Jesus’s mom has her say at ACT
So that you know right off the bat, Mary suggests to those who urge the notion of a virgin birth on her that it might not be so. “After all, I was there!” she flings in their faces
That got the biggest laugh, albeit a startled one, on opening night of Irish writer Colm Tóibin’s absorbing one-woman play, Testament, now at A.C.T. Not that there were many laughs. As you’ve no doubt guessed, the Mary in question is, yes, that Mary, the most famous and revered mother of them all, so the tale she has to tell is not one fraught with humor.
It’s also, as Tóibin conceives it, not one fraught with the familiar. He presents her as a real woman, not a saint or an icon. In eighty uninterrupted minutes, pacing, darting her eyes, eloquently lifting her arms, she tells her son’s story, and hers, with riveting candor. Though a pair of interrogator/scribes, whom we never meet, have an agenda (they need Christ to be the Son of God), she fiercely refuses to cooperate. “I won’t say anything that isn’t true,” she insists, and she’s got the backbone to stick to her words.
This Mary is a surprisingly tough cookie.
The play takes place long after Jesus’s death. Closely guarded, Mary lives in exile in a foreign land, What Tóibin offers us is a new look at a legend that strips her of sentimentality and religious elevation, imagining her as she might historically have been: an uneducated, unsophisticated woman whose son’s radical, ultimately perilous behavior bewildered and frightened her, especially when, in the play’s most chilling moment, he demands, when she approaches him at the Marriage in Cana, “What have I to do with you?” It’s a stunning rejection. His notions of himself have already left his mother behind.
Believers won’t be happy with this, and I’m guessing pretty much everyone will squirm uncomfortably at Mary’s eyewitness account of the crucifixion. She doesn’t turn away from the blood and the agony. It’s not a religious event as she recounts it, it’s brutal torture, and she herself isn’t safe. A Roman assassin lurks in the crowd, and when he eyes her menacingly, she knows he’s been hired to strangle her.
As it is now, so was it then: politics, politics, politics.
Despite, or because of, its revisionary view, Testament is taut and fascinating. The painter Giotto gave us a bereaved, suffering mother, and Michelangelo sculpted a vision of serenity, but Tóibin aims for human complexity. Playing his Madonna, the noted Canadian actor Seana McKenna is sturdily watchable. She’s down to earth and deeply sure of her convictions. If she has a god, it’s truth, and she’s loyal to it to the end, when she turns for consolation elsewhere. Having given up attending Temple, she seeks the embrace of the old Greek gods.
A.C.T. gives Tóibin’s play a handsome production under Carey Perloff’s deft and intelligent direction. Daniel Ostling’s set of tall, narrow rectangles suggests Medieval church windows emptied of stained-glass. The fine support team includes Brandin Barón (costume design), Stephen Strawbridge (lighting) and Sara Huddleston (sound).
Testament plays on Geary Street until November 23rd, followed by the annual return of A Christmas Carol. For tickets/information call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org.
–ROBERT HALL