Theater: Walter Kerr Theater / 219 West 48th Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
Award-winning stage and screen actress Fiona Shaw returns to Broadway with The Testament of Mary, by the acclaimed author Colm Tóibín, directed by Deborah Warner.
The Testament of Mary takes place after the Crucifixion. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is in the city of Ephesus where she is both guarded and protected. As two of her son's followers set about giving shape to Jesus' story, Mary tells her own story - the one which has not been heard.
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April 22, 2013: Just let the woman speak, for pity’s sake. A great actress and a fine, trenchant script are struggling to assert themselves at the Walter Kerr Theater, where Colm Toibin’s “Testament of Mary” opened on Monday night. The ads for this production, directed by Deborah Warner, feature the play’s sole performer, Fiona Shaw, wearing what appears to be a crown of thorns, but as a muzzle.
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April 22, 2013: If every mother secretly believes her son is a saint, you'd have to imagine the Virgin Mary would be positively insufferable. But she isn't in Colm Toibin's thrilling, idiosyncratic imagining of Mary's life after her son's death. The one-woman show, "The Testament of Mary," opened Monday at the Walter Kerr Theatre starring Fiona Shaw — sharing the stage with a live vulture — and taking big bites out of the New Testament.
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April 22, 2013: In a pre-show segment before The Testament of Mary gets underway, Fiona Shaw sits in meditative silence in a glass box. Wrapped in a cerulean blue cloak over a coral pink gown, she appears as a familiar depiction of the Virgin – a Bellini or Raphael portrait brought to life. The audience makes a pilgrimage onstage to visit this shrine, stepping around terracotta urns and other props, ancient and modern, that will be used throughout the play. But something appears unsettlingly askew in an image that for centuries has represented piety, humility, serenity and succor for the woes of the world.
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April 22, 2013: “The Testament of Mary,” a visceral one-woman dramatization of Colm Tóibín’s recently released, controversial short novel about the Virgin Mary that stars the characteristically intense Fiona Shaw, has the distinction of being the only Broadway show of the season, at least to my knowledge, that attracted protesters to its first preview performance.
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April 22, 2013: As in previous seasons, many of this spring’s Broadway productions seem to have conspired to address an accidental theme. What does it mean, these shows implicitly ask, to be alone—in history, onstage? Not only have there been more solo plays than usual, but their casts have stretched the definition of “solo.” Ann, a one-woman show about the late Texas governor Ann Richards, also features the prerecorded voice of Julie White as her secretary. Alan Cumming’s psych-ward Macbeth includes a doctor and orderly who hover constantly and occasionally speak. Now comes the most unusual second banana of all: a 3-year-old yellow-headed vulture named Pinhead. Before the lights go down at The Testament of Mary, when the audience is invited onstage to look around, he stands tethered to a table, staring beadily as if offended while people take pictures with their iPhones.
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