New York

Fiona Shaw in 'The Testament of Mary.' Paul Kolnik

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.

The Testament of Mary

Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St

Through June 16

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. The members of the audience, whose unswerving secularity is comfortably taken for granted by Mr. Tóibín and his collaborators, are invited to snigger along with Mary at her son and his disciples, and snigger they do, over and over again. Rarely have I heard laughter so smug as that which greeted this line: "He gathered around him, I said, a group of misfits, only children like himself, or men without fathers, or men who could not look a woman in the eye, men who were seen smiling to themselves." Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

Ms. Shaw is, of course, a great actor—I have deeply etched memories of the avant-garde "Medea" that she brought to Broadway in 2002—but she mostly settles for generalized mannerism in "The Testament of Mary," though her performance is both specific and memorable whenever she modulates out of the key of outrage and slips into something less obvious. (The quiet awe with which she describes the raising of Lazarus, for instance, is breathtaking.) As for Deborah Warner's portentous staging, it's a visually static catalog of stock postmodern effects that are already looking a bit quaint. If any of them surprise you, then you don't get out enough.

One more thing: I have no doubt that "The Testament of Mary" will be praised as transgressive and/or subversive by those members of the herd of independent minds who long ago turned those once-useful words into terms of the highest praise. Nothing doing. While it would surely be transgressive in the extreme to stage "The Testament of Mary" in, say, rural Mississippi, mounting it on Broadway is about as daring as writing a musical that makes fun of Mormons.


Alan Cumming's near-solo version of "Macbeth," which is set in an insane asylum, bears a number of palpable similarities to "The Testament of Mary." It, too, is a high-concept show about madness—Mr. Cumming plays a lunatic who seems to think that he's all of the characters in the play—accompanied by unending horror-show electronic music. Like Ms. Shaw, he spends the evening thrashing around the stage in a state of anguish, and he, too, strips to the buff and takes a bath in full view of the audience.


Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St.

Through June 30

While I yield to no one in my admiration for Mr. Cumming, his high, reedy voice is a less-than-ideal instrument for the speaking of Shakespearean verse, especially when you're expected to listen to it for an hour and 40 minutes. Nor is his acting sufficiently varied in tone, involving though it is from moment to moment, above all in Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" monologue and Macduff's despairing "All my pretty ones" speech, both of which are superbly realized. If the whole show were like that . . . but it is, and that's what's wrong with Mr. Cumming's performance. It's like spending the evening with a lapel-grabbing monomaniac. Even if you think he's got a point—and Mr. Cumming has points galore—a time comes when you cry "Enough, already!" and look for the nearest exit.

The production itself, which is jointly credited to John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg, suffers from the same double-barreled deficiency as many other high-concept Shakespeare stagings. Not only does it fail to illuminate the text in anything more than a superficial way, but once you figure out what's going on, which doesn't take long, the concept simply isn't fresh enough to sustain interest for more than a few minutes. I couldn't help but remember Rupert Goold's 2008 Broadway "Macbeth," which was set in an grimy-tiled, anonymous-looking emergency room that looked not unlike Merle Hensel's grimy-tiled, anonymous-looking loony bin—and in which Patrick Stewart gave a performance that was far more pleasing to the ear than this tenor-voiced tale "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing." Well, not nothing—but not enough, either.
