The people who follow Mary’s son are all misfits, foolish and cruel. Death is not conquered, sin remains rampant, vanity and egoism triumph. Through Mary’s voice and vision, Toibin offers his own harsh, humanizing version of the Christ story, a story in which there are no confirmed miracles. I fled before it was over but if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. Now, interrogated by two unnamed apostles (John and Luke?) who want to fix the story of her son’s life and death and resurrection, Mary insists on reporting only what she knows: “I was there.
Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.” No longer an icon, hardly a virgin, this Mary addresses us with the piercing directness of the passion she has suffered: to have seen her only son crucified despite her efforts to save him. Her hair is cropped, her face haunted wearing short leather boots, she fumbles as she searches for a hand-rolled cigarette to steady herself. Photo by Hugo Glendinningīut when we are all back in our seats, Mary casts off her robe to stand before us in a simple black shift, flowing easily over narrow brown pants. In a large open-sided box, stage left, the actress Fiona Shaw, draped in blue from head to toe, arranges herself, then sits perfectly still, holding a lily and an apple. A few chairs, scattered jars of honey, jugs of water beside a free-standing waist-high faucet, a tall ladder, a long table, a stripped tree trunk with a wooden wheel at the top suspended from the rafters, a menacing roll of barbed wire, and a live turkey vulture occasionally spreading wide its iridescent blue-black wings: such is the set for Deborah Warner’s searing production of Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary, a one-woman show currently in previews at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York.
The Flesh Made Word: Colm Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary” on stage and in print By Joyce Zonanaīefore the play begins, the audience is invited on stage we walk around, not quite knowing what to do, gazing at the props, uncertain. Home › Art › The Flesh Made Word: Colm Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary” on stage and in print By Joyce Zonana
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