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Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. There's a note on the program for the play Sabbath's Theater that says in part "Please note, this production contains nudity, sexual situations, strong and graphic language, and discussions of suicide." The play, based on Philip Roth's novel of the same name, is not for the pearl-clutching set. It starts with two people having sex loudly. The more appropriate description would be the 'F' word that we can't say because of FCC rules. This couple Dranka and Mickey have been having an affair for more than a decade. They may be each other's carnal soulmates.

When Dranka dies, it sends Mickey into a tailspin. Not that he needs much help turning and churning up his life. Once a puppeteer, this multiply-married Mickey Sabbath is-- he can be wildly inappropriate, sexually-minded, and can be stimulated almost anywhere. Played with gusto by our next guest John Turturro, we watch as Mickey contemplates life, death, and loss. The loss of his lover, his family, and his sense of purpose. The work was adapted by Turturro and New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy. The new group's production of Sabbath's Theater is now running at the Pershing Square Signature Center at 480 West 42nd Street and it has been extended until December 17th with several talk-back opportunities with the cast and creatives, and John and Ariel are in studio. So nice to see you again, John.

John Turturro: Nice to see you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Nice to meet you, Ariel.

Ariel Levy: Nice to meet you, too.

Alison Stewart: John, you and Philip Roth are friends?

John Turturro: Yes. I guess he selected me many years ago to-- or he asked me to do a one-man show of Portnoy's Complaint after he saw me in Quiz Show and then we worked on it. I did a stage reading and then I worked alone in his studio with him, which was quite intimidating.

[laughter]

John Turturro: We never did it because we couldn't decide on the director and I was doing various projects. He was actually very helpful because he had interviewed Primo Levi and I was working on this Primo Levi film. For about five years I worked on it, called La Tregua, The Truce about his return from Auschwitz home. The 10-month odyssey that he had. I did it a couple of years after that but Philip was very helpful with me. That connected us, and then even though we didn't do it, then he decided he didn't want to do that book anymore. We kept talking and I always thought that theater would be a great expression because you can use the author's language, whereas in a film they usually rewrite it and dilute it.

Alison Stewart: Did he speak the way he writes?

John Turturro: No. He was very-- [chuckles] I would describe him as sort of a human vacuum cleaner.

Alison Stewart: Really?

John Turturro: Yes, he would want to know everything about you. He was very funny and he could imitate people really well, so no, he was really a quite erudite in many ways.

Alison Stewart: Ariel, what was your first interaction with Sabbath's Theater?

Ariel Levy: Well, I had always loved the book because I think that the emphasis on the venal urge, the sexual urge, the nasty side of existence as Roth writes, as a kind of not the antidote to death but the thing that keeps you alive. That's some of the life force. It just always seems spot-on to me. It just always rang true. As John has said, as we've been working on this, both of us have had the deaths of people close to us, and the book, and our hope is that the play also will really pass the smell test of what it means to grieve, what it means to be a human being and experience loss.

Alison Stewart: This is your first adaptation of a play.

Ariel Levy: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What made you say yes to the project?

Ariel Levy: Well, if one of your favorite actors says, "Do you want to collaborate on adapting the work of one of your favorite writers?," like you say yes, so I did. I mean, it wasn't much of a dilemma.

Alison Stewart: You really didn't think it over?

[crosstalk]

Ariel Levy: No, I know I sound like Sarah Palin when John McCain asked her, and she was like--

[laughter]

Ariel Levy: You remember? I remember she was like, "You can't blink." I really took that to heart, no I'm kidding, but no I didn't think twice. I thought, "Of course, I want to try to do this."

John Turturro: It was Hilton Als who recommended Ari and he's the yenta who brought us together.

Ariel Levy: Yes.

Alison Stewart: John, why did you think this book would be good theater?

John Turturro: Well, I went to Philip's memorial and then I had lunch with Andrew Wylie. Andrew knew I was a big reader of Roth and I'm not as big a reader as you are, Alison [laughs]. I've seen your bag of books, but he gave me the book. He said, "Have you ever read this one?" I said, "No." He said, "Maybe you would like it," and I read it. Some of it, I was just like, "Oh my God, I can't believe he is saying all these things." I have since recorded it this summer as sort of a-- they wanted to do a new-

Alison Stewart: Audio.

