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For an Irishman, raised Catholic in a country where veneration of Mary was for so long a way of life, it amounts to utter rebellion, an overturning of any and all received ideas about the second-most important person in the Catholic religion.
THE TESTAMENT OF MARY BROADWAY LIGHTING FREE
But clearly such criticisms are wide of the mark ToÃbÃn is taking a cudgel to the plaster carapace of piety that has surrounded Mary for centuries, setting free the flesh-and-blood woman who surely once walked the earth. She also recalls the pain of separation from her son as fame overtook him and her helpless terror as the civil authorities spied on him, looking for the right moment to close in.Įspecially in our current polarized climate of religious discourse, this is strong stuff, and there have been the predictable cries of heresy and bigotry from the usual sources. She casts a cold eye on her son's career, noting that his followers constituted "a group of misfits," adding that they were "men who could not look a woman in the eye." Paraphrasing the gospels for her own gimlet-eyed purposes, she says, "Whenever I have seen two men together, I have seen foolishness and cruelty." To her, the miracles are either suspicious, as in the wedding feast at Cana, or monstrous: She sees the resurrection of Lazarus as a rejection of "the way things are in the world," adding that the poor man remained a kind of walking corpse, waiting to die again as quickly as possible. Instead, she is a shrewd, observant, and tough-minded peasant woman, looking back in anger at the terrible tragedy that has shattered her, leaving her furious and empty. As she tells it, the Immaculate Conception was a crock. (See The Song of Bernadette.) She is not the object of endless novenas, and she is most certainly not a symbol of unthinking acquiescence to God's will. "They want to make what happened live forever," she says, adding, definitively, "He will not come back." Traditional Catholics take note: This is not the tranquil Mary of a million bathtub-encased statues, nor a vision created by Hollywood special effects artists and given voice by Linda Darnell.
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The author, Colm ToÃbÃn, has imagined Mary later in life, after Christ's death a woman alone, she isn't at all happy to be visited by his followers. If her rages can evoke the terrors of the earth, even in moments of quiet introspection, she can rattle your nerves. Perhaps not, but as played by Shaw, Mary is a woman of Medea-like furies. And yet a disturbing thought occurs: With that simple, yet distinct, gesture, is she attempting - either consciously or unconsciously - to connect these two towering female figures of antiquity? (Whether the children she had murdered were on stage, I mercifully no longer recall the final image was disturbing enough.) In The Testament of Mary, Shaw plays Mary, the mother of Jesus, presumably a more benign parent figure. At the end of her 2002 Medea, she sat next to a pool, giggling and flicking drops of water at her grieving husband, Jason. If you caught her last Broadway way, the gesture is enough to make your blood run cold. The Testament of Mary begins with Fiona Shaw, by a pool, flicking bits of water with her fingers and smiling with childlike satisfaction. Theatre in Review: The Testament of Mary (Walter Kerr Theatre)