When his secret life of debauchery comes to a heartbreaking end, disgraced puppet maker Mickey Sabbath plunges into increasingly mad and maddening encounters with people from his wild and wicked past. Part ghost story, part love story, Sabbath’s Theater unleashes Roth’s power to shock and amaze in this profound meditation on mortality and juicy celebration of life.
Ariel Levy and John Turturro's stage adaptation of Sabbath's Theater begins with a bang: Over-the-hill lecher Mickey Sabbath (Turturro) and his insatiable Croatian mistress, Drenka (Elizabeth Marvel), schtup with abandon in the opening scene. But the play goes flaccid fast. Despite the transgressiveness of the source material—the late Philip Roth's scabrous novel, considered a masterpiece by some and purely masturbatory by others—the play is an impotent affair, with three excellent actors working awfully hard to screw inert vignettes into a whole.
This juxtaposition – intermingling – of sex and death, of obscenity and grief, is central to the play, and arguably at the core of much of Roth’s oeuvre, although a writer who produced “Portney’s Complaint” and “American Pastoral” and“The Plot Against America” can’t be summed up so simply. But the balance is skewed in this adaptation. I found the explicit scenes more often off-putting than amusing or alluring. There are some poignant moments, especially when Marvel is portraying Drenka, and Kravits is playing Sabbath’s100-year-old cousin Fish. But there are fewer than intended.
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