It’s a reflex action for those in the arts to recoil and get angry when creative work is described as “intolerable blasphemies.” But it’s probably worth giving a small shout out to the America Needs Fatima organization as they protest the production of Colm Toíbín’s The Testament of Mary at the New Repertory Theater in Watertown MA. Why? Because amidst repeated variations of “blasphemy,” “blasphemous” and “blasphemies” in their rhetoric, the group is careful to call for “respectful but firm protest” at one point, and asks that people speak out against the show “legally and respectfully.” I hope that those who hear and choose to answer their call heed those cautions.

America Needs Fatima (ANF) has taken issue with The Testament of Mary before, both in its Broadway production and in a subsequent San Francisco run. They claim that their efforts helped cause the Broadway show to end early and that they prompted many to “turn away” from the San Francisco engagement. Of course, there’s no proof that either is the case. As someone who saw and admired Fiona Shaw’s Broadway performance as well as the play, I recall that it opened during the usual spring crush of new Broadway shows and, without sufficient critical praise, it was indeed closed quickly. But anyone who knows Scott Rudin, the show’s lead producer, knows full well that he wouldn’t back down from protests and his decision was entirely pragmatic and fiscal.

Fiona Shaw in The Testament of Mary on Broadway

For those who don’t know The Testament of Mary, or Toíbín’s book from which it’s drawn, it is a one-person play about Jesus’s mother, who recounts her son’s experiences both of faith and tragedy. It does show the character questioning the motives of some of Jesus’s associates and reacting with great distress to his crucifixion. While it is certainly does not comport with any of the gospels, it is a serious-minded imagining of what might have been her thoughts, rather than a satire or parody of religious issues, like the film Dogma or the musical The Book of Mormon.

ANF managed to get their newest protest noticed by The Boston Globe, which published an account of their efforts on January 21. The article, by Don Aucoin, spoke with Jim Petosa, artistic director of New Repertory and director of the production. It’s somewhat curious that ANF did not make their organization’s director available to Aucoin for comment, which seems pretty basic protest protocol when dealing with the largest newspaper in the region. As the Globe reported, Petosa and the company stand by the decision to produce Testament of Mary, and so the article simply presented the views of both sides as they were available.

However, there was the potential for the article to engender further protest, by bringing ANF’s view of the show to a larger audience. So I asked Petosa about the response since it appeared.

“There’s been more of a positive response from people,” he said. “I’ve gotten e-mails that say things like ‘I’ve been a devout Catholic all my life and I’m glad you’re doing this.’ We’ve gotten more people who are sympathetic than opposed.”

Petosa said that New Repertory’s staff has created a map to show where expressions of support and opposition were coming from, and it shows that there’s local support, with opposition coming from outside the greater Boston area. He observed, “Most of the negative comments are coming from people who couldn’t possibly get to New Repertory.”

I asked Petosa whether he had heard of any plans for in-person protests at the theatre and he said no, but commented, “They’d be more than welcome and we’d invite them in to see the production.”

Petosa chalks the communications against The Testament of Mary up to “a misunderstanding about the intent of the writer and the intent of the theatre,” saying that the goal of the company’s work for audiences was “to enhance their lives, not diminish their convictions.” He also ascribed the rhetoric against the show to being reflective of “the polarity of political discourse,” that it was “born out of orthodoxy.”

Petosa did acknowledge a recurring theme in some communications he’d received opposing the show, saying, “In a couple of letters, there were some intolerant but not surprising statement about Colm Toíbín’s sexuality, but that’s not pervasive. It is people equating blasphemy with homosexuality, revealing their own homophobia.” In one of its online documents about the play, during its Broadway premiere, ANF made a point of noting that it was “being performed and directed by open lesbians.”

The first previews of The Testament of Mary this weekend will overlap with the final performances of New Rep’s production of David Hare’s Via Dolorosa, and Petosa said he wished the two plays could have run concurrently for much longer. “They are thematically connected,” he noted. “They are pilgrimage plays, both journeys to Calvary. I’m eager to see how the dialogue around Dolorosa is affected by Mary, and the other way around.”

