In his Philip Roth: The Biography, Blake Bailey writes, “Roth usually considered [Sabbath’s Theater] his own favorite among his novels — certainly the one he had the most fun writing, as he mined a misanthropic vein that had flourished amid his travails with [wife Claire] Bloom. ‘The misanthropy is genuine,’ he later remarked. ‘And a misanthrope can be a very funny fellow, so I learned.’”
True enough. Mickey Sabbath, for whom arthritis ended a puppeteering career, can be a funny fellow. He’s often especially funny about his extraordinarily active sex life. For some readers — for instance, New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani — he wasn’t so funny. For her and others who regard the work as she does, “gross” might be a handy adjective to sum up the feats Sabbath gets up to a tale that renders “bawdy” an insufficient adjective.
Now the same opposing reactions might surface during a stage version that John Turturro and New Yorker writer Ariel Levy have crafted and in which Turturro appears as the confounded ex-puppeteer, with Elizabeth Marvel as, among other characters, his most creative sex partner, the indefatigable Drenka Balich; and Jason Kravits as, among other characters, Mickey’s aging Cousin Fish. (Roth believed the late-in-manuscript Fish encounter is among his absolute best writing.)
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Roth devotees — and maybe readers, mostly women, who believed him more misogynistic than misanthropic — might wonder how such an immaculately stylish prose writer with a boundless gift for humor translates to the stage. Well they might. Turturro, evidently a close Roth friend, and Levy have trimmed the 451-page novel into something exploding over the footlights for around 100 minutes.
The result passes muster along the lines of professionally accomplished CliffsNotes. As could be expected, the playwrights include sections of all, or most, of the important sequences, although they don’t always catch the hilarity that comes so easily to Roth. Nevertheless, they do impressively convey the mounting frustrations eventually causing Mickey to contemplate ending it all.
Perhaps most notably and predictably, they don’t feel obliged to retain all the potentially bleepable language invoked to describe the Mickey-Drenka activities before and after her slow cancer demise. Spoiler ahead: Turturro, Levy, director Jo Bonney, and projection designer Alex Basco Koch do fashion a way to show expert masturbator Mickey pleasuring himself at Drenka’s grave. (He’s followed by another man with a second honorary offering at hand.) Mickey still gets to blurt, “I want to piss on you, Drenka.” Whether he does is left to ticket buyers’ imaginations.
Pointedly, the acting is what raises to must-see levels this carefully edited, first-person (rather than third-person) treatment that ends with — requiring only a pronoun substitution — Roth’s chillingly malign final sentence.
Actor-playwright Turturro probably chose Sabbath’s Theater, if only in part, because the Mickey Sabbath role is so hugely challenging. (As commercial warnings on such properties often state: “Some nudity.”)
Roth writes on page one that Mickey is “a short, heavy-set, white-bearded man with unnerving green eyes.” That’s not Turturro, who may have the green eyes (hard to be certain from the audience), but otherwise doesn’t resemble Roth’s Mickey. But he behaves like him.
From start to finish and in whatever mood, he’s as intense as a rattlesnake set to spring. He’s mad with desire. He’s abashed at Drenka’s sexual liberation. He’s furious at her demanding he be monogamous with her while she refuses monogamy with him.
Addressing patrons when serving as narrator, he’s direct and unsparing. For a long stretch after the beginning sex scene and when Mickey has pulled on trousers over his skivvies, Turturro leaves the fly open. Surely, this is a deliberate and shrewd character choice that director Bonney approved, if not suggested.
Marvel’s lean, thin Drenka, speaking with a Yugoslavian accent (Kate Wilson is the dialect coach), is beautifully driven — definitely in the intercourse interlude that unflinchingly begins the play. (Oddly for these careful times, the program lists no intimacy coordinator credit.) Seemingly lit by a frighteningly dim inner light, Marvel is a thrill. In and out of several other characters, she’s so malleable that even the shape of her face seems to alter.
Kravits quick changes a few of costumer Arnulfo Maldonado’s clothes (Maldonado, also the set designer) to impress as a few indelible others in Mickey’s hectic life. Most especially, he’s touching as aging Cousin Fish, whose memory has mutated into a sponge.
Last thoughts after seeing and hearing Sabbath’s Theater on its (often bare) feet: Mickey frequently claims he hears his mother coaxing and criticizing him. Another way of assessing Roth’s maturing over a magnificent (but no Nobel) career is that the Mrs. Portnoy of Portnoy’s Complaint has transformed into Mrs. Sabbath of Sabbath’s Theater.
An auxiliary observation is that while Roth adamantly insisted he never indulged in autobiographical writing, he, of course, did. Just as Alexander Portnoy must have had autobiographical grounding, Mickey Sabbath is undoubtedly Roth taking to extremes his own often commented-upon compulsive flings with women.
All the more reason for Roth partisans to reread the controversial novel and for those who have yet to read it to correct the situation. Isn’t that what this adapted Turturro-Levy version slyly nudges?
Sabbath’s Theater opened November 2, 2023, at Signature Center and runs through December 3. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