John Turturro: -audio version, and I did it. Then there were things in it that made me laugh and laugh. I thought the depth of it was an interesting balance with all the nastiness and all the sex. I don't think I would have wanted to adapt it if there wasn't this great love story, and that this man, who is a failure, is still capable of loving another human being. I thought, "Wow, that really makes us look at it differently, instead of the typical relationship that is rendered." That's what attracted me and I can't speak for Ari.

Ariel Levy: Oh, yes you can.

John Turturro: Well, it seemed to attract her, too.

Ariel Levy: Yes.

John Turturro: We had a meeting of the same minds.

Ariel Levy: We would go our separate ways and highlight the stuff we thought we wanted to use and then we would look and we would have highlighted the same things. We both had the same idea of 'this love story is what is going to propel us through'. It's what propels you through the book too, or what propelled us through the book.

John Turturro: Right.

Alison Stewart: What skills as a journalist were you able to apply to this, if any?

Ariel Levy: The thing that I learned through this process, to my surprise, is that the laws of narrative are stable. Telling a story requires the same sense of narrative arc and propulsive motion, and economy, whatever the form is that you're using. I think all the skills transferred except I didn't have to interview anyone [laughs], but sometimes I had to talk to you.

John Turturro: Yes, well we read it out loud to each other. She read Sabbath, I read Dranka we would switch back-

Ariel Levy: Oh, it was funny.

John Turturro: -and forth and it was really a delightful collaboration.

Ariel Levy: It was a good time.

John Turturro: Yes, we really got along really well and it was just a nice feeling that we had, and then we did a reading of it and continued to work on it for the last couple of years.

Ariel Levy: It was like a funny thing, because I remember once being on the train to go somewhere and John called me. My phone yells out 'John Turturro', and then he's saying like the filthiest stuff you've ever heard. "Do you think we should say this or this?" I'm saying on the thing, "John, I think we should say this."

John Turturro: I remember that.

Ariel Levy: Do you remember?

John Turturro: I remember that. I just had to share that with you [laughs].

Ariel Levy: [unintelligible 00:07:58] got to decide. I mean which way we're going to put it.

John Turturro: Yes. I mean we did take a lot of stuff out.

Ariel Levy: Yes.

John Turturro: Our first reading, people were just like, "Wow." I also think it's a good antidote right now, because you're showing the human animal right out there. You're not trying to hide from it and you're saying, "But then this person is still a human being, you know what I mean, who has all these wounds. Like a wounded animal."

Ariel Levy: An animal, that's a key word I think, because there's a lot about sex but there's a lot about other things that have to do with the human animal body. There's a lot about the way a body rots and what keeps a body going, and the humiliations of aging, and the pain of losing not just other people but parts of yourself.

John Turturro: Right.

Alison Stewart: My guests are John Turturro and Ariel Levy. We're talking about Sabbath's Theater, which is at Pershing Square Signature Center, and it's been extended until December 17th. What's something that both of you understand about Philip Roth's writing now, or understand better, having worked on this project?

John Turturro: I think the sense of loss.The depth of it.

Ariel Levy: The haunting.

John Turturro: You know, the gold standard of losing a brother who was 20 years old and never seeing his body, and what that did to his family and what it did to him. I think he really, having lost a lot of people and being of a certain age, it really resonates with me. I don't even have to reach for it. Sometimes I have to push it away, it's so strong. That I think is something he was in touch with when he was writing it.

Ariel Levy: Just hearing you say that makes me-- the other day I was looking at my phone and seeing how many voicemails I have from different dead people at this point that I'll never be able to delete, and just the way losses accumulate as you go through life. In this play for Sabbath, the dead are much more real than the living most of the time, and that, I think, is the vivid experience of grief that everybody has at some point.

Alison Stewart: This takes place in 1994. What did you have to remind yourself about 1994?

John Turturro: No cell phones. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Answering machines.

John Turturro: Yes. In some ways, he was ahead of the loop. He is disgraced and canceled.

Alison Stewart: He's canceled.

Alison Stewart: He rages against that and everything like that. It's not really unfair, he just gets caught. What attracted me was that he was powerless, basically. He wasn't a man who had power. I liked that. It was the opposite of Roth. In his next book, American Pastoral, he writes that the Swede, who is this really responsible, lovely man who life crushes. This is the opposite of that. I just was attracted to the freedom of the book, that he didn't seem to care if he only had 30 readers read it. He's so free, and he jumps from 30 years back in a sentence. I was like, "Wow, there's something miraculously also theatrical about it."

