Colm Tóibín has spoken about the inspiration behind his one-woman play The Testament of Mary.
“I thought of a woman I knew in New York whose son was in Afghanistan and who lived day and night with the dread of the phone ringing to say something happened to him,“ the author recently declared, explaining how he imagined the mindset of Mary.
In other words, he saw her as the mother of an endangered son. “I was thinking about people talking to Mary about the marvel of redemption, when she sees the loss of flesh and blood.”
“I didn’t know where this was going,” he said, recalling how he tried to plot Mary’s reaction to the news of her son’s death. “I didn’t have a theory. I didn’t have a plan. I just wrote what I thought she would say next."
The Testament of Mary, a one-woman play, is currently running at the Undermain Theatre, Dallas, following performances in Ireland, Barcelona, London and Broadway, in which productions, Fiona Show played Mary. The actress Shannon Kearns plays Mary in the Dallas production.
The monologue is uttered in the period when Mary is living in solitude in the city of Ephesus, guarded by followers of her son seeking to record her account of the events surrounding his death.
In Tóibín’s portrayal, she is not the serene, almost passive maternal figure familiar to many Catholics, but is a complex flesh-and-blood woman who is sceptical and depressed in her grief. Tóibín was in Dallas on St Patrick’s Day - the day of the show's preview - to talk about his latest novel, Nora Webster at the Dallas Museum of Art.
The 59-year old County Wexford author told the Dallas News newspaper that The Testament of Mary drew from the same pool of grief which inundated him as a 12-year old boy when his father died, following a stroke.
That catastrophic event had also inspired Nora Webster, which concerns a widowed mother of young children struggling to resume life as normal in widowhood.
Tóibín is currently teaching literature at Columbia University. He told the Texas newspaper about the different reactions he has seen in theatrical performances of The Testament of Mary. In Ireland, audiences were quiet. In Barcelona, he witnessed “a lot of tears and howling.”
The work was also the matter of a novel, published in 2012, which made the Man Booker shortlist the following year. Hearing Meryl Street read the audio-book made him “relive the raw emotions” he experienced when he wrote the play, he revealed.
