When his secret life of debauchery comes to a heartbreaking end, disgraced puppet maker Mickey Sabbath plunges into increasingly mad and maddening encounters with people from his wild and wicked past. Part ghost story, part love story, Sabbath’s Theater unleashes Roth’s power to shock and amaze in this profound meditation on mortality and juicy celebration of life.
One great benefit of seeing “Sabbath’s Theater” brought to the theater is that I had never realized how Shakespearean the novel is. It’s not just the graveyard scenes, but the overall outrageousness of Mickey’s language and behavior. Turturro plays Mickey, and while he has never had the lightest touch as an actor, he brings a benign levity to the tale that sometimes runs counter to the spirit of Roth’s novel. Roth dares us to find anything admirable in his hero. Turturro, on the other hand, seduces us into liking the guy.
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.
2023 | Off-Broadway |
New Group Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
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