Alison Stewart: The character of Mickey, the official New York Times review in '95 was a bit of an outlier. didn't like the book, even though it won a National Book Award.

John Turturro: The New York Times book review loved it.

Alison Stewart: It was hilarious. It was interesting, there are two very conflicting reviews in the Times that year, which it gets to the character a little bit, the idea that Mickey does some really horrible things.

John Turturro: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: You can understand, it can be an explanation, not an excuse for his behavior in certain ways. Do you find him likable or unlikable, or does that not even really matter?

John Turturro: I think he's a human animal. He's a human being. I think Ari and I, our adaptation gets to the core of it. There are things in the book that when I recorded it, I was like, "Oh my God, I can't believe I'm saying this." It's a story, and I think we had to just find the kernel of that or the heart of that. For me, the child that he is, is still there. Yes, there are things that I would go, "I'm not like that," but that I could give and be fearless and do something like that and show that and also maybe involve you in it in whatever way you're involved in it, is a big challenge and especially when there's a real strong intelligence behind it.

I don't usually get a chance to do that. I don't get a chance to say, "To get where you have to go, the extent of the mistakes you're required to make." There are some beautiful, beautiful passages and it just pierces your heart when you share that with an audience because you, too, have those experiences. I don't know if that was an answer to your question.

Ariel Levy: There was an amazing essay that John and I both loved by the fiction writer Garth Greenwell about the book and about how his students, when he's teaching it, will say, "This is horrifying, this is immoral." His point is that the morality of the book is showing us that all human beings are more than their worst action. There's a whole human existence. There's a whole complex character there. That's part of the function, I would think, of literature and of art and of theater is to bring you into other realities and everybody doesn't have to be the Swede. Everybody doesn't have to be a moral example of who you want to be when you grow up.

John Turturro: I also like that there is really no violence.

Ariel Levy: There's no violence.

John Turturro: I think that we live in a puritanical country. I always think of it as junior high school, like a stunted sexuality in this country. Sometimes the more honest the conversation is, the more interesting it is. It's healthy in many ways to say, "Okay, I wouldn't do that, but I can understand why someone would maybe do that." That interests me, that people can actually connect with each other. I think that's a miracle.

Ariel Levy: It's a love story and a story about carnality between two equal sexual adventurers, two collaborators. When he loses the love of his life, he loses his collaborator in dirtiness, and that's a relationship based on equality. It's not a relationship based on exploitation.

Alison Stewart: No, they're carnal soulmates, that's [unintelligible 00:15:08].

Ariel Levy: They're carnal soulmates.

Alison Stewart: We'll talk about you like you're not here for a second, John.

John Turturro: Fine.

Alison Stewart: Someone asked me, "Should I see this play?" I said, "Yes, because John Turturro's charisma brings this to stage." I won't say what actor I said they were playing the role I wouldn't go see this play, but it's partly because of John, I think it's part of the reason this succeeds.

John Turturro: Sure.

Alison Stewart: What did he bring out in the words that you think makes a success, because I think part of his talent and charisma as an actor is why we can think about Mickey's humanity.

Ariel Levy: I think that's exactly right. In the play, Mickey says about a woman who he gets interested in, "There was stature in this woman, mockery, play." Well, there's stature in John Turturro and mockery and play. He has the intelligence and the depth and the sensitivity along with a little bit of the devil in him.

Alison Stewart: [crosstalk] [unintelligible 00:16:06] from the play. [laughs]

Ariel Levy: You need all of that. You need a passionate fellow and we got one.

John Turturro: I credit my mother. I do. My mother never inhibited me. Maybe that's what Philip saw in me.

Alison Stewart: Absolutely.

John Turturro: I don't know, that sometimes there's a yin and a yang, that you can get underneath someone else's intellectual mind. I've always liked doing challenging things. I feel like it challenges me and challenges the audience. I know I like to see that stuff sometimes because I go, "Oh, wow, I would never do that but I understand that now better." That's part of storytelling, I guess.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about Sabbath's Theater, which is at The Pershing Square Signature Center until December 17th, recently extended. I'm talking to John Turturro and co-writer Ariel Levy. There are two other castmates. We should shout them out. Excellent seasoned actors, Elizabeth Marvel and Jason Kravits and they play all the other roles. Is it 16?

Ariel Levy: If you say so.

Alison Stewart: I believe it is. Elizabeth plays your wife, your lover, a lady you bother on the train, a cemetery plotkeeper. Why have the actors play multiple roles?

John Turturro: Go ahead.

