In “Testament,” the one-woman show starring Canadian stage legend Seana McKenna (“Napoli”) at the American Conservatory Theater, playwright Colm Toíbín tells the story of the aftermath of Jesus’s crucifixion from his mother Mary’s perspective. Although Mary talks about going to the synagogue – we really do get a portrait of Jesus as the rebellious good Jew – she seems more Irish than Jewish. She has the same crabby, wry sense of humour as the Irish mothers Toíbín usually writes about. McKenna is terrific, commanding the stage throughout this eighty-minute production, but problems with the text and the often overwrought production tend to overshadow her performance.
McKenna spends the play on a rectangular wooden island, surrounded by fabric, while the entire stage is surrounded by a wired structure meant to evoke, if not quite resemble, a prison cell. It’s more than a little on-the-nose about how alone and ashamed she feels now that her son is dead — she wasn’t able to stop it. She sits at a table with chairs and a stack of papers, paces around, and often seems so at home at that we almost think she’s speaking from within her own house rather than in a guarded room, where she’s been sent to write her testament about the events that lead to the crucifixion and how the crucifixion itself went down. Meanwhile, the lights dim and brighten at every opportunity for dramatic effect, and the music highlights every emotional note, especially the ominous ones.
Mary starts by recalling her son’s behavior, before he was arrested. Toíbín never has her refer to Jesus by name, so instead of thinking of him as the son of God, what we get is the portrait of a young man – a young man we can relate to, who gathered with his friends, and found many people who followed him. As his mother, Mary is oblivious to the effect her son had on people and why they chose to become his disciples. She remembers the secrets, the rebellious behaviour, and the organizing – she talks about him as if he were planning a political coup – but he’s still just a boy to her, not a great orator inspiring the masses.
She goes off on tangents now and then, complaining about aches and pains, the boredom of attending weddings, and other lightly comedic interludes. We get the sense that the humour is as much for her benefit – to cope with the ordeal – as it is for ours. Eventually, she circles back to the fateful day of the crucifixion, and how she watched it happen – in agony – and all the guilt she felt for not stopping it, even though she knew she was powerless to do so.
Director Carey Perloff does a remarkable job of bringing us back to the events of the crucifixion, to feel as if we’re there, even though we’re only hearing the account of them from Mary. When McKenna holds her arm out to talk about her son being nailed to a cross, it’s a chillingly vivid image. She pulls us with her into that horrific memory. This is also the only time that Perloff subtly uses the lighting, dimming and brightening, to indicate the passage of time. As Mary recounts the night her son spent on the cross, we feel like we’re living through that night because of how the lighting is changing. It can sometimes feel overwrought, since the changes also coincide with particularly dramatic parts of Mary’s soliloquy, but it is a truly excellent way to put us in Mary’s shoes, bringing us back to that day.
Perloff also works to make the story completely relatable: It doesn’t feel biblical, or mythic, like something from the distant past, with no relevance to us now. Instead, Mary’s direct soliloquoy makes us see her as a flawed human, and thus, see the events she’s describing as something not far removed from us. Toíbín’s text, after all, is all about finding the humanity, the vulnerability and the wit in figures we deify, but who were still people like us. Costume designer Jessie Amoroso dresses Mary in a loose grey skirt and top, which doesn’t seem to come from any particular time period: It’s both modern and timeless, reminding us that Mary’s experiences are not so removed from our own.
Throughout, we wonder whom Mary is addressing and why she’s talking. There’s no one else present on stage; she appears to be in a room alone; and she gets sidetracked enough for this not to be a set speech. While it makes sense that she’d keep going over and over this, both to craft her testimony and to move past the trauma, it never quite makes sense why she’s talking out loud, as if to an audience, despite being in an empty room. But since we’re effectively watching her do this for eighty minutes, we have a lot of time to ponder what the point is.
I actually spent more time pondering this question than engaging emotionally with the material, through no fault of McKenna’s, who gives a superb and complex portrait of the grieving, helpless mother. Toíbín succeeds at making us see the ordinary in the extraordinary situation Jesus found himself in. But Perloff’s insistence on hammering us over the head with the play’s ideas ensures the production doesn’t pack quite the emotional punch.
“Testament” plays Tuesday-Sunday at the American Conservatory Theatre. Use the promo code MOTHER23 to get tickets for as low as $10. For more information on discounted student tickets at the American Conservatory Theatre, check out our guide to affordable Bay Area theater here.
Contact Alexandra Heeney at aheeney ‘at’ stanford.edu.