The fury, it should be noted, never accommodates the magnificent ferocity that Shaw and Warner brought to a very different mother's tale in their Medea. Under the vigorous direction of her longtime collaborator Deborah Warner, Shaw gives full force to Toibin's imagining - clearly not meant to be any stab at literal history - of a woman driven as much by her desire for justice and sympathy for others as by grief or fury. What emerges is a portrait of a loving mother with a strong, sharp mind and a broken heart. The most duplicitous character, a false confidante named Marcus, is fictional.

She refers early on to two regular visitors, presumably apostles, who watch and question her, and 'the brutality boiling in their blood.' She tells us sardonically of the 'group of misfits' that her son 'gathered around him,' and her impatience with them.īut Shaw's characteristically textured delivery also shows us Mary's struggle not to seem embittered and Toibin has her remember Jesus with a great tenderness that is extended to others, notably Lazarus, whose story is retold with particular poignance. When the play, which opened Monday, began previews in March, protesters gathered outside the Walter Kerr Theatre to object to what one sign described as its 'blasphemous' nature.Ĭertainly, Toibin's Queen of Heaven, whom we meet years after Jesus has been crucified, is capable of acerbic irreverence. Religion, not surprisingly, has been a source of both fascination and skepticism for both artists. Like Toibin, who adapted Testament from his own novella, Shaw was born in Ireland in the 1950s and raised Catholic. Once the audience is seated, Shaw elegantly leads the bird of prey offstage - and launches into an 85-minute monologue that thoroughly shatters the calmness of the prelude, along with any conceptions of Mary as a passive, obedient figure. Shaw sits immobile in a clear box, her face bearing an expression of serene warmth - even with a live vulture poised just beside her. Prominent in it is Mary herself - or rather Fiona Shaw, the extraordinary actress who plays her.

NEW YORK - If you arrive before curtain time at the new Broadway production of Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary (* * * out of four), you can walk up on stage and through a simulated museum exhibit evoking the ordeal of the play's title, and only, character: the mother of Jesus Christ.

The testament of mary broadway lighting