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But she scoffs at their narrative of miracles and divinity.
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From her exile in Ephesus, she obligingly describes for them each stop on the His Greatest Hits tour: the healing of the cripple at Bethesda the raising of Lazarus (which is for once rendered so as to sound truly wretched) the wedding at Cana and of course the crucifixion. First, Mary resists the men’s hagiography. “All of it?”īut two not-quite-parallel things happen as the story unfolds. Like many Christians today, the first apostles, writing what will become the gospels, want her to provide a version of the story of Jesus’s life that will “live forever” and “change the world.” But a more apt description of the time would be “always.” The 90-minute monologue begins with Shaw, as Mary, telling of her ongoing interrogation by two men who are evidently among her late son’s disciples - “a group of misfits,” she calls them, “who cannot even look a woman in the eye.” That interrogation of Mary has, in effect, never stopped. Tóibín identifies the setting as “now” - perhaps to head off accusations of blasphemy as his Mary drinks and smokes and bathes before us naked, eventually saying things that might prove, for the Church if not all believers, quite shocking. The visitors are ushered back to their seats, the Plexiglas box disassembles, Pinhead exits, and Shaw’s costume transforms into something more modern as the play proper starts. How overwhelming an audience looks to the one being watched! That too is a context that the director, Deborah Warner, wants playgoers to grasp.Īnd then, as if whisked by a broom, it all disappears. Indeed, it was at this point, looking up and out for the first time, that I took in, from the perspective of the stage, the buzzing tiers of the Walter Kerr.
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Implicitly, we are being asked to accept that we are in a place of imagined stories - and to wonder if, in that regard, the church and the theater are much different. An actor’s teacups, hand-rolled cigarettes, a rehearsal chair with a heap of papers on which portions of the script have been copied by hand. Some of the other elements in this museum, though, are artifacts not of the church but of the theater. That’s the received Mary of Catholic teaching: beatific, matronly, all but mute. She smiles slightly and seems to be murmuring, perhaps rehearsing lines. The most obvious is art centuries of painted Mariolatry are summed up in the astonishing image of Fiona Shaw sitting in a Plexiglas box, dressed in Renaissance robes of coral and turquoise, with a sheaf of calla lilies cradled in her right arm and in her left hand an apple. There are others, and the artifacts arranged for your inspection as if at an archeological museum - the superb design is by Tom Pye - suggest some of them. In purporting to tell a “real” story of Mary, Colm Tóibín’s play (based on his novella, itself based on an earlier play) necessarily puts the New Testament matriarch in several contexts, one of which is death. Pinhead and the rest of the preshow will get a lot of attention, but they are not gimmicks. Before the lights go down at The Testament of Mary, when the audience is invited onstage to look around, he stands tethered to a table, staring beadily as if offended while people take pictures with their iPhones.
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Now comes the most unusual second banana of all: a 3-year-old yellow-headed vulture named Pinhead. Alan Cumming’s psych-ward Macbeth includes a doctor and orderly who hover constantly and occasionally speak. What does it mean, these shows implicitly ask, to be alone - in history, onstage? Not only have there been more solo plays than usual, but their casts have stretched the definition of “solo.” Ann, a one-woman show about the late Texas governor Ann Richards, also features the prerecorded voice of Julie White as her secretary. Remember the season when every other show was about race? Or the one that got dragged down with drag? Likewise, many of this spring’s Broadway offerings seem to have conspired to address an accidental theme. Fiona Shaw in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary.