" 'Sabbath’s Theater', no longer a book and not quite a play, is best enjoyed as a celebration of its performers. But it’s never as unholy as it wants to be."
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"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...Sexuality is front and center here, and by the end, Turturro has even given us the full Mickey. But he only exposes the body of this tortured and terrible miscreant, and not the character's soul."
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“The production is a faithful-to-a-fault adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, by Turturro and the author Ariel Levy, that gets stuck in translation. It’s the story of a chronically, self-destructively passionate man, but its writers can’t figure out how to render that fire onstage. The raw materials are there, but the spark is lacking.”
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“Ms. Levy and Mr. Turturro have certainly done their best to capture the highlights, if generally exulting in sexual transgression can be so described, of Mickey’s turbulent life. But in attempting to squeeze Roth’s novel into less than two hours of stage time they have hollowed out its emotional impact. What’s left is mostly moments of lurid outrageousness—which pall quickly.”
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"Their reproduction of Roth’s language, Levy and Turturro bring a desperately needed voice of delicious transgression to the American stage. That alone makes 'Sabbath’s Theater' worth seeing."
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“Passages that seem so vivid on the page feel flat and stagey when acted out; rather than gasping at Mickey masturbating at Denka's grave, one instead notes how artfully the projection designer depicts the emission of sperm. The play reproduces most of the book's key events but its most distinctive feature, the author's scalding, offensive, irrepressible voice, is muted.”
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“With direction by Jo Bonney, the performances are uniformly excellent. Turturro gives a fearless, no-holds-barred performance...To the credit of the adapters and designers, there is a good deal of theatricality in this excursion into Roth's world. Nevertheless, there's a certain amount of irony in the notion that ‘Sabbath's Theater’ may be best suited to the page and not the stage.”
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Philip Roth’s 1995 Rabelaisian novel "Sabbath’s Theater" would seem a strange choice for stage adaptation both as it is considered Roth’s raunchiest – if not filthiest – book and it moves around a great deal to places in New England, New York, New Jersey and Venice, Italy. The stage adaptation by journalist Ariel Levy and actor-director John Turturro who also stars in The New Group’s production at the Pershing Square Signature Center is not really a play but a staged reading. Performed by Turturro and two actors, Elizabeth Marvel and Jason Kravits, taking all the other parts, this very doubling reinforces the feeling that this is not a fully realized play.
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