ANF’s website asks people to sign a petition urging New Rep to cancel their production, as is their right. But by using their own petition engine, rather than a third party site, it’s impossible to know whether the 30,000 signatures the group claims are genuine, repetitious, or merely coded. In any event, since I first looked at the page several days ago, the signature count is virtually unchanged, so there doesn’t appear to be a groundswell of support for their position.

So ANF will continue to express their opinions against The Testament of Mary, consistent with their past efforts against Taylor Has Two Mommies, Jerry Springer: The Opera and the artist Andres Serrano, among others. As long as they keep their efforts legal and respectful, even an activist with opposing views wouldn’t suggest that they aren’t entirely within their rights, because they are. But perhaps people in the arts community, and in theatre audiences, will drop a note to Jim Petosa and the staff and board of New Repertory, and congratulate them for being unbowed by ANF, and wishing them the best with their newest production.

Thanks to Jacqueline Lawton for her research assistance with this post.

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts.

Yes, I brought my camera to a Broadway show with the intention of using it. And I did.

Having read that the audience was invited on stage before the start of The Testament of Mary to gaze upon an assortment of props, as well as the leading lady Fiona Shaw, I brought my camera to document the event. I figured it would make for perfect art to accompany a blog post about the wisdom of a show exploiting audience curiosity in order to seed a social media marketing campaign.

Instead, I was converted.

No, not like that.

In the 36 hours since I saw the next-to-last Broadway performance, I have come to realize that the audience ambling and photobombing of Shaw was in fact an integral part of the show, and it reveals new layers to me even as I write.

Colm Toíbín’s revisionist view of the mother of Jesus, adapted by Shaw and director Deborah Warner, gave us a most ordinary Mary, who spent much of the show in a drab tunic and pants. She was remarkably modern in her speech, talked with an Irish accent, and dangled a cigarette from her lips. The set was strewn with anachronistic props: plastic chairs, a metal pail, a bird cage – a yard sale filled mostly with items from the Bethlehem Hope Depot.

Mary’s tale might be that of any Jewish mother whose son has fallen in with the wrong crowd, less disciples or worshippers than hooligans; her skepticism about her son’s miracles is hardly veiled. She spoke of the raising of Lazarus as if he had been buried alive, of the transformation of water into wine as a show-off’s trick, and wrenchingly of the crucifixion. She described those who urged her to recount her son’s life and death in specific ways, contrary to some of her own recollections; she talked about potential threats to her own safety resulting from her familial connection. She stripped bare and submerged herself completely in a pool of water for a second or two longer than might seem safe; an auto-baptism perhaps?

But that’s the play. Or so we’re meant to think.

In hindsight, the play – or at least the production – began the moment Fiona Shaw took her place, Madonna-like, behind plexiglass walls, at roughly 7:40 pm before the announced 8 pm curtain. While it’s perhaps unfortunate that this device was used so soon after the Tilda Swinton-in-a-box stunt at the Museum of Modern Art, we were clearly watching a tableau vivant of the Virgin Mary as seen in countless religious icons, not an Oscar winner feigning sleep.

The moment the play proper, or perhaps I should say “the action,” began, the audience was shooed to their seats, cautioned against further photos, the glass case lifted, and Shaw quickly shed the fine vestments for the costume described earlier.

As I had stood among the crowd on stage, and it was indeed a crowd, I thought, ‘Why isn’t this better managed? Everyone is going in a different direction. People could trip, people could slip off the stage itself, they could taunt the live vulture, they could foul up the preset props.’ Even after I wormed my way up to the plexiglass and was ready to retake my seat, I couldn’t, such was the flow of people coming and going from two small stairways on a suddenly tiny stage.

I have come to realize that we were the modern day rabble, gawking at the remnants of Jesus’ death. There was no corpse, but the barbed wire we tiptoed around would later be a crown of thorns, Shaw as the Madonna was indeed a gazed-upon icon, making her transformation to flesh and blood all the more striking minutes later. We weren’t looking upon any of this with reverence, but with the avid curiosity of onlookers at a tragedy. Our actions were the curtain raiser, we were our own cast in a sequence of immersive theatre within the confines of a proscenium theatre.  The vulture was gone after this prologue, since we had picked the bones of the production dry under our eager gaze; Mary was vividly alive, and therefore of no interest to a animal that feeds on carrion.

