Mickey Sabbath (John Turturro, right) shares a memory with his longtime lover Drenka (Elizabeth Marvel), in the adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel Sabbath’s Theater.
Philip Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater is considered outrageous and raunchy even by Rothian standards, with retired, arthritic puppeteer Mickey Sabbath making Alexander Portnoy—the hero of Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, which launched his career—look tame by comparison. For Mickey there is no desire for redemption or decency; there is only narcissistic pleasure-seeking, misanthropy, and self-gratification at any cost. All of which begged the question, in a recent New York Times piece on John Turturro and writer Ariel Levy, who co-adapted the novel into a playscript, “Is 2023 ready for Sabbath?”
The question is meant to conjure up so-called “cancel culture” and the banishing (or imprisonment) of some lecherous men in the wake of #MeToo. But this New Group production, directed by Jo Bonney and starring Turturro as the titular Sabbath, doesn’t really offer up anything genuinely challenging or provocative. It comes across, rather, as a self-satisfied and bizarrely mechanical rendition of Sabbath’s greatest hits, too besotted with its own winking faux-transgressiveness to wrestle with actual moral complexity. And it never tries to seriously answer the fundamental question: Why tell this story now?
Sabbath waxes poetic to a homeless man (Jason Kravits) on the subway.
The story is structured as a memory play, and alongside Turturro’s Sabbath are Elizabeth Marvel and Jason Kravits playing a variety of characters from his life. While adapting the novel involved substantial cutting and rearranging, all the words in the script, including stage directions, are Roth’s. In addition to interacting with the other characters, Sabbath directly addresses the audience, offering sarcastic or wicked asides, à la Richard III. Excellent lighting design by Jeff Croiter helps one keep track of when and where we are in the story and also adds expressive touches that lend some emotion to scenes that can otherwise be quite flat. There is sporadic use of projections (designed by Alex Basco Koch), which are too cartoonishly distracting to be useful to the storytelling.
The most important secondary character is Drenka (Marvel), Sabbath’s longtime mistress, a Croatian immigrant of voracious carnal appetite, who sees her relationship with Sabbath as having initiated her into both carnality and an American identity. The scenes with Drenka range over the 13 years of their affair, and it is her death from cancer that precipitates the latest crisis for Sabbath, who trails behind him a first wife who disappeared, a second wife who hates him (and he her), a career as an indecent puppeteer derailed by arthritic hands, and a college teaching job lost because of a phone-sex scandal with an undergraduate.
For Sabbath, even Drenka’s death becomes a sexualized ritual: right before masturbating on her grave he exclaims, “Never forget you coming. Never forget you begging, more, more, more. … Sweetheart, rise up before you turn to dust, come back and be revived, oozing all your secretions!” This séance-like onanism is interrupted by the ghost of Sabbath’s mother, who emerges occasionally as a disembodied voice (sound design by Mikaal Sulaiman), either whistling her “signature song” or reminding Sabbath that he’s wasted his life in brothels.
Sabbath and Drenka talk after sex. Photographs by Monique Carboni.
The apparently deep loss that Sabbath feels over his mother and his brother, Morty, who was killed in World War II, seems hastily tacked on here, so that a moment when Sabbath weeps over his dead brother’s wartime letter lands without emotional impact. The same is true of moments that are supposed to be subversively filthy but actually come across as juvenile, such as Sabbath’s and Drenka’s conversation in the hospital where she is dying about the time they drank each other’s urine.
At the play’s conclusion Sabbath strips naked and wraps himself in the American flag and delivers a paean to misanthropy, to the ideal of the dirty old man: “To everyone I have ever horrified, to the appalled who’d consider me a dangerous man, loathsome, degenerate and gross ... not at all. My failure is failing to have gone far enough.” If this is meant to shock, it doesn’t; it’s just tiresome, especially since there are several moments that precede this where it seems the play has already ended.
Turturro is always interesting to watch, but he doesn’t manage to get inside Mickey or make him seem human. The performance and the play strike the same one note, and that note is grating by the end of the 100-minute running time. All the prodigious talents of Turturro, Marvel, and Kravits can’t make this production click. Sabbath desperately wants an audience, but never makes the case why an audience should want to pay attention to him.
The New Group’s Sabbath’s Theater runs through Dec. 17 at Pershing Square Signature Center (480 W 42nd St.). Evening performances are 7:30 p.m. Tuesday–Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday (beginning Nov. 8) and Saturday–Sunday. Tickets are available by visiting thenewgroup.org.
Playwrights: Ariel Levy & John Turturro
Director: Jo Bonney
Sets: Arnulfo Maldonado
Costumes: Arnulfo Maldonado
Lighting: Jeff Croiter
Sound: Mikaal Sulaiman
