are essentially the same, and there have been judicious tweaks and trims rather than radical changes. The main differences are further refined technical elements and, most important, a subtle but crucial change in focus. In 1993, she lent her voice to the Pink Panther series and later appeared on High Society, Style and Substance, In-Laws, 24, Samantha Who and more voiceover work on the Disney Channel series Kim Possible — to name a few.
It’s a tricky system to capture in a tight play with a five-person cast and sparse, economical staging at the Samuel J Friedman Theatre, but it’s one this Broadway edition, directed by Anne Kauffman, manages to wrangle through the nucleus of Mary Jane. She’s the center of a network of women who help care for Alex, from contracted at-home nurses to emergency room doctors to supportive parents of fellow chronically ill children. The first half of the play takes place in Mary Jane’s Queens apartment, which is small, bright and lightly cluttered and which levitates to reveal a sterile, eerily white hospital set for the second half.
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Hard to think of another play that understands so well. Potts married husband James Hayman in 1990, and they later welcomed two children together. Potts is also mom to son Clay Senechal, whom she shares with ex-husband B.
Jane by Design follows Jane Quimby a quirky teen with an eclectic chic fashion sense who lands a job at a hip fashion house when they mistake her for an adult. Torn between her love of fashion and the need to finish high school, Jane conceals her true age to assist the demanding, but talented Gray Chandler Murray who travels the world in search of the next big style trend. Mary Jane is a personal assistant who is struggling to care for her child and keep her job and McAdams has a cheery, round face and infectious smile.
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In 1976, she also originated the role of Melba Snyder in Broadway's Pal Joey. After starring as Julia Sugarbaker on all seven seasons of Designing Women, she played Randi King on Family Law beginning in 1999. All the actors in “Mary Jane” save for McAdams portray dual characters in the first two acts. Jared Janas and Brenda Abbandandolo, respectively, work well.
Mary Jane (Academy Award nominee Rachel McAdams) sits in the small kitchen of her one-bedroom apartment, speaking to her super, Ruthie (Brenda Wehle). While Ruthie plunges desperately into the clogged sink, Mary Jane chats aimlessly. As she drones on with an eerie cheeriness, desperate to fill in the dead air, it’s immediately apparent this is a rare opportunity for her to socialize. Though Ruthie initially attempts to indulge Mary Jane, pity takes over, and the older woman instead begins to advise her tenant on the wonders of good sleep hygiene and self-care. Even armed with her cloak of optimism, it’s apparent to everyone except Mary Jane that her emotional well-being is teetering on the edge. The series was canceled after one season while plans were in the works for a second season.
She also appeared on the big screen in films like Garden State, The Accountant and Babylon. In 2017 she kicked off her one her longest-running roles to date — second only to Designing Women — as Meemaw on Young Sheldon. Into the 2000s, Carter appeared in Broadway's Thoroughly Modern Millie and later on several episodes of Desperate Housewives, in a role that earned her an Emmy nomination, before her final role in 2009's That Evening Sun, which she appeared in alongside her husband, actor Hal Holbrook. She has the help of her childhood Best Friend Billy (Nick Roux), although his hidden relationship with Jane's rival/bully Lulu Pope (Meagan Tandy) causes problems in school.
The power of the performance lies in McAdams’ ability to deglamorize herself without letting that undermine the formidable, everyday optimism of this character. How could all of this happen to her, you keep thinking, letting the play send your mind spinning as to what life for Mary Jane would have been like without this challenge. “Mary Jane,” which stars the excellent Rachel McAdams in the title role and was first seen at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2017, is a closely observed play, reflective of the same attention to detail that its title character showers on her child, who has cerebral palsy.
We hear his machine’s beeps and whirs, see his mountain of stuffed animals on a hospital bed, jolt and hurdle along his journey from medical hiccup to crisis. And yet, as Mary Jane – the titular mother so movingly, hauntingly embodied by Rachel McAdams – insists, he can understand her. Medical dramas are very difficult to stage in a live theater for all kinds of reasons. But director Anne Kauffman (with the help of a simple but emotionally rich design from Lael Jellinek) calibrates this one with an authenticity utterly unfamiliar to hospital procedurals.