Philip Roth’s Theater

“Sabbath’s Theater” is a book of the novelist Philip Roth’s unreconstructed and randy old age. Written 27 years after the teenage libertinism of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” the later book takes as its subject sex on the grave’s edge. Now, nearly three decades after it won a National Book Award, the book schleps to the stage, adapted by Ariel Levy and John Turturro, who plays the aging puppeteer, a King Lear of menial means and perfervid fantasies. The play, directed by Jo Bonney at the Pershing Square Signature Center, conveys the pornographic pathos of Roth’s sensibility. Mr. Turturro’s Mickey Sabbath is a disgraced puppeteer, brought low by a telephonic sex scandal. His lover Drenka, a terrific Elizabeth Marvel, recalls Chaucer’s Wife of Bath had she hailed from Belgrade. Her death, from cancer, undoes Sabbath, whose wife, Roseanne, kicks him out. A man with nothing to lose, he searches for what remains amidst the ruins. Sabbath’s name may mean rest, but there is none of that for him in this agitated adaptation. The stage is crowded with ghosts. His first wife Nikki is a disconcerting presence, but nothing compared to his mother, her Yiddish accented English booming from the rafters, urging Sabbath to end his failure of a life. He is taken in by old friends, only to be expelled when he is caught nicking their college-age daughter’s panties. He is unrepentant.It is common to elide the distinction between Roth and his fictional avatars- Alexander Portnoy, Nathan Zuckerman, the “Philip Roth” of “Operation Shylock.” Roth was the same age — 64 — as Sabbath when he wrote the character into being. It would be a mistake to conflate the two. Sabbath is a failure, Roth had nearly as many awards as novels. They both, though, did not have children, and they shared a sense of an unsettled Jewishness, deeply grained.Sabbath is one of Roth’s great talkers, a crowded and jabbering summit. He reckons that “Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.” In a defining loss, his brother Morty perishes in World War II. Afterward, his mother “was never again heard to whistle her signature song.” Sabbath’s wife’s laughter “hid both so much and so little.”“Sabbath’s” spare staging shines the spotlight on Roth’s language, where it belongs. As its protagonist’s fortunes wane and despair builds, his rhetoric finds a kind of rigor mortis excellence. In a Rothian mixture, Sabbath’s filth is tinctured with swigs of nostalgia for the unsullied moment. Drenka rhapsodizes Sabbath as “my American boyfriend.” When they danced, she, a self-described “Croatian Catholic shiksa,” was “dancing with America.”Sabbath earns that appellation with his ode to the Jersey Shore from which he came, and to which he returns at the show’s end. He recalls, in lines among the most gorgeous Roth ever set down, the “sand and ocean, the tide, the stars, the mists, the gulls. The limitless sea, the Atlantic. You could touch your toes where America began. Endlessness. We grew up on it.” He treasures his brother’s dog tags — “A for blood type. H for Hebrew.”After a final failed suicide suicide attempt, Sabbath takes his leave from the stage by addressing “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. My failure is not having gone further.” He asks “How could I leave? How could I go?” His answer is a misanthrope’s mantra — “Everything I hated was here.”This is the Sabbath who feels a “laughable hunger for more. More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis! God willing, more pussy!” Lines like these underwrite the judgment of Roth’s best critic, Ruth Wisse, who ventures that “Sabbath’s Theater” is a “very funny book, a desperate book” but that the writer’s sense of “sex as our true source of satisfaction and solace bespeaks a pauper’s idea of human potential.”At the show at which this critic was present, the audience’s most animated reaction was reserved for Sabbath’s reading of his will. He leaves some spare change to his “friends at the Astor Place subway station” — that elicited a chuckle — and 20 dirty pictures … to the State of Israel.” The audience laughed, high and nervous. Weeks before, Roth’s co-religionists had been slaughtered in their thousands. These laughing Jews were the lucky ones.

Philip Roth’s Theater

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