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A&O Meetup in NYC: 'The Testament of Mary' on Broadway

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By Marilyn Stasio
BROADWAY---Where to begin? Well, there’s a live vulture on stage, and an uprooted tree suspended in mid-air, and a pool of water that appears to be bottomless. And that’s before the house lights even go down on “The Testament of Mary.” The matchless Fiona Shaw commands the stage in this solo piece adapted by Irish scribe Colm Toibin from the 2012 novella he fashioned as an interior monologue delivered by Mary, the mother of the historical Christ and, in Christian legend, the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven. It’s safe to say you’ve never seen anything like it. [link]
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Charles Austin | Huffington Post said…
How far can one go in retelling a Bible story, adding things that are not in the original? In "The Testament of Mary," Colm Toibin goes a long way. His 2012 book is now a Broadway play presenting a view of the mother of Jesus so different from pious tradition that it angers some Christians, creating a "new," intellectually and spiritually challenging Virgin Mary. Yet in the end, Toibin's searingly human Mary may be ultimately more accessible than the Mary of porcelain perfection set high on a pedestal.
Wed Apr 24, 06:49:00 AM EDT
David Finkle | Huffington Post said…
What Nikos Kazantzakis did to de-sanctify Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, Colm Toibin has done for the Madonna in The Testament of Mary -- with, predictably, the some outraged response from various Catholic Church officials. Who'd think the reaction could be otherwise when, among other revelations in the 80-minute monologue, the immaculate conception is denied outright? Certainly not at a time when Francis I is traditionally conservative.

All the same, Toibin's New Testament revision -- which in a cynical age has effect of a scorching modern poem -- is the occasion of a bravura performance by Fiona Shaw, whom the audience, on entering the Walter Kerr, is invited to view garbed as the Virgin Mary. She sits silently in a tall, transparent box as if she's merely another of the thousands (millions?) of Madonna representations crowding the history of art -- right up to and beyond Chris Ofili's controversial image.
Wed Apr 24, 06:50:00 AM EDT
Lisa Schwarzbaum | Entertainment Weekly said…
The audience can tour the stage in the 15 minutes before Mary begins her testament in The Testament of Mary at Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre. The place is a marvel, a walk-through cabinet of wonders, like something between a Joseph Cornell box of oddities and an Italian Renaissance church. There's a live vulture, a bowl of grapes, a ladder laid on the ground, rolled cigarettes, a bathing sponge, sheafs of yellowed paper; there's also a kind of Plexiglas-enclosed altar, laid with candles, into which Fiona Shaw steps even as gawkers surround her, snapping smartphone photos. Sitting and wrapping the blue drapery of the Virgin Mary around her, Shaw becomes the holy mother of Jesus, her face lit in beatific tranquility, and we stare at her like tourists.

With the audience seated, though, this sacred tableau falls away, the candles are taken away, and the stage reveals itself to be a home, just a bare jumble of a room where the very earthly Mary, mourning mother of a dead son, lives out her days in grief and fury, watched over by unseen ''guardians'' who want her to stick to the company line: He is risen. He will return. She disagrees.
Wed Apr 24, 06:51:00 AM EDT
Terry Teachout | The Wall Street Journal said…
If you’re a lapsed Catholic, preferably Irish, who now believes that Christianity is the principal source of evil in the modern world, then I encourage you to see “The Testament of Mary,” a modern-dress solo stage version of the 2012 novella by Colm Tóibín in which Jesus’ mother (played by Fiona Shaw) proclaims to all and sundry that her son was (A) crazy and (B) not the Messiah. It’s your kind of play, and then some. If, on the other hand, you’re a Christian of the old-fashioned sort, you’ll likely go home praying for fire, or at least a plague of locusts, to descend upon the Walter Kerr Theatre and its blasphemous occupants. But what about everybody else? Assuming that you don’t have a horse in this particular race, how does “The Testament of Mary” come across when considered not as an antireligious statement but as a piece of pure drama? Perhaps not surprisingly, it proves to be predictable in the extreme.
Wed Apr 24, 06:53:00 AM EDT
Ben Brantley | The New York Times said…
Just let the woman speak, for pity’s sake. The Mary whose testament we have gathered to hear is the mother of Jesus. And she wants to be allowed, for once, to tell her story on her terms, and to appear to us unencumbered by the signs and symbols that history and devotion have layered upon her. That it doesn’t quite work out that way ranks as one of the greater disappointments in a season that has made a practice of dashing hopes. Having read and admired Mr. Toibin’s book of the same title, an expansion of the script for this play, and knowing how transfixing Ms. Shaw can be, I was all set for an evening of searing, austere eloquence. Ms. Warner and Ms. Shaw are brilliant artists; I don’t hesitate to say that. And I assume there’s method in this jitteriness. Perhaps it’s meant to conjure a woman forever trying to distract herself from, or make palpable and manageable, the pained consciousness that never leaves her. But I was never happier — or more harrowed — than in those rare quiet, contained moments when this Mary made us feel that we were in a private tête-à-tête with a woman who had an extraordinary story to tell, and needed to keep telling it, forever and ever.
Wed Apr 24, 06:58:00 AM EDT
Fr. Edward L. Beck said…
During the course of an intermission-less 80 minutes, we hear Mary tell her version of the raising of Lazarus, the wedding feast of Cana, and the brutal crucifixion, which, stakes in hand, she reenacts. These are demythologized retellings to be sure. She will have none of the hagiographic overlay of redactors who have tainted the story and none of the distortion that seeps in with historical distance. She was there, after all. Lazarus may have been walking around, but he still seemed dead to her. Some water may have tasted like wine at a wedding, but "did anyone actually see what jugs they brought in?" As for the Resurrection, well, she did have the same dream as someone else about her son being alive again...the same exact dream. "Now, how can that happen?" It is left as a question. While people of Christian faith may, too, be left with many questions by this production, arguably, that is what good art does. It invites us to ask the deeper questions without forcing us to wholeheartedly agree with its perspective or conclusions. The answers to the questions must be our own. We have our own testaments to tell.
Mon Apr 29, 07:41:00 PM EDT
REGINA WEINREICH said…
The news that The Testament of Mary would close on Sunday hung in the air for Friday evening's performance, more prominently than any of the play's props, including a dead tree. At the prologue, the audience comes to the stage circling Mary as blessed icon, robed in blue. How she became that exalted figure is what this play's about. To be sure, sharing the stage with a vulture may be genius, but not a good sign for a long life. You could hear the proverbial pin drop at the Walter Kerr Theater, for an audience that had rushed to see a final performance. Despite the beauty of a cobalt blue backdrop to a gilded leafy tree, never have a show's last words had this weight, and with so little hope for resurrection.
Tue May 07, 09:12:00 PM EDT
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