Theatre in Review: Sabbath's Theater (The New Group)/It's That Time of the Month (Soho Rep)

	John Turturro. Photo: Monique Carboni

This is Off Broadway's Vulva Week. That's a statement I never thought I'd make, but there you are. At the New Group, Sabbath's Theater opens with John Turturro and Elizabeth Marvel feigning sexual climax behind a screen on which is projected an animation featuring revolving female genitals. (The actors are also talking about their favorite grilled meat dish, as one does.) Meanwhile, downtown at Soho Rep, at the show with the full title of Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It's That Time of the Month, the entire upstage wall of Greg Corbino's set consists of a pair of spread female legs, allowing the actors to enter and exit through the...well, you know.

Today, the password is "transgression." In some ways, these productions represent the opposite poles of the Off-Broadway scene. Sabbath's Theater is a star vehicle adapted from Philip Roth's National Book Award-winning novel, supported by a top director and a prominent design team. That Time of the Month aims low and goes lower, trying to draw laughs out of such comic standbys as herpes and yeast infections. And yet, watching each show work itself into a sweat (among other bodily fluids) trying to scandalize audiences, they struck me as strangely alike. These days, it's tough work trying to be a theatrical provocateur; indeed, it may be impossible.

In book form, Sabbath's Theater remains a reliable jaw-dropper. Even for Roth, whose depictions of unreconstructed male sexual aggression have made him equally revered and reviled, the adventures of Mickey Sabbath, a retired theatre director and puppeteer sidelined by arthritis, is a hilariously calculated offense. Mickey, stuck in the Berkshires, trapped in a joyless marriage, and trying to live down a phone sex scandal with a college girl, carries on shamelessly with Drenka, the wife of a local innkeeper. When Drenka dies, horribly, of cancer, Mickey's life, already in a rickety state, spins wildly out of control. In New York for the funeral of an old colleague, he holes up in the apartment of his longtime friend, Norman, a theatre producer. He repays his host's considerable kindness by defiling his daughter's underwear and trying to seduce his wife, Michelle. Expelled -- but not before stealing $10,000 and some nude photos of Michelle -- Mickey ends up in his Jersey Shore hometown, shopping for cemetery plots, visiting his only living relative (a doddering centenarian), and contemplating suicide.

It's a picaresque tale on a downward slant, hurtling its protagonist toward perdition with alarming momentum. In all his priapic, anarchic intensity, Mickey nevertheless represents some kind of life principle; he's an uncontrolled id howling his defiance in the face of death. You turn the pages, appalled, amused, and fearful over what will happen next. But that ferocious momentum is exactly what is lacking in the stage adaptation by Turturro and Ariel Levy. Edited and condensed into a series of discrete episodes, it loses any sense of Mickey's increasingly desperate circumstances and reduces his boundless malice and unchecked libido to a rude comedy routine. Passages that seem so vivid on the page feel flat and stagey when acted out; rather than gasping at Mickey masturbating at Denka's grave, one instead notes how artfully the projection designer depicts the emission of sperm. The play reproduces most of the book's key events but its most distinctive feature, the author's scalding, offensive, irrepressible voice, is muted.

Most notably absent is any sense of tragedy. Lurking in the book's background is a terrible, ever-present ache -- for Mickey's aging body; for his first wife, who vanished under mysterious circumstances; and his brother, whose wartime death is the narrative's primal, unhealed wound. As Mickey, Turturro radiates a Zorba-the-Greek lust for life -- it's always a pleasure to be reminded of his powerful stage presence -- but his characterization is ultimately flat and two-dimensional. In contrast, Marvel delivers a tour-de-force as Mickey's regiment of women, especially lusty Drenka, frigid Roseanna, and games-playing Michelle. Jason Kravits is solid as, among others, Norman and Mickey's elderly cousin.

