The Testament of Mary
by Colm Toibin
Directed by Jim Petosa
New Repertory Theatre – January 30 - February 28
It’s a challenge to take on an icon, and few icons are
bigger—or more challenging—than Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Catholic Church
believes that she was not only impregnated by God, but also taken bodily to
heaven. It can be tough sledding to find a human being people can relate to in
there.
In Testament of Mary,
a one-woman show based on his novella by the same name, Irish writer Colm
Toibin gives it a shot. In his own words, “I had to just leave the Gospels
aside, leave all sources aside, and begin to imagine: What would that be like
if you had known this man as a baby? If you had nurtured this child.”
A noble starting point. Unfortunately, I came away
unconvinced that he had really imagined—fully imagined, felt in his gut—what
this experience would have been like for Mary. I came away thinking that this
man has no idea how intensely a parent feels about his—or, in the case of the
play, her—child.
The problem is that Toibin never establishes a real,
believable, moving relationship between Mary and Jesus. We get almost no sense
of what it was like for her to know him as a baby, to nurture him. There are a
few vague references to him as a child, but nothing that paints a picture of
the child who became the man. In fact, we don’t get a whole lot about who he is
as a man, either. Considering the gut wrenching conclusion of Jesus’s life, the
pain, the loss, the drama of it never really come alive, because we don’t know
who he was or, most importantly, who he was to Mary, who is telling us the
story.
The play opens with Mary having just seen off two of the evangelists,
the followers of Jesus who wrote the Gospels. We don’t get a very clear picture
of who they are, either, despite the fact that Mary has presumably been
associated with these men for more than 20 years—the play taking place 20 years
after Jesus’s execution. All she ever tells us about the followers of Jesus—and
she tells us this several times—is that they were misfits. She’s just irritated
with these two for wanting her to alter her story to match what they’re
writing.
It’s this contrast between what the evangelists want to
write and what she experienced that is the basis for the play. It is this
discrepancy that leads Mary to tell us her version of the story—mainly, the
part about Jesus’s getting in trouble with the Jewish leadership and the Romans
and then being executed. This should be powerful stuff, but Toibin never gives
Mary the words that would make her experience—of raising Jesus, watching him
grow physically and spiritually, become a great spiritual leader, be in great
danger, and, finally, be framed and brutally murdered—truly come alive for us.
There is a strangely inappropriate intellectuality about a
play on this subject. Even though the actress, Paula Langton, tries to convey
pain, sorrow, fear, loss, the words she’s saying are always at one remove from
reality. It’s as if she’s talking about some celebrity she’d read about, rather
than about a human being she’d given birth, raised, and watched go off into the
world. Even under normal circumstances, parenting a child to adulthood is one
of the most profound experiences of a lifetime. Under the circumstances of Mary
and Jesus’s life, it must have been intensely painful, and, again, although
Langton strains to express that pain, Toibin has not given her the material she
needs to make the experience real for us, so it’s rarely believable.
The play turns on a cowardly act of Mary’s in the context of
Jesus’s execution, something she has felt guilty about for two decades. But,
first of all, as a parent, I didn’t believe she would have done what she says
she did. Secondly, even if I had been able to believe it, it would have had little
emotional impact, because, again, Toibin had not painted the picture of a real
relationship between this mother and child that would give the act the impact
he clearly wants it to have.
Toibin also employs dreams—too often a writer’s deus ex machina—twice within a short
span of time to deal with both the iconic image of Mary holding Jesus in her
arms after the crucifixion and with the idea of Jesus’s resurrection. Again,
this serves to distance us from her experiences, rather than deeply engaging us
with them, because these experiences are not even real for her.
And, finally, Toibin introduces the pagan goddess Artemis as
the entity to whom Mary has turned in her disillusionment with Judaism (and,
presumably, Christianity, although she never mentions it). This devotion to
Artemis comes out of nowhere, in no way feels like an organic development, and
smacks of a former Christian sticking it to his former church by making Mary a
pagan.
So, what should be a profound story about a parent and a
child, about love and loss, about existential suffering, ultimately comes
across as an intellectual exercise. I kept wanting
to care about Mary’s experience, but she never made it real for me, and
it’s hard to care about a life that doesn’t seem real.
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