TT: At the atheists’ ball

Once again The Wall Street Journal has given me two extra slots this week to report on the many shows that are currently opening on Broadway. Today I report on The Testament of Mary and Alan Cumming’s Macbeth, neither of which did much for me. Here’s an excerpt.
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If you’re a lapsed Catholic, preferably Irish, who now believes that Christianity is the principal source of evil in the modern world, then I encourage you to see “The Testament of Mary,” a modern-dress solo stage version of the 2012 novella by Colm Tóibín in which Jesus’ mother (played by Fiona Shaw) proclaims to all and sundry that her son was (A) crazy and (B) not the Messiah. It’s your kind of play, and then some. If, on the other hand, you’re a Christian of the old-fashioned sort, you’ll likely go home praying for fire, or at least a plague of locusts, to descend upon the Walter Kerr Theatre and its blasphemous occupants.
But what about everybody else? Assuming that you don’t have a horse in this particular race, how does “The Testament of Mary” come across when considered not as an anti-religious statement but as a piece of pure drama? Perhaps not surprisingly, it proves to be predictable in the extreme. The members of the audience, whose unswerving secularity is comfortably taken for granted by Mr. Tóibín and his collaborators, are invited to snigger along with Mary at her son and his disciples, and snigger they do, over and over again….
Ms. Shaw is, of course, a great actor–I have deeply etched memories of the avant-garde “Medea” that she brought to Broadway in 2002–but she mostly settles for generalized mannerism in “The Testament of Mary,” though her performance is both specific and memorable whenever she modulates out of the key of outrage and slips into something less obvious….
Alan Cumming’s near-solo version of “Macbeth,” which is set in an insane asylum, bears a number of palpable similarities to “The Testament of Mary.” It, too, is a high-concept show about madness–Mr. Cumming plays a lunatic who seems to think that he’s all of the characters in the play–accompanied by unending horror-show electronic music. Like Ms. Shaw, he spends the evening thrashing around the stage in a state of anguish, and he, too, strips to the buff and takes a bath in full view of the audience.
While I yield to no one in my admiration for Mr. Cumming, his high, reedy voice is a less-than-ideal instrument for the speaking of Shakespearean verse, especially when you’re expected to listen to it for an hour and 40 minutes. Nor is his acting sufficiently varied in tone, involving though it is from moment to moment…
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Read the whole thing here.