Perhaps no work so captures Philip Roth’s preoccupation with sexual perversion as his 1995 Sabbath’s Theater, whose protagonist is the aging, degenerate, and unsuccessful puppeteer Mickey Sabbath. The novel was recently adapted for the stage, with John Turturro playing the title role. Ari Hoffman writes in his review:
Sabbath’s spare staging shines the spotlight on Roth’s language, where it belongs. As its protagonist’s fortunes wane and despair builds, his rhetoric finds a kind of rigor-mortis excellence. . . . Sabbath [at one point delivers an] ode to the Jersey Shore from which he came, and to which he returns at the show’s end. He recalls, in lines among the most gorgeous Roth ever set down, the “sand and ocean, the tide, the stars, the mists, the gulls. The limitless sea, the Atlantic. You could touch your toes where America began. Endlessness. We grew up on it.” He treasures his brother’s dog tags—“A for blood type. H for Hebrew.”
Although Hoffman has much praise for both the original work and the staging, he also reminds us of “the judgment of Roth’s best critic, Ruth Wisse, who ventures that Sabbath’s Theater is a ‘very funny book, a desperate book’” but that the writer’s sense of “sex as our true source of satisfaction and solace bespeaks a pauper’s idea of human potential.”
More about: American Jewish literature, Philip Roth, Ruth Wisse, Theater
