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AS ADAPTATIONS OF NOVELS GO, it’s hard to think of a more paint-by-numbers production than Sabbath’s Theater at the Pershing Square Signature Center, a new play based on Philip Roth’s novel of the same name currently running at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theater. The promotional material will have you know that the play was adapted by the New Yorker writer Ariel Levy and actor John Turturro (who also plays the eponymous puppeteer Mickey Sabbath), but “adaptation” is a stretch: The script is essentially a julienned and compressed version of the novel, which sinuously tracks the thoughts and exploits of Roth’s most amative creation—a man whose bottom nature, as Gertrude Stein might have put it, is fucking.
In an interview with the New York Times, Levy said, “We didn’t write anything. It’s only Roth’s writing. Including most of the stage directions. Because you can’t top it.” Perhaps not, and maybe Levy and Turturro wished to honor Roth in reusing his exact words, but the play is sacerdotal to a fault and in an age where AI has increasingly been used to cowrite plays, one craves more than a copy-and-paste job from human enablers.
Working with a script that yaws between monologues and heavy exposition, the actors, under Jo Bonney’s direction, dispatch their lines in workmanlike fashion. While some degree of scene setting may be useful for orienting viewers unacquainted with the novel, the frequent signposting and direct addresses to the audience disperse our attention. Roth’s novel is one great existential yawp and takes place over the course of just three days as the arthritic puppet master mourns the death of his Croatian mistress Drenka, contemplates separating from his wife, visits his old friend Norman, and purchases a cemetery plot for himself. The 450-page book is told in a close third person that occasionally melts into first person. It’s a feat of immersion that Levy and Turturro struggle to replicate for the stage.
It certainly doesn’t help that the actors playing Sabbath and Drenka are physically incongruous with the characters they’re meant to play; the mismatch is especially hard to ignore given that the novel lavishes so many words on characters’ bodies. Turturro, a beanstalk of a man, looks nothing like the “short, heavyset, white-bearded man with unnerving green eyes” immortalized in Roth’s book and, more importantly, lacks the corkscrewing intensity and randy vigor of his namesake, whose every glance cops a feel at this housekeeper, that college student. Turturro’s manicured beard and sartorial insouciance impart the sprayed-on seriousness of a college professor rather than an on-the-brink-of-homelessness satyr. An actor like the charismatic and clownish Jeremy Radin, who recently starred in Dmitry Krymov’s adventurous Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” (In Our Own Words) at La MaMa in New York, would have made a better Sabbath; he possesses the heft and emotional amplitude required to play a man who ecstatically submits to eros above all things and can jape with the best of them.
As if bashfully acknowledging that his voice will be his greatest asset in this production, Turturro first manifests onstage as just that: a disembodied voice in the throes of effortful lovemaking. A white sheet hides his Sabbath and Drenka (Elizabeth Marvel) from our view. Then the curtain drops, revealing two pantsless figures whose torsos are nevertheless modestly covered; Sabbath wears a Mackinaw jacket while Drenka is enshrouded in a chunky sweater. The too-modest look is a perfect metaphor for this tactful and anodyne production: This is no Sabbath’s Indecent Theater but a too decent treatment.
Marvel, who plays multiple characters in addition to Drenka, acquits herself well in supporting roles as Sabbath’s alcoholic wife, the superintendent of a cemetery, and an acting student, but she is poorly cast as Sabbath’s inamorata, who is described in the book as a “dark, Italian-looking Croat . . . on the short side like Sabbath, a full, firmly made woman at the provocative edge of being just overweight, her shape, at her heaviest, reminiscent of those clay figurines molded circa 2000 B.C.” Marvel, with her blunt haircut and bladelike cheekbones and clavicles, is more convincing in the role of Sabbath’s long-suffering wife Roseanna, whose “skinny titlessness” and warmed-over AA shibboleths Sabbath scorns. Physical discrepancies wouldn’t matter so much if the actors found compensatory ways to quicken their characters’ pulses, but this is not the case with this Sabbath, which has the autumnal aura of a memory play.
It’s hard nowadays to mention Roth without hearing, to mangle a phrase from writer Norman Rush, the slow thighs of sexism moving somewhere in the vicinity. He stands accused of creating off-the-peg female characters, among other things, but to my mind, Drenka, and, to a lesser extent, Sabbath’s second wife Roseanna, are two of the most absorbingly appetitive women in Roth’s fiction. In a luminous essay for the Yale Review published earlier this year, novelist Garth Greenwell goes so far as to locate a source of transcendence in Drenka: “Through sex, through her erotic life, Drenka transforms shame—a sense that the meaning of her body is known, fixed, finite—into mystery, a sense of a surplus of meaning, an uncountable worth.” Besides sex, the novel’s other great theme is death. Over the years, our Hamlettian horndog has lost his older brother Morty, who was killed in World War II, his mother, his friend Linc, and his first wife, who one day vanished “off the face of the earth.” The Grim Reaper then claims Drenka. Right after issuing an ultimatum to Sabbath—“Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over”—Drenka reveals that she has cancer. Her death in the novel wires him even more deeply into grief such that he contemplates suicide and secures a plot of land in a cemetery for his eventual burial. The novel’s epigraph is from The Tempest: “Every third thought shall be my grave.” In one scene I was glad made the voyage from the novel, a reporter (Jason Kravits) reads aloud an obituary for the not-quite-dead Sabbath, who hovers nearby. Here lay Sabbath: a man avid for an epitaph.
Just as vital: Sabbath is a man slapped away from suicide by gonadal stirrings. Like Odysseus, another complicated wanderer, he is propelled by some indefinable “thing which allowed him to improvise endlessly and which had kept him alive.” An actor playing Sabbath therefore needs to embody both the will to live and the will to leave, continually flinging himself between the two. Turturro puckers from the challenge. His incarnation of Sabbath convinces on neither account, with housebroken line deliveries that fail to shock the sensibilities of his audience. His Sabbath never gives the impression of being truly poleaxed by the successive losses of people close to him; when he says, looking mistily out into the audience, “There’s nothing on earth that keeps its promise,” he might be reporting on the weather.
All-too-frequent asides also undermine the play, ensuring that chemistry is never fully established between the two main characters, as when Sabbath abruptly breaks off from a postcoital conversation with Drenka, his “sidekicker,” to tell us, “The only man she would ever admit to having charged for the night was the puppeteer Sabbath, when he had negotiated their threesome with the German au pair.” It’s an awkward shift in perspective that unplugs us from their moment of intimacy. Soliloquies and speeches here act as a sous vide, subtracting from rather than amplifying one’s dramatic understanding of the characters.
Adaptations may be to theater what zugzwang is to chess: No matter what move you make, you’re bound to lose. Hew too closely to the source novel, as Levy and Turturro’s uxorious Sabbath’s Theater does, and you’ve produced a dramatic reading. (Arnulfo Maldonado’s bitumen-dark set with de minimis props unhelpfully reinforces the idea of just such a reading or dress rehearsal.) Fling off the chastity belt of narrative and you risk upsetting purists who will pox you for failing to include, among other desiderata, a nineteen-page footnoted transcript of Sabbath’s incriminating conversation with his student Kathy Goolsbee (boiled down to a three-minute audio recording in the play), his glass eye, and the novel’s fine ending, which sees Sabbath cuckolded, and on and on and on. “My failure is failing to have gone far enough. My failure is not having gone further,” says Sabbath at the end of the play. It’s a failure the audience keenly feels.