And as she takes this suffering into her own heart and being, she takes also the pain and hurt of the world: she redeems not our sin, but our pain. We are brought into Her presence, and the experience takes us home.Īs June Courage writes in her comment on Kathryn House’s beautiful “ Reflections on Good Friday,” recently posted on FAR, Mary as the Pieta “reaches depths of suffering unimaginable to we who watch. As such, she offers us another Way: in her unadorned humanity, she becomes someone with whom we identify, a woman whose very immanence offers a different form of redemption. Mary courageously insists on distinguishing between reality and dreams, embracing her own and her son’s pain without any mitigating consolation.
Yet even as she narrates what she sees as her unnamed son’s senseless death, Mary makes a crucial distinction: “despite the fact that his heart and his flesh had come from my heart and my flesh, despite the pain I felt, a pain that has never lifted, and will go with me into the grave, despite all of this, the pain was his and not mine.” Fiona Shaw as Mary gazes unflinchingly into the abyss, and she take us with her.Īnd yet, this is not a nihilistic play, nor is it blasphemous and heretical as a Catholic group protested on its first night of previews. It is almost too much to bear, this suffering without redemption, without purpose or meaning. Yet, Mary reports, her son was not like them: “grateful, good-mannered, intelligent,” he “could look at a woman as though she were his equal.” As Shaw enacts the part of Mary, she takes on the roles of all the people she encounters: through her face, gestures, and voice we meet the self-serving apostles we see and hear the vicious mob in the end, we see and hear and feel her son, carrying the cross, riven by nails, crowned with thorns-that roll of barbed wire, now encircling Mary’s exposed, fragile neck. The people who follow Mary’s son are all misfits, foolish and cruel. Death is not conquered, sin remains rampant, vanity and egoism triumph. Through Mary’s voice and vision, Toibin offers his own harsh, humanizing version of the Christ story, a story in which there are no confirmed miracles. I fled before it was over but if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. Now, interrogated by two unnamed apostles (John and Luke?) who want to fix the story of her son’s life and death and resurrection, Mary insists on reporting only what she knows: “I was there. Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.” No longer an icon, hardly a virgin, this Mary addresses us with the piercing directness of the passion she has suffered: to have seen her only son crucified despite her efforts to save him. Her hair is cropped, her face haunted wearing short leather boots, she fumbles as she searches for a hand-rolled cigarette to steady herself. Photo by Hugo Glendinningīut when we are all back in our seats, Mary casts off her robe to stand before us in a simple black shift, flowing easily over narrow brown pants. In a large open-sided box, stage left, the actress Fiona Shaw, draped in blue from head to toe, arranges herself, then sits perfectly still, holding a lily and an apple. A few chairs, scattered jars of honey, jugs of water beside a free-standing waist-high faucet, a tall ladder, a long table, a stripped tree trunk with a wooden wheel at the top suspended from the rafters, a menacing roll of barbed wire, and a live turkey vulture occasionally spreading wide its iridescent blue-black wings: such is the set for Deborah Warner’s searing production of Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary, a one-woman show currently in previews at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York. The Flesh Made Word: Colm Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary” on stage and in print By Joyce Zonanaīefore the play begins, the audience is invited on stage we walk around, not quite knowing what to do, gazing at the props, uncertain. Home › Art › The Flesh Made Word: Colm Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary” on stage and in print By Joyce Zonana
0 kommentar(er)
