We all know, presumably, how Jesus died and what happened, more or less on that day, in about 30 A.D. Jesus’ mother Mary was there – and yet the agency of Mary and her reaction to her child’s suffering is largely absent from the story as we know it. There is no gospel of Mary; Mary doesn’t give her witness recorded by the New Testament. What was she thinking that day? What would she have published, or chosen not to publish, on her Facebook/Twitter that night, 2,000 years ago?
These are some of the questions explored in The Testament of Mary, currently being performed by actress/playwright Jane Press and directed by Maryann Schaupp Rousseau at the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts.
Originally written by Colm Tóibín, who conceived it as a 2012 novella, The Testament of Mary hit the stage before the book hit bookstores, produced in 2011 by the Dublin Theatre Festival as a one-woman play starring Marie Mullen. In 2013, the play was first performed on Broadway with Fiona Shaw as Mary. It received three Tony Award nominations.
Then comes Jane Press, and she is worth your every minute.
Press owns her own theater company called Press the Button, where she seeks to put women over age 50 onstage. The Testament of Mary provides an outsized lead role perfect for the task.
There’s very little we know about Mary, and when we do see her it is as a suffering mother, as in Michelangelo’s “Pietà.” That’s not the Mary this play gives us, nor is it the Mary we are looking for when exploring our modern-day problems.
In Tóibín/Press’ take, Mary is human. She is human when she suffers for him, but she is never more human when she betrays her son fearing the same end. She does it several times, first by staying in the crowd while he is nailed to the cross, and then again, when she makes a decision and sneaks out to run away, far from Jerusalem, before he actually dies and is buried.
Mater Dolorosa, Mary in grief as a sculpture is a saint out of this world. But Mary, the mother of Jesus – a troublesome young man killed by the local government for causing trouble – is a scene from contemporary America.
THE TESTAMENT OF MARY runs 7:30pm Fridays and Saturdays, and 3pm Sundays, through Sept. 11. Carl Cherry Center for the Arts, 4th and Guadalupe, Carmel. $23, $20/military. 233-1941, carlcherrycenter.org