Review - “The Testament of Mary” and “The Nance” welcome Broadway additions

Fiona Shaw stars in Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary.

It can’t have been easy being mother of God, but the Bible actually tells us comparatively little about Mary. There’s barely a record of a word she spoke, other than to confirm she’d play her part once God’s plan was revealed to her.

It’s a bit of an oversight considering her historical importance, isn’t it? Matthew and Luke mention her occasionally in the Gospels, but Mark barely mentions her at all.

Apparently she’s there to perform her miraculous birth and then disappear from the story as Jesus takes over. Only St. John mentions her presence at the wedding feast of Cana and later in the last terrible hours on Calvary.

You could say it’s a tale as old as Hollywood (older actually). Once her role in the story is performed she’s written out and the lead takes over.

That absence and silence has apparently intrigued Irish novelist and playwright Colm Toibin for decades, as his meditative and immensely subtle play The Testament of Mary, now playing at the Walter Kerr Theatre on West 48th Street, makes clear.

Toibin’s Mary, played by Ireland’s most accomplished theater actress Fiona Shaw, is not the meek and accepting doormat of Christian tradition. She drinks, she swears, she’s opinionated and she’s deeply afraid of the New Testament writers that keep her under a kind of house arrest as they interrogate her for her memories of her increasingly famous child.

This Mary does not believe in the great project that her son’s followers envision. She thinks they’re misfits who led her all too credulous offspring to an early death. But it’s the work Toibin does in the realm between myth and reality that makes this play utterly remarkable.

The Testament of Mary explores the myths of death and resurrection the Gospels are based on, but it never quite demolishes them. Instead Tobin creates an unsettling ambiguity, no more so that when Mary recounts the tale of the resurrection of Lazarus.

Bringing a buried corpse back to life, as Jesus reputedly did, is miraculous, but it is also unspeakably horrific. It upends the natural order of life. There is something profoundly sinister about the action, something that cannot be overlooked in the joy of an unexpected reunion.

Paying very close attention to the threat that Jesus represented then (and now) to the established order, Toibin allows his Mary a mother’s exasperation and fear of the political and social consequences. She understands better than her son what his growing band of followers means, and what can happen to individuals who challenge the states order.

Shaw’s performance is the production’s greatest asset. Her fury and her focus carries this impressively cerebral text and its writerly effects past passages that perform like literature rather than theater.

Tom Pye's set provides the subtlest design I have ever seen on a Broadway stage. Its revelatory power aids the production immensely.

If you’re looking for a play that takes a bulldozer to the life and miracles that form the basis of the Gospels, this is not it. The small band of Madonna wielding protestors that lined up before the play opened need not have bothered.

It isn’t blasphemous. Instead it poses questions that two millennia have failed to answer. That partly explains their enduring power.

Three blocks away, Jack O’Brien’s particularly nimble direction makes The Nance, now playing at the Lyceum on 45th Street, one of the strongest new productions to open on Broadway this season.
Set in the world of 1930s burlesque, the play tells the story of Chauncey Miles (Nathan Lane) a headline performer that draws the crowds each night.

In the parlance of New York burlesque, a nance was slang for a man who plays the part of an effeminate homosexual on stage. This being the theater, though, the irony is that the man is usually a homosexual. “It’s a bit like a black man wearing black face,” Lane quips at one point.

Onstage Lane is brittle, funny and transgressive, but what is permitted onstage for laughs is often violently denied him offstage, with increasingly tragic results.

Douglas Carter Beane’s new play is at times a treasure box of vanished performance styles from burlesque’s heyday, and at best it references and stands shoulder to shoulder alongside Broadway classics like Cabaret.

This tender, moving and unspeakably funny new play features flawless supporting help from the talented cast is one of the best things to have arrived on Broadway this decade. Miss it at your peril.

Theatre reviews by Cahir O'Doherty, Irish Voice Arts Editor

A look at books - the Magdalene Laundries, Reverend Ian Paisley and the Irish Diaspora

It Doesn’t Ring a Bell
By Racer Lynch

It hasn’t been two decades since the last Magdalene Laundry in Ireland closed in 1996. That’s well within the living memory of young adults. The question is, what to do with all that suffering now that its come to light?