Yes, I tweeted photos of the motionless Shaw; I imagine others did the same. I tried to get a good shot of the vulture, but it wasn’t much for posing and its black feathers in low light made it even more difficult a subject. I wasn’t about to use a flash, lest it trouble the seemingly imperturbable bird; others had no such compunction.

I have seen many coups de théâtre in my years of theatergoing, but this was the first time I had been a part of one. Even my tweeting served the piece; I was spreading the classic image of Mary to others, tipping them to the ability to photograph her themselves, in order to have their own actions questioned and subverted for the subsequent 90 minutes. As I did it, I felt there was something cheap in my actions; only in hindsight do I realize that Shaw and Warner had expertly suckered me into their game, as the modern day equivalent of a gawking bystander in ancient times.

Unfortunately, only another 1,000 people may have had the opportunity to respond to my small, complicit role as I exploited images of the show on social media, in the public relations of religious and theatrical iconography, since The Testament of Mary closed after its next performance. Perhaps it ran too short a time to become the stuff of legend, but it was, for me, a memorable experience, one martyred by what Broadway seems to demand.  I hope it goes to countless better places.

all photos by Howard Sherman

I’m often asked by journalists for observations about trends, on Broadway, Off-Broadway, or about theatre in general. One recent call queried me about the prevalence of shirtless men on Broadway this season, a topic on which I had little to say.

Although I was taught in my press agent days that two similar items are a coincidence but that for journalistic purposes, three similar items make a trend and get covered as such, I still tend to look at confluences on Broadway in any given season as accidents. Shows come together (or not) at certain times for many reasons, without co-ordination. But it’s hard not to look at the spring Broadway crop of one-actor shows and let it go unremarked.

In a span of only eight weeks, four of Broadway’s 40 theatres will be home to new one-person shows – all genuine plays, not musical revues or autobiographical monodramas – representing four of the ten new plays due this spring. They tell the stories of three influential women, all deceased – Hollywood agent Sue Mengers (I’ll Eat You Last), Texas governor Ann Richards (Ann) and Jesus’ mother (The Testament of Mary) – and those Scottish social climbers, The Macbeths. Not having seen any of them as yet, I know that the Scottish play has a single actor (Alan Cumming) playing every role; whether there are multiple characters portrayed in the other shows is to be seen.

Is this confluence the result of ‘star casting’ run amok? Not really, since of the four actors involved– Cumming, Bette Midler, Fiona Shaw and Holland Taylor (in alphabetical order) – only Midler is a multi-generational ‘big name’ in the U.S. The other three are all accomplished and honoured actors, and Cumming’s star has risen sharply since he joined the cast of TV’s The Good Wife, but none is necessarily box office catnip. Taylor last appeared on Broadway three decades ago in the infamous Moose Murders, while Shaw’s only prior appearance was as Medea during a brief run 11 years ago. Midler, we hear, won’t be singing, the feature of her previous Broadway forays in the 1970s.

So what to make of this monomania? In all likelihood, it’s simply a quirk of fate, but it has potentially lasting effects. As new plays on Broadway are typically launched into long lives in regional and later amateur theatres, is the theatrical canon being expanded with this work? One only has to see how Red and The Mountaintop have flourished around the US to see the Broadway effect on plays’ future lives, perhaps due to their tiny casts helping to balance out large plays elsewhere in a theatre’s season. Will these solo plays make the same journey – or are they taking the place of larger pieces that need a marketing boost to make that leap?

One-person shows place a significant burden on one person’s shoulders. In any venue, there’s the risk of the actor becoming ill or being injured; while subsidised theatres in the US often don’t use understudies – they’ll carry them on shows like these. But  will any audience want to see a substitute for the person truly charged with the singular task of holding a stage by themselves?

If the shows are hits, and do spawn future productions, they could further diminish cast sizes nationally. The economic temptation will be there, and perhaps playwrights who worry now about writing shows that require even six or seven actors will start to think in a smaller scale, to the detriment of the dramatic canon. We can ill-afford a scenario in which God of Carnage is a theatre’s ‘big’ show.

I look forward to each of these plays, which promise a variety of subject and style. But if solo shows become Broadway’s dramatic bread and butter, they’re likely to be met with the sound of one hand clapping.