It’s a good thing Philip Roth has died; otherwise he would surely be canceled. Points for courage, then, to John Turturro, who
cowrote and stars in a defiantly cancelable one-act stage adaptation of Roth’s intentionally offensive 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater (at the Pershing Square Signature Center through December 17) that luxuriates in its source’s most shocking scenes. Though Roth (1933–2018) approvingly chronicled the spread of sexual license, since his era the heterosexual lust of aging men for much younger women has widely been ruled contemptible, or in the parlance of twenty-first-century feminist columnists, “gross” or “problematic.” If sexual preoccupation was at the very heart of the American novel in the 1960s and ’70s, when Roth, John Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer expounded on their every horny thought, it is somewhere between quaint and incredible that Roth won the 1995 National Book Award for fiction for Sabbath’s Theater. That prize is, like most others, now circumscribed by an unwritten anti-quota against white men (the last pale male to win it, in 2015, was Adam Johnson, although he is part Sioux), and today Roth would not only fail to capture awards for such a book, he could also expect severe critical scoldings and perhaps mass walkouts from the woke young women who currently form the infantry of the major publishing houses. That Roth’s protagonists tended to be fairly close cognates of their creator would today be seen as additional justification for tying him to his work and damning the lot.
The scene in which Mickey Sabbath, an avant-garde puppeteer and sometime theater director, impishly explains how he has used his puppeteering skills to ensorcell young coeds with one hand so that he could unbutton their shirts with the other, at one point even exposing a breast right on the street, is one of many that today’s young editors would declare to be a defense of sexual assault and therefore unpublishable. Who would want to be party to a crime, or a defense of same? Never mind the many novels told from the point of view of murderers. Neither Mickey nor Roth is the type to apologize for sexual impropriety, so it seems unlikely that the novelist would have buckled to demands to include some finger-wagging language clarifying that Sabbath is a bad, indeed reprehensible, man. I suspect that if Roth were in his prime today he’d have to seek out one of the lesser publishing houses and get used to very little favorable attention from the media. Among Mickey’s other transgressions are masturbating over the grave of his departed lover Drenka, with whom he had an affair that was adulterous on both sides, and stealing the panties of his friend’s nineteen-year-old daughter to keep them in his pocket for a little thrill. He even attempts to play footsie under the table with the wife of a friend while he is sitting next to her (creating a somewhat embarrassing situation—Sabbath doesn’t realize he is rubbing his foot all over the foot of the husband, not the wife).
Since “transgression,” like similar terms for ignoring decorum’s boundaries, is today a term of high praise across the arts, however, a less approving label for Mickey’s behavior would have to be devised. “Dangerous” also sounds too appealing; “‘Philip Roth makes us feel unsafe,’ editors say in an open letter as they stage walkout from Houghton Mifflin” would likely be the headline.
Just because a work enrages all the right people doesn’t mean it’s good, however. As written by Turturro and the New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy, under the direction of the stage veteran Jo Bonney, Sabbath’s Theater is certainly strong stuff, even before Turturro’s lumpy, wrinkly, saggy Mickey climactically strips nude before our eyes in a scene that reminded me of why I dislike locker rooms. But it falls well short of being a gripping play. Mickey Sabbath is more exasperating than anything else. Even at a lean hour and forty minutes, the piece seems long. Being stuck with the musings of this horndog is unpleasant without being particularly illuminating; to read the novel, by contrast, is to be placed inside Mickey’s mind, which makes him far more sympathetic.
Turturro is onstage throughout, joined by two other cast members who respectively play the various other men (Jason Kravits) and women (Elizabeth Marvel) in his life. It’s 1994, and Mickey, at sixty-four, is not sure he still wants to be alive in “the age of total schlock,” but he keeps going by reminiscing about his bedroom antics, chiefly the long affair with the married Croatian, Drenka. “In thirteen years, I never got tired of looking down your blouse or up your skirt,” he tells us, in a line some may take to be sweet. A handful of actors might be able to inject a bit of mischievous charm into such vulgarities, but Turturro, a specialist in scruffy, unattractive supporting figures rather than radiant leading men, isn’t one of them.
Near the beginning, when Sabbath learns that his beloved Drenka is going to die prematurely of cancer, the event sends him into a downward spiral as he tells us lasciviously about his life, which seems to be reducible to his sex life. There’s always something rotten within the tenderness. When, late in the play, Sabbath recalls visiting Drenka on her deathbed, his thoughts become a discussion of how, when they first met, they celebrated their union by urinating on each other.
The point is that death, or at least death via the onslaught of cancer, is obscene, and so Sabbath exists to battle this demon with his own device. It’s a deliberately ugly war on both sides, and not terribly instructive to observe. While I honor Mickey Sabbath’s anguish, I’m not sure it’s worth much consideration.
Gutenberg! The Musical! (at the James Earl Jones Theater through January 28) made me extremely curious, not about the printing legend Johannes G., but about the show’s investors. Broadway shows cost millions these days, and yes, I am referring to the cost of attendance. (Okay, top ticket prices are merely $318 in this case, plus $75 for your peak-hour Uber home.) As for the producers, though the show was designed as a bare-bones affair (one set, two performers, three musicians), I wonder how it struck them as worth a go on the Rialto. The piece is nakedly and unabashedly a frisky, youthful folly meant as no more than a calling card that might win its talents a shot at getting hired for a real show. As such it belongs in a college dining hall or, at best, an off-off-Broadway theater or lounge where tickets presumably cost ten bucks and maybe come with a two-drink minimum. Downtown is where the show originated: it played at the Upright Citizens Brigade back in 2005. It was considered a success there. It ran forty-five minutes. The authors of its book, music, and lyrics—two childhood friends from North Carolina, Scott Brown and Anthony King—initially performed it as well. And they did indeed get hired to work on a real production: the pair contributed the book for the musical adaptation of Beetlejuice that ran on Broadway in 2019–2020 and might have been a hit but for the pandemic.
It was perhaps five minutes into the show that panic began to beset me: hang on, I thought, is this plotless sketch about intentionally inept songwriting somehow going to stagger on for two hours? Will anyone be left in the theater then? Will anyone be left awake? Gutenberg! reunites The Book of Mormon costars Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad for a two-character piece about a pair of talentless wannabes, Doug and Bud, who work at a nursing home in New Jersey but have convinced themselves that their idea will slay on Broadway. To that end, they have pooled their small net worths to rent a theater for one night to stage a run-through of their musical comedy about the inventor of the printing press. They gush about their project, share embarrassing details of their lives (Bud, at forty-two, is a virgin; Doug says, “I killed my mom”), and perform a series of ditties from their proposed show. The setup is such that the audience can either laugh at how bad the songs are or (this is presumably Brown and King’s intention) be pleasantly surprised by their quality. None of them sounds like more than a half-thought composition made up on the fly to me: two keyboardists noodle along while a drummer keeps the beat, occasionally adding to the comedy by blowing on a whistle of the kind you might associate with 1930s slapstick.
Because the material is so meager, Rannells and Gad attempt to charm-bomb the audience into laughter. They mug and prance and caper around the stage. A running gag that becomes threadbare, then tedious, before dying of boredom with itself, involves trucker caps with the names of various characters on them: “monk,” “drunk,” etc. There are dozens of these hats, and the actors try to get a laugh by, for instance, wearing a stack of them, then, as they switch characters, taking off one cap after another to indicate a different character. The show within the show—about Gutenberg, his girlfriend Helvetica, and the eureka moment when he discovered he could convert a wine press into a printing press—is only an intermittent element, and as Brown and King aren’t interested in that story except as a means for tossing out jokes, the audience won’t be either. There is no plot whatsoever here; no one is after any goal except to finish the show, and no questions demand to be answered. It lives or dies entirely on whether it keeps you laughing with its rapid-fire comedy.
