We’re Glad We Went!
We were off to New York last weekend to see Sabbath’s Theater, the off-Broadway production adapted from Philip Roth’s confounding controversial novel that Roth himself said was his personal favorite of 31 books.
It seemed probable that reading the award-winning novel, which was published in 1995, beforehand might help one to hold on to the feeling and profoundness of the production. But, if that was not the case, the acting of John Turturro, Elizabeth Marvel and Jason Kravits was so credible, so strong, one will be thinking about this man named Mickey Sabbath for some time to come.
Turturro’s Sabbath, a one-time puppeteer, is looking to close out unbearable grief from death and loss. His own life exudes depravity, lust and love, the degradation of women and certainly of himself. The setting is 1994, a half century after Sabbath’s older brother Morty died in the Second World War when Mickey was 12 or 13. His erotic mistress Drenka, is dead from cancer. His mother and father are dead. Mickey Sabbath is 64 years old and is looking for a way out.
Turturro and Ariel Levy adapted The New Group production which is playing at the Pershing Square Signature Center at 480 West 42nd Street. Due to popular demand, it has been extended through December 17. Jo Bonney directed.
In one of his teaching sessions after the novel was published, Philip Roth offered this wrap-up of Mickey Sabbath’s life during a Master Class at The Roth Explosion festival in Aix-en-Provence in 1999:
“…Sabbath doesn't move from being between a conventionally virtuous person and an outrageous person. He's an outrageous person from beginning to end. What he does reveal, I think in the book is his extreme polarity. And I think up until the second half, or in the first two thirds of the book, you see a much tougher, meaner, crueler, more bitter Sabbath than you see in the last third of the book. The closer he gets to the dead, the more the geyser of feeling is unleashed in him. And the closer he gets to the dead, the less guile he has. As a man in the presence of his dead, he has no guile. No, no whatsoever. He has virtually no strength.
And when he gets so close to his brother, as to wrap himself in that American flag, which was the flag that draped the coffin of his brother when he was buried as a soldier, there's no satire in him, and there's no satire in me. I'm not making fun of the American flag. It's easy to do that. And it's been done. I wanted to turn that on its head. And this is Sabbath…when he wraps himself in that flag and weeps for his brother. This is Sabbath at the other pole. He's reached the other pole. And that's part of the journey, too. It's a journey into feeling. It's a journey into his own raw wound. It's a journey into his own guts and his own blood and so on. And so the last third of the book has a very different feel to it. You don't have the brash high jinks, the wild performance. The wild performance has come to an end.”
Sabbath’s Theater was originally developed by the New Jersey Performing Arts Center for the Philip Roth Unbound Festival here in Newark this past March. The New York adaption includes a note cautioning ticket buyers that the performance includes haze and contains nudity, sexual situations, strong and graphic language, and discussion of suicide.
As we drew close to the theater that night with about 20 minutes to spare, we stopped in the Chez Josephine at 414 West 42nd for a quick bite at the zinc bar— a bowl of soup and we couldn’t resist trying a cocktail as we were serenaded by a singer. In those few minutes, write-ups of the 1986 Parisian bistro seemed absolutely true with live music and the warmest welcoming and attentive staff ever who understood and accommodated our time crunch. We want to thank Miriam Jaffe, program director at Philip Roth Society and her husband for giving us their Sabbath’s Theater tickets!