Even now most would prefer to look the other way, exactly the way they used to when these unpaid gulags were in operation. The Irish government had to be browbeaten for years by a group of committed former inmates and their offspring before finally offering a full apology. That apology was offered in February 2013, by the way, just two months ago.

So the Irish reluctance to face up to the legacy of widespread physical and sexual abuse has been one of the most remarkable aspects of the now three decade long crisis in the Catholic Church.  Instead of principled stock taking, denial, defensiveness and even blaming the victims have been the standard responses.

So what happens to the nation that fails to confront its own traumas? Does it hand them and their legacy on to the next generation without comment?

What is the best way, culturally and spiritually, to recall the wrong roads taken, to discuss the lessons learned?

Fiction has long been one of the most reflexive fields for the Irish to consider their history and what it has made of them. In It Doesn’t Ring a Bell, author Racer Lynch quietly paints a picture of a different aspect of convent life in Ireland in the days before the outraged Magdalene headlines.

Based on factual stories, Lynch reminds us that life for the postulants training to become nuns could be every bit a dehumanizing and traumatic as the lives experienced by the banished women they would eventually minister to.

Set mostly in the 1940s and 1950s, the era when Ireland’s theocracy was at its zenith, Lynch paints a picture of a dysfunctional and out of control culture where bullying and oppression were the norm and protests of any kind were suppressed, often with tragic consequences.

It Doesn’t Ring a Bell makes for disturbing but important reading, and provides a cultural context for the abuses that have come to light in more recent times.

PublishAmerica, $22.46

The Second Coming of Paisley
By Richard Lawrence Jordan

In the 1970s the Reverend Ian Paisley had twin obsessions. The first was to save Ulster from popery and the second was to save it from sodomy.

You can judge for yourself how successful he was at either enterprise, but the time has come to study the relationship between his brand of militant evangelical fundamentalism and similar brands he encountered in the U.S. in the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Troubles in the 1960s.

In his absorbing new study The Second Coming of Paisley, author Richard Lawrence Jordan traces how the exposure to the idea of leaders of the American Christian right such as Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis enabled Paisley to develop a toxic militant brand of highly politicized religious fundamentalism to successfully bock the advance of civil rights for the north’s Catholic population.

Fascinatingly, Jordan also demonstrates that this cross-fertilization didn’t happen in a vacuum. In fact it happened in the context of centuries of interaction between Ulster and America. Paisley, the author claims, used a religious culture imported from the U.S. to shake up religion and politics in the north.

Syracuse, $39.95

Other People’s Diasporas
By Sinead Moynihan

Ireland has long seen itself as a land of emigrants, so what happens when it is asked to welcome immigrants? In her new book Sinead Moynihan, a lecturer in 20th century Irish literature at the University of Exeter, asks what happens when other nation’s diasporas converge on the homeland of a diasporic people?

These are provocative questions and ones that will clearly reflect on what we have learned as a culture in our travels.  Moynihan plunders the literature of Ireland since 1998 to explore the representations of developing race relations on the island, and she points to the ways contemporary Irish culture looks to the history of Irish American and African American relations in an effort to understand its own immigrant communities.

It turns out the centuries long tradition of Irish emigration to the U.S. has much to say about prevalent trends in contemporary immigration. This dialogue has been going on in a one sided way for hundreds of years, but the good news is the Irish in Ireland are finding a new language to greet immigrants with the lessons they learned over the centuries themselves.

Syracuse, $39.95

Roald Dahl's Matilda battles bullies on Broadway

Bertie Carvel steals scenes and carries the show.

The truth is Matilda isn't one of Roald Dahl's most interesting works. Oh, it's a charming and typically dark effort by the old master and you'll certainly find yourself rooting for his bright and put-upon young creation, but there are contradictions in the narrative that make you wonder why it takes the time it takes for the story to end happily.

That's not the case with the Royal Shakespeare Company's absurdly entertaining new musical Matilda based on Dahl's book, now playing on Broadway.

This high octane production, which features choreography that's sometimes so athletically over the top it's a little exhausting to witness, manages to do the near impossible and outfit the slim story line with songs and dance routines that add immeasurably to the source material.

With it's theme of the imaginations power to push back against the ugly realities of life, and the power of books to transform any existence, you'll cheer as smart as a whip little Matilda learns to push back against the bully who wants to boss her around.