Arnulfo Maldonado's set seems mostly designed to keep the story moving and to facilitate the projections, by Alex Basco Koch, which, in turn, highlight Erik Sanko's shadow puppet designs. Jeff Croiter's lighting is typically solid as is Mikaal Sulaiman's sound design. Despite Mickey's outrageous antics, Jo Bonney's direction can't prevent a sense of drift; this is not typical of her and would seem to be the fault of the material. Turturro and Levy clearly share a boundless love for Roth's novel, but they haven't solved the problem of turning Sabbath's Theater into real theatre. I suspected this production might prove difficult; I never thought it would be this dull.

That Time of the Month is dull, too, largely because of its relentless insistence on publicizing private parts. We are at a talk show hosted by Snatch, America's "disembodied vaginal sweetheart," and Tainty, who was a penis but, thanks to a MeToo scandal, has been reduced to a taint. (Look it up. I did.) Be warned: Audience participation is the order of the day. One patron is asked to find Snatch's clitoris. In a game called "Sore Wars," another is drafted to toss whiffle balls, representing herpes infections, onto Snatch's costume. (Velcro is involved.) Another lark, titled "Hustle and Flow," features two men in a beat-the-clock exercise, trying to correctly strap on old-style sanitary napkin belts. (It is harder than it looks.) This morphs into "Mx. America," in which the same guys are given beauty pageant sashes and asked questions about menstruation. Did I mention the HIV puppet?

A special guest is featured at each performance. At the one I attended, Bridget Everett, the downtown comic and star of the MAX series Somebody Somewhere, was in the hot seat, talking about, among other things, her abortions, and her mother's diaphragm (it's a long story). Everett, who really knows how to work an audience, unintentionally highlighted the sloppiness of Becca Blackwell (Snatch) and Amanda Duarte (Tainty), who, during a semi-improvised performance, frequently talk over each other while sometimes seeming to lose track of what is supposed to happen next. In any case, Everett, the best of sports, took part in a rebirth ceremony with her usual elan.

Underneath all the fooling around is a political point about the depredations of capitalism and the marginalization of women and LGBTQ people. A sequence called "Funny Headlines" turns out to be a not-so-funny roundup of stories about bathroom trans bans, attacks on gay dads, and anti-LGBTQ hate crimes. (To be sure, each is accompanied by an extended fart noise.) Also featured is a PSA for a real-life service that delivers abortion pills through the mail. Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett puppets are produced and stashed in hazmat bags. Performing these bits at Soho Rep is the very definition of preaching to the choir, undermining the show's claim to be daring.

Near the end, Blackwell -- who has done fine work in the plays Hurricane Diane and Is This a Room -- sheds the Snatch costume and, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, speaks directly about their experience as a trans person. (It is not lost on Blackwell that they have evolved into a middle-aged white man, the sort of person their colleagues often regard with a certain suspicion.) It is an honest description of their experience as an outlier in a binary society, making a heartfelt plea for us to envision a world where people aren't limited by categories. It is by far the most affecting thing in the show, and it suggests that Blackwell might build an entire evening around their story. The speech is so effective because, after an evening of puerile genital jokes, it considers the whole person and their connection to the larger world. It also points to a persistent problem with so many downtown theatre artists, who, in a mad world crying out for mordant commentary, are largely obsessed with their gender identity issues. In focusing so intently on their nether parts, I fear they are really gazing at their navels.

The director Jess Barbagallo keeps things on just this side of chaos, and he has certainly gotten imaginative work from Corbino and costume designer Amanda Villalobos. Kate McGee's lighting is solid, as is ien DeNio's sound. (Duarte handles the sound effects and live scoring from her onstage laptop.) The most original work is supplied by animator Derek Rippe and video designer Nicholas Zeig-Owens, who provide pointed satiric cartoon sequences between scenes.

You can't criticize That Time of the Month for its vulgarity, its obsession with all (and I mean all) bodily excretions; it is, in fact, a point of pride for everyone involved. But some wit would have been nice. Everyone involved has taken the sadly naïve view that simply putting these things onstage is the very soul of comedy. Like Sabbath's Theater, it wants desperately to provoke. As a starting point, it's fair enough. But what else have they got? --David Barbour