In one of Toibin’s most disturbing passages, Mary finds odd comfort in distraction as her eye keeps being drawn to the macabre spectacle of a man feeding live rabbits to a huge predatory bird, its cage littered with their half-dead corpses. Irrespective of an audience member’s beliefs, it would seem impossible to be unmoved by the agony of the mother onstage as she relives that cruel loss. The drama crescendos with the Crucifixion, powerfully evoked by Warner and Shaw using coils of barbed wire, a ladder, and heavy iron spikes. Her account of that interaction, during the Wedding at Cana, is among the play’s more hypnotic episodes.
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Mary regards the disciples as weak misfits the miracles, at least in part, as embellished second-hand accounts and the crowd of followers that grew as her son’s fame spread as “a carnival with every malcontent and half-crazed soothsayer in its wake.” She sees Jesus as a victim of some kind of cult of celebrity, gazing at her without recognition as she attempts to warn him of the danger to his life. He is undertaking a nuanced psychological exploration of a figure whose nobility is due in part to her eternal silence, rendering her instead here as a woman who will not be silenced. Provocative as much of the content is, Toibin is not doing anything so blunt as a revisionist interpretation of the Scriptures. It’s a performance requiring enormous reserves of physical and emotional strength, and Shaw meets its demands with her customary ferocity and intelligence. She also has the manic energy of a woman whose refusal of the comforts of sleep – and more pointedly, the healing balm of dreams – has taken her beyond fatigue.ĭuring the course of the play, Shaw tokes compulsively on cigarettes, hauls around vessels of water, restlessly dons and removes clothing, rearranges the sparse furniture or overturns it in a rage, strips naked and plunges into a well as if to wash away the horror Mary has witnessed and her guilt over fleeing the scene of her greatest sorrow. Her Mary is haunted, scornful, a hardened skeptic as uncompromisingly judgmental with herself as she is with others. That conflict is conveyed with lacerating authority by Shaw. Unable to bring herself to say the name of Jesus, she also is resistant to the disciples’ request for a simple factual account that meets their needs as authors of the Gospel, intent on establishing the martyrdom of the man they call the Son of God. But the imagination and emotional impact of the narrative remain striking despite that shift.īoth the novel and the play start with the same words: “They appear more often now, both of them, and on every visit they seem more impatient with me and with the world.” Mary is speaking of her son’s followers, the keepers whose task is to record her recollections of the Crucifixion, the events leading up to it and those that followed. It imposes a level of artifice and intellectual distance on the exchange, particularly in Warner’s conceptualized presentation. But unlike the intimate relationship between reader and book, theater is a collective experience. On the page, when Mary sifts through events of the past and her own conflicted responses to them, it’s a mournful internalized dialogue. The stage treatment is different in that, inevitably, it sacrifices the mesmerizing quietness of the first-person narrator’s voice in the novella. The play in its original version predates the book, performed at the 2011 Dublin Theatre Festival. Toibin published The Testament of Mary as a novella last year to major acclaim, and even by the elevated standards of this uncommonly gifted Irish writer, it’s a work of stunning directness, the austerity of its prose matched by its soul-piercing empathy. And like their last partnership on Broadway a decade ago with Medea, this play takes a figure from the ancient world, enshrouded in myth, and catapults her into modern times – or more accurately, into all time – as a flesh-and-blood woman. In Colm Toibin’s harrowing theatrical monologue, the stoical grace traditionally attributed to this most beloved figure in religious iconography is stripped away by degrees, exposing the raw pain and anger of an unforgiving mother grieving the senseless loss of her son.Ī dense, boldly unorthodox piece for risk-averse Broadway, it has been directed with transfixing focus by Deborah Warner, whose frequent collaborations with Shaw go back 25 years. Or possibly the live vulture perched nearby. Or the obsessive agitation with which she turns an apple in her left hand. Perhaps it’s the troubled intensity with which Shaw mutters unheard words to herself.