As Miss Trunchbull, actor Bertie Carvel inhabits the role of the headmistress from Hell so successfully you might as well award him a Tony right now (it's all but inevitable). His grotesque makeup, his hunched back, his shuffling walk and his vocal stylings are captivatingly sinister and unspeakably funny.

The four young American actresses who alternate in the title role have all successfully mastered their British accents, but in the first act their projection occasionally faltered in certain songs. But these are the teething troubles of a new production, the over all performance never misses a note.

Try to book your tickets now because they're going to become sought after. This show delivers the best new musical on Broadway since The Book of Mormon broke the bank.

A look at books - photography, music, and coming of age stories

The Irish: A Photohistory
By Sean Sexton and Christine Kinealy

Sometimes a photograph can be a door you can walk through into the past. In The Irish: A Photohistory, Sean Sexton and Christine Kinealy have assembled one of the most evocative and moving collections of the life of the Irish over the past two centuries that I have ever seen.

The first Irish photographs date from 1840, six years before the unforeseen catastrophe that would come to define the tragedy of British colonialism in Ireland.

Many of the images contained in this collection are heart-stoppingly beautiful. You can actually see and feel the progress of Irish history contained in these moving portraits of smiling young men and women, all unmistakably Irish, whose grandchildren were long dead before this collection even commenced.

Sexton and Kinealy (the noted historian of the Irish Famine) have taken it upon themselves to conjure 200 years of Irish history in all of its grandeur and tragedy. Many of the faces in this collection are lined with sorrows, others are carefree, their whole lives still ahead of them.

In 1839, when the first photographs were taken in Ireland, it was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe with over eight million inhabitants. One hundred years later its population had fallen to five million, a decline that was unique in Europe.

The consequences of all that struggle and change are contained within this remarkable book. If you only buy one study of Irish history this year, make it this one.

Thames & Hudson, $21.95.

Rory Gallagher: His Life and Times
By Marcus Connaughton

It's not a bad old life, being a guitar hero. Ireland has produced master musicians in every generation, but you can still count on one hand how many have made it out of Ireland onto the world’s stage.

Rory Gallagher was one of the few. In 1963 at the age of 15 he bought his trademark Fender Stratocaster and his rise, as they say, was meteoric.

Talent finds its own level. Gallagher discovered the blues in Ireland at a time when it was difficult to buy a pop magazine or hear a blues tune on the radio. The music was somehow already in him and he went on to inspire players like The Edge, Johnny Marr, Slash and Gary Moore.

In this handsomely illustrated biography Gallagher’s contemporaries and fellow musicians tell stories about the legendary rocker who won the Melody Maker Guitarist of the Year award in 1972 (when there was plenty of competition).

Shy and retiring in the Irish way, it was when he was on stage that his talent took over, leaving audiences and critics astounded by his dexterity, the Irish blues man who even startled the genres trailblazers with his gift.

Dufour, $34.95.

Screwed
By Eoin Colfer

Colfer made his reputation as a best-selling author for young readers with his Artemis Fowl series, but his equally best-selling crime novels have attracted a whole new audience for the gifted Irish storyteller.

Screwed is an mordantly funny second outing for Dan McEvoy, the down on his luck owner of a New Jersey dive bar, whose uneasy truce with the local criminal kingpin Irish Mike Madden is being tested by an unexpectedly sudden death.

Colfer has an ear for dialogue, and the back and forths between characters are a highlight of this immensely entertaining Irish American noir. This is a tale that’s crying out for the big screen, but in the meantime revel in its inventive mastery.

Overlook, $29.95.

The Gamal
By Ciaran Collins

Things rarely end well for the weird kid in an Irish town. It’s usually because they can’t find a chapter in the story of their home place that will willingly include them.

From Roddy Doyle to John McGahern to Patrick McCabe, the outcome of all this exclusion and casual cruelty is rarely ever in doubt -- violence, separation or even death.

In The Gamal by Ciaran Collins we meet poor young Charlie -- the gamal, short for the Irish word “gamalog” meaning, roughly, simpleton. Always in trouble, always being run out of places, he’s the perfect foil to expose the prejudices of the little town he lives in.

It’s as old as the Bible, this dance. Just fall in love with the wrong person and watch the sparks fly.
The darkness that lurks in the hearts of others gets a workout in this poignant and bitingly funny book, which marks Collins’ debut.

Bloomsbury, $17.