Some of it is amusing. I might have laughed three or four times, or roughly one-fifth as many times as I checked my watch. (The Bible, we are told, doesn’t tell us about everything good: “what about bacon?”) But it’s not worth leaving the house for such wobbly entertainment, much less paying $318. The show is aimed entirely at musical-theater nerds who thrill to nudge-nudge insights on the writer’s craft: “a motif is when you use the same piece of music over and over and over again, but it’s not lazy.” “What’s foreshadowing?” “I’ll tell you later.” Those who simply can’t get enough of the throw-your-body-all-over-the-stage camp sensibility will have a fine time. But much better musical-theater parodies are pretty easy to find on television; many of them have been on The Simpsons and Curb Your Enthusiasm over the years, and Apple TV+’s Schmigadoon is a witty, sometimes very funny, sitcom built on such parodies (season two spoofs late-1960s and ’70s Broadway—Sweeney Todd, Company, etc.). The difference is that nobody working on such shows would be so obtuse as to try to keep a single spoof alive for two hours. Gutenberg! is a television sketch that overstays its welcome by about 105 minutes.
Why shouldn’t a gentleman of a certain age who has made a few bucks at the office indulge his fantasies a bit?
Imagine a rock act that conjoins Moby with Bill Nye the Science Guy and you’ll have some grasp of Emergence (at the Pershing Square Signature Center through January 7), a splashy off-Broadway “conceptual performance” written by and starring one Patrick Olson, a science publisher who tells us he has been creating music “privately” for some years and is now going public with his hobby. Olson is a nondescript middle-aged white guy with a shaved head and an orange-pink suit who, supported by four musicians, four backup singers, and three dancers, does draw the eye, both because he is the centerpiece of the show and because he is by far the least talented performer on stage. Olson can’t dance, can barely sing, and obviously lacks the looks, the charisma, or the stage presence to be a rock star, yet a rock star is what he presents himself as. I salute him for trying; why shouldn’t a gentleman of a certain age who has made a few bucks at the office indulge his fantasies a bit? No harm done. I do think it would have been only fair for the program to feature a disclaimer: “This is a vanity show.”
Olson carries with him the aspect of one of those middle-school science teachers whose love for his subject is so complete it’s adorable. Emergence is essentially a revue—there’s no storyline—in which each of ten scientifically and philosophically inquisitive songs (“Moons of Jupiter,” “Energy,” “Becoming”) is set up by a friendly, simple mini-lecture from Olson featuring the kind of brainteaser that has fascinated generations of youngsters considering a life in laboratories or behind a telescope. One of these little lessons is about the Big Bang—can you believe that the entire universe was once so condensed it could have fit inside a thimble? Another is about time. If the sun disappeared, it’s so far away that nothing would happen on Earth at that moment. Its light would still shine on us all, for eight minutes anyway, so our favorite star, Olson notes with awestruck appreciation of paradox, would both exist and not exist at the same time, depending on location. “Am I alive?” he asks. “Are you alive?” How can we be, when we’re made up of inert elements? The infectious rock song that follows is entitled “Like This.” A discussion of gravity builds to a number called “Falling.” To the rear of the stage, images of natural and astronomical phenomena on a screen add to the trippy nature of the proceedings. It’s a lively-looking show.
It also sounds enticing. Though Olson’s supposedly mind-blowing questions and science lessons aren’t enough to make for a robust piece of theater, the songs are good—energetic, melodic, with impressive harmonies on several numbers and an up-to-date feel that would make them excellent candidates for the sound design at a cool nightclub or restaurant. Olson may not be a natural performer, but he is a talented songwriter and may have a future contributing to Broadway musicals. A keyboardist, guitarist, bass player, and drummer play a hearty series of compositions that reminded me of the percussion-heavy art rock of Peter Gabriel, with a touch of David Byrne’s nervy joyousness. Olson’s backup singers are superb also, although I could have done without the dancers (two women and a man) who periodically appear to writhe around a bit on either side of, and in front of, Olson.
Were it not for Olson’s scant stage presence and thin vocals, the show might be effective, but then again it’s such a personal, idiosyncratic event that it wouldn’t really make sense for someone else to lead the performance. Perhaps his compositions will be repurposed for a better show. It’s not hard to imagine his songs (he also recorded a 2021 album called Music for Scientists) being backed with a story and reshaped into a book musical. As it is, however, even at a single act of eighty-five minutes, the evening crawls by. I suspect Olson’s chief goal was to announce to the theater community that he, despite being nothing more than a mass of inert elements, exists. With Emergence, which previously played at a theater in Los Angeles but has not attracted much attention in New York, he has achieved that and then some.
