Theatre in Review: The Testament of Mary (Walter Kerr Theatre)

	Fiona Shaw: Photo: Paul Kolnik

The Testament of Mary begins with Fiona Shaw, by a pool, flicking bits of water with her fingers and smiling with childlike satisfaction. If you caught her last Broadway way, the gesture is enough to make your blood run cold. At the end of her 2002 Medea, she sat next to a pool, giggling and flicking drops of water at her grieving husband, Jason. (Whether the children she had murdered were on stage, I mercifully no longer recall; the final image was disturbing enough.) In The Testament of Mary, Shaw plays Mary, the mother of Jesus, presumably a more benign parent figure. And yet a disturbing thought occurs: With that simple, yet distinct, gesture, is she attempting -- either consciously or unconsciously -- to connect these two towering female figures of antiquity?

Perhaps not, but as played by Shaw, Mary is a woman of Medea-like furies. If her rages can evoke the terrors of the earth, even in moments of quiet introspection, she can rattle your nerves. The author, Colm Toíbín, has imagined Mary later in life, after Christ's death; a woman alone, she isn't at all happy to be visited by his followers. "They want to make what happened live forever," she says, adding, definitively, "He will not come back." Traditional Catholics take note: This is not the tranquil Mary of a million bathtub-encased statues, nor a vision created by Hollywood special effects artists and given voice by Linda Darnell. (See The Song of Bernadette.) She is not the object of endless novenas, and she is most certainly not a symbol of unthinking acquiescence to God's will. As she tells it, the Immaculate Conception was a crock.

Instead, she is a shrewd, observant, and tough-minded peasant woman, looking back in anger at the terrible tragedy that has shattered her, leaving her furious and empty. She casts a cold eye on her son's career, noting that his followers constituted "a group of misfits," adding that they were "men who could not look a woman in the eye." Paraphrasing the gospels for her own gimlet-eyed purposes, she says, "Whenever I have seen two men together, I have seen foolishness and cruelty." To her, the miracles are either suspicious, as in the wedding feast at Cana, or monstrous: She sees the resurrection of Lazarus as a rejection of "the way things are in the world," adding that the poor man remained a kind of walking corpse, waiting to die again as quickly as possible. She also recalls the pain of separation from her son as fame overtook him and her helpless terror as the civil authorities spied on him, looking for the right moment to close in.

Especially in our current polarized climate of religious discourse, this is strong stuff, and there have been the predictable cries of heresy and bigotry from the usual sources. But clearly such criticisms are wide of the mark; Toíbín is taking a cudgel to the plaster carapace of piety that has surrounded Mary for centuries, setting free the flesh-and-blood woman who surely once walked the earth. For an Irishman, raised Catholic in a country where veneration of Mary was for so long a way of life, it amounts to utter rebellion, an overturning of any and all received ideas about the second-most important person in the Catholic religion. His words are plain, often savage, and yet unaccountably beautiful; Mary's eyewitness account of the crucifixion is transfixing, each word driven home like a nail through flesh. (She describes how removing a crown of thorns only makes it dig deeper into one's skull; she also notes, in almost clinical fashion, the gaping wounds left on her son's body after he is scourged.) In my experience, no conventional religious account of these events has ever made them seem so horribly real.

And in Shaw, who seems actively energized by the most daunting challenges, Toíbín has an actress who can give full-bodied voice to his unbelieving, unfulfilled, utterly human mother of God. This Mary has a wicked sense of humor; recalling how one apostle claimed that Christ would change the world, she cocks her head to one side, narrows her eyes in skeptical appraisal, and asks "All of it?" in a tone of voice that renders the statement nonsensical. She is gripped by near-psychotic rages that pass like a summer storm, leaving overturned furniture in their wake. She begins on a frenetic note, busying herself with tasks like chopping fish, but as her narrative moves unstoppably to the moment of torture and death, she becomes quieter, more focused, her eyes burning with such intensity that surely one could pick them out of a crowd in broad daylight. This is a performance so monumental that everything else on Broadway vanishes in comparison.

There are three major reservations attached to this project, however, and for some I imagine they will prove to be deal breakers. Deborah Warner's production is a frankly bizarre affair, full of distracting staging touches that constantly threaten to divert one's attention from Toíbín's searing words and Shaw's burning intensity. It begins with the 15-minute preshow, in which the audience is invited onstage to gaze at a live buzzard, a tree trunk hanging from the flies, and Shaw herself, dressed in conventional Blessed Virgin Mary clothing inside a clear Plexiglas booth. Actually, I'm on board with that last touch; here, Warner presents us with the Mary of conventional piety before raising the box and setting Shaw free to work her black magic. Even then, however, Tom Pye's set design looks like a collection of props assembled for the rehearsal room, and the action is backed by a series of horizontal and vertical drapes that keep reconfiguring themselves to no purpose whatsoever. One senses in Warner's direction a need to do something, anything, to ensure the audience is focused on Mary; instead, such devices backfire, distracting us at the most inopportune times.

The most elaborate set piece is the on-stage pool (lit, like everything else on stage, with seamless skill by Jennifer Tipton); at one point, Shaw strips naked and goes underwater, a device that might have been more effective if I hadn't seen it the night before in Alan Cumming's Macbeth. In fact, these two solo shows from the United Kingdom share so many staging touches, including horror movie soundscapes (here composed and designed by Mel Mercier) and a penchant for apples; see them both and you are fully up to speed on the current clichés of avant-garde theatre as practiced in the British Isles. Finally, and most damagingly, The Testament of Mary is an extremely fine piece of writing, but it is not a play. At 80 minutes, it is a closely argued monologue, full of vivid details that build toward an admittedly astonishing summing-up, a speech that Shaw handles with devastating finesse. Toíbín can hypnotize one with words, as he did in his stunning novel, Brooklyn, and he doesn't need to use any kind of Joycean curlicues to do it, either; he writes in an unadorned style that lands with stunning force. Still, if you're looking for the pleasures of drama -- conflict, character, thrilling debate -- The Testament of Mary may seem fragmentary.

And yet, it is hard to shake the power of Toíbín's argument. As heterodox as it may seem, it is not unfelt. He is not dismissing Mary; no one who writes with this kind of intensity can be anything but totally engaged with his subject. The Testament of Mary is, in many ways, a kind of affirmation. Theologians tell us that God is most surely found in life's darkest places, where physical pain and psychological despair render belief all but impossible. Even now, Mary is, as Flannery O'Connor would say, haunted by Christ. You can say the same about Colm Toíbín. --David Barbour