Even more so than his other novels, Sabbath’s Theater was Philip Roth at his most sardonic and scatological. His hero of sorts, Mickey Sabbath, is a 64-year-old former puppeteer who is, by his own admission, a dirty old man: seemingly all he thinks about is having sex when he’s not actually having sex. After his insatiable Croatian mistress Drenka dies of cancer, he is thrown for a loop, which causes him reevaluate his life choices, including his marriages, other relationships with available women, and family memories, notably his beloved brother Morty’s death while flying planes against the Japanese in World War II.

 

Can a 105-minute play hope to distill the essence of Roth’s masturbatory fantasy of self-abasement? Based on the evidence of John Turturro and Ariel Levy’s stage adaptation, in which Turturro stars in a tour de force as Sabbath, the answer is: not really. Although the adapters have plucked certain incidents and scenes out of the book into their version, it has a scattershot feel, since most of it is pruriently sexual, which makes Mickey Sabbath far more one-dimensional than in the novel. 

 

The play begins with the sounds of a sexual encounter between Mickey and Drenka, then the lights come up to the pair wrapped up on the floor as she coos sweet nothings in his ear about cooking him the best Eastern European dishes. The scenes between Mickey and Drenka have a spirited frission, helped by Turturro and Elizabeth Marvel (despite a bizarre accent), whose terrific rapport extends from the physical to the intellectual. 

 

But when Mickey deals with men—like Norman, whom he repays for letting him stay at his Manhattan apartment after the funeral of Norman’s former producing partner Linc by attempting to seduce Norman’s wife and steal his daughter’s panties from her bedroom—the results are a comedy of embarrassment, but Roth does this queasy sort of thing better on the page. 

 

Then there’s the story’s nadir, when Mickey visits Drenka’s grave and masturbates—it’s here that the otherwise adroit director Jo Bonney succumbs to the cheap scatology by showing his shadowy ejaculation—only to find another man also performing the same act. Such a blunt comedy of debasement keeps Mickey at arm’s length, however charmingly garrulous is  Turturro’s performance.

 

Turturro and Levy smartly end their adaptation with the poignant meeting between Mickey and a 100-year-old cousin, Fish (touchingly played by Jason Kravits), in which Mickey finally decides that his wasted life is worth living. Notwithstanding Turturro’s gratuitous nudity as he drapes himself in the flag that Mickey’s mother received after his brother died in action, it provides a satisfying way out of a too often enervating take on Philip Roth’s most scathing self-depiction.