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.
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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