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.
This juxtaposition – intermingling – of sex and death, of obscenity and grief, is central to the play, and arguably at the core of much of Roth’s oeuvre, although a writer who produced “Portney’s Complaint” and “American Pastoral” and“The Plot Against America” can’t be summed up so simply. But the balance is skewed in this adaptation. I found the explicit scenes more often off-putting than amusing or alluring. There are some poignant moments, especially when Marvel is portraying Drenka, and Kravits is playing Sabbath’s100-year-old cousin Fish. But there are fewer than intended.
A play starring actors like John Turturro and Elizabeth Marvel, based on an acclaimed — and, more importantly, filthy — novel, should not make only a small impression. But the mystery of the New Group’s adaptation of Sabbath’s Theater is that it struggles to shock you or even to stick in your memory. The production is a faithful-to-a-fault adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, by Turturro and the author Ariel Levy, that gets stuck in translation. It’s the story of a chronically, self-destructively passionate man, but its writers can’t figure out how to render that fire onstage. The raw materials are there, but the spark is lacking.
2023 | Off-Broadway |
New Group Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
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