Ariel Levy: For the women in particular, I think we thought it would amplify the sense that's very much pervasive through the book, that in your life, you come across different versions of the same thing. Sometimes it can be eerie where you think, "Wait, who am I having this conversation with? You, who I'm looking at or the person you remind me of?" We thought that having, particularly for the female roles, that having one actor, one actress perform all those roles would amplify that sense of echo. It's incredible.

John Turturro: Elizabeth is marvelous that way. It's scary sometimes to see all these different people. I'm looking at her, I'm thinking, "I think I know her. I know her somewhere." We thought that was innately theatrical and also economical. [laughs]

Ariel Levy: You get to see her. I don't think Jason has [unintelligible 00:18:31] change characters in real time. Beth does. You see her change characters on stage and it's remarkable.

Alison Stewart: There's a credible tenderness between Mickey and his 100-year-old relative. It's just that it's the sweetest, to me, part of the story. How does that moment help us understand Mickey more?

John Turturro: He sees someone who he is related to, who knows his whole family. When Mickey dies, all those people die. All the memory of them die. He says, "To have someone say, I was there, I swear, we all were alive," to hear him say that. I know that feeling and I think it's a beautiful scene. That scene into the scene would drink, and she's in the hospital, those were two of Roth's favorite things that he had ever written. He said he'd hold that up as some of his best writing. Then it just resonates. When you do it--- He says, "I don't recognize you." He said, "That's okay. I was a kid." We all have that inside of us. To see him get unmasked that way, I was like, "Wow, this is beyond his sexuality. This is his essence of who he is."

Alison Stewart: You were gathering information as you were workshopping this, way back into January. You've been doing this for a bit. What were some of the changes that came out of the workshop? What were some of the things that you're laughing, developed out of the workshop in period?

Ariel Levy: Well, look, I mean, first we had to get the basic architecture down. We had to get a story that you could really track from beginning to end. Once that was clear, we could really refine a lot of the characters who aren't Mickey [chuckles] that we did a lot of work making. Michelle, who's one of the other women he gets interested in, more of an interesting full, developed person after that. Basically, we did the heavy lifting and then we were able to get into other things that were just as interesting, but just we couldn't mess with them until the scaffolding was there. I think that.

John Turturro: Yes. We wanted to have a fidelity to his language and not dilute it. We changed first person to third person and things like that. We really wanted to not try to rewrite him because I've seen that happen and it's been a failure. Other writers, too. I've worked on lots of adaptations, usually in cinema. You're just very depressed because you go like, "This is the thing I love the most about the book, and they just erase it."

Alison Stewart: They make it go away.

John Turturro: Yes. They make it go away.

Alison Stewart: What have the talkbacks been like? Have you--?

John Turturro: Fabulous. The people--

Alison Stewart:: Yes, really interesting. What do people want to know?

John Turturro: It's interesting. A lot of older people, ladies and men, they feel really invigorated by it. One lady said to me, "I feel like I'm alive again."

Alison Stewart: That's interesting.

John Turturro: "You just brought me alive." Some people said, "We all have a little bit of that inside of us. Not all of it, but some of it. All of it." [laughs] It's been very, very interesting. Some people know the book, some people don't. Some people like this better than the book, because it's not as robust, I guess. or something. It can be exhausting sometimes. Mickey can be-

Alison Stewart: A handful.

John Turturro: -a handful. He's on the precipice of someone who's with a mental problem. He is. He's on that precipice. It's been really interesting. I've wanted to talk to people because I want to hear what they have to say, because that's why we're doing it. There hasn't been a lot of haters. There's been a few people who've been, "It's not for me." They were upset a little bit about it. I was like, "All right. Okay."

Ariel Levy: Nobody's thrown tomatoes at you.

John Turturro: No.

Ariel Levy: Which I think we thought might happen.

John Turturro: Well, maybe in our original version.

Ariel Levy: Yes. Right.

[laughter]

John Turturro: I thought I'd need a garbage pail cover or something. I think that's something exciting about theater that you're having this interaction.

Alison Stewart: We got a text, "John as a national treasure." Just thought you should know that.

John Turturro: Oh. Well, thank you.

Alison Stewart: Sabbath's Theater is playing at Pershing Square Signature Center until December 17th. John Turturro and Ariel Levy, thank you for coming to the studio

John Turturro: Thank you.

Ariel Levy: Thanks for having us.

John Turturro: Thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It after the news.

 

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