The Irish writer Colm Toibin was shaving in his bathroom on Tuesday morning, and savoring the news that his “Testament of Mary†had just been nominated for a best play Tony Award, when the telephone rang. The voice on the other end said, “I have Scott Rudin on the line for you.†And so began one of the more surreal phone conversations that Mr. Toibin ever had: He was a freshly minted Tony nominee, but his producer Mr. Rudin was telling him that the play would close on Sunday, after only 43 performances and far earlier than planned, due to poor ticket sales.
Mr. Toibin said he took the news in stride - commercial Broadway is a brutal business, with only 25 percent of shows ever turning a profit - and went off to his teaching job at Columbia University. On Wednesday, after the news had sank in, Mr. Toibin - whose novels include “The Master†and “Brooklyn†- reflected on his rookie outing as a Broadway playwright with the one-woman show about the mother of Christ, which stars Fiona Shaw and was directed by Deborah Warner.
Q: What was the strangest part of seeing your work on Broadway?
A: One Saturday I flipped through the paper and suddenly saw a full-page ad for the play with this extraordinary image of Fiona and the crown of thorns around her mouth. It was so stark and stunning. But it was also just bizarre - here it’s a Saturday morning, you’re having your coffee, you’re thinking about going for a walk in Central Park, and then you see this huge ad for something you wrote. Something I wrote. I couldn’t really believe it.
Q: You learned about the Tony nomination around 8:45am Tuesday, and learned the play would close an hour or so later. How did you feel?
A. I had read about the nominations online, and made some calls to people, as one does. I was happy. Then I realized I had to get ready to discuss essays with my undergraduates. So I had a shower and was half-shaved when the phone rang, and it was that lovely voice saying, ‘I have Scott Rudin on the line for you.’ These are hard calls to make. He was very nice about it. But you know, about 30,000 people will have seen the play over a 6-week run by the time it closes, with a standing ovation every night. In European terms, that’s a huge success. In Dublin I’d be walking around with everyone saying, what an amazing success you’ve had with your play. But in New York the template is another of Scott’s shows, “The Book of Mormon,†where you’d have three productions touring the world and never ending. We won’t do that. The play will have productions in Spain,Brazil, Denmark, and some other countries we’re talking to.
Q: Fortunately, a lot of the “Mary†producers are also “Mormon†producers - that’s how the business works, and I’m sure they will be fine financially. But did you ask Scott to reconsider closing the show?
A.You know, I really trust his judgment. If he was calling to say that this was the decision he’d come it, then in my view the finances of the show - whether it could run an extra week or not - is of no concern to me.
Q: How did you deal with the news?
A. I think dark laughter might be the best way to put it. And when in doubt, consult Oscar Wilde. I’ve been teaching him in this semester. He has a quote - success is merely a preparation for theater. Anyone who works in the arts knows, if you’re writing a novel or a play or anything, you have to be ready for someone to say, you’re time is up.
Q: Once the play was in rehearsals, did you find that some pieces of the writing weren’t having the impact or the power that you expected?
A: Fiona and Deborah had really parsed and analyzed every single word in the play, so there was nothing left unchallenged. For example, when the cross is lifted up, I had a line, “His voice deepened.†And Fiona and Deborah immediately wanted to know,: Why did his voice deepen there? What did that sound like? And I couldn’t say to them, I just wrote “deepened.†So they did so much work with the text that, when Fiona was performing, I had this faith and trust that they believed very deeply in the way they were doing the play and she was saying the words.
Q: As a novelist you’re used to authorial control. How did it feel having an actor and audience members take some of that control away.
A: There were shocking moments. One was when the audience, from the very beginning, found a line funny that I didn’t intend - I hadn’t written it with a note in the script, “stop for a laugh at this point.†But I came to enjoy some of that reaction. My favorite was when Fiona talks about the water changing into wine. She would do a line, “I may have sipped some wine myself.†I had put that in to convey that Mary didn’t really care about wine, that it wasn’t a big deal to her. But the audience found it funny. It was the way Fiona said it - there was a great comic undertone to it.
Q: Did that teach you anything?
A: Yes. I thought that because she was allowing a comic undertone at certain points, they were more willing to accept her pain when it come. When Fiona screamed out something later, the audience followed her more easily to that place of pain because they had laughed before. The next time I write a play - in order to get audience trust for a particular sort of tragic line, I’ll try to bring the audience a good distance before that. Part of that is allowing comic moments to occur. I had been afraid of that - that once the audience started laughing in the play, they would never stop.
Q: Scott Rudin is one of the most successful and strong-minded producers on Broadway. What was working with him like?
A: The amount of care and work he did was extraordinary. He was around all the time. There was a moment two weeks ago, after seeing a performance, when I thought a line needed fixing, needed one more thing in it. I said afterward to everyone, I’m sorry but I think we need to fix a line. I began to describe it when Scott turned to me and he just delivered the line as it should have been delivered. It turned out that, at the performance, Fiona had gotten one word wrong in the line. But Scott knew the line by heart - he knew the whole play by heart, I think. And in rehearsals he was very interested in storytelling. He knew that in the second arc of the play, it couldn’t merely be about the Passion and the Crucifixion - rather it was also a story about her speaking and it would change something in her.
Q: Did you two get along well, even when he told you that the play would close?
A: Yes. There moments of frustration, like when he decided to have an author’s note but in the Playbill, then called me to ask if I had written it. I pointed out to him that he had just decided to have one, and that I hadn’t written it yet. He said OK, but he needed it A.S.A.P. And I said, OK, but I would send it when I was done writing. I had some research to do. He was being a producer, and he was an excellent one.
Q: Was the pre-show idea yours, with Fiona Shaw posing in a glass box like the Virgin Mary we’ve seen in so many paintings?
A: No, the idea arose in rehearsals. I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don’t have a strong visual imagination. So what would work and not work theatrically was not something I would easily see in my mind.
Q: What did you think of the pre-show?
A. There was one night and I stood at the back of the theater and watched all the people walking around on stage, around Fiona, and I thought it was amazing. It was something new in my experience gojng into a Broadway theater. I thought we were in a recreated space.
Q. One Broadway veteran said to me Tuesday that perhaps the play wasn’t controversial enough to get an audience - that it had to become a must-see flash point in the culture wars.
A. I think it might have been possible for us to provoke people into buying tickets, but I was concerned about that. I wanted this play to be a theatrical experience rather than a culture war over religion. You could have marketed the show to Catholics and others as“the most shocking thing you will ever see,†and I’m glad we didn’t do that. It would have harmed the integrity of the production and performance. I think we have a right and a duty to put on good theater, and I think we did that.
