Margery Kempe thinks she is a remarkable woman. The rest of the world doesn't quite see it that way.
The Saintliness of Margery Kempe follows the true-life misadventures of the famed English woman of the 14th Century. She begins her career by throwing her lot in with the Devil and buying a brewery. When this doesn’t work out, she decides to become a saint instead, although she has none of the qualifications for the job!
The legendary Austin Pendleton directs this comical and amazingly timely play. The creative team includes playwright and scenic designer John Wulp, lighting designers Jennifer Tipton and Matthew Richards, costume designer Barbara Bell, with original music and sound design by Ryan Rumery. Andrus Nichols, who starred in Bedlam's Sense & Sensibility and earned raves for her portrayal in the title role of Bedlam's acclaimed production of Saint Joan, takes on the role of the less-than-saintly Margery Kempe.
Review: In ‘The Saintliness of Margery Kempe,’ a Comically Restless Mystic
Andrus Nichols and Jason O’Connell in “The Saintliness of Margery Kempe,” directed by Austin Pendleton.Carol Rosegg
To write a memoir, first you have to take yourself seriously — to consider your life worth scrutinizing, your thoughts worth passing along. That’s maybe not such a high bar to clear in this confessional, self-obsessed age, but for a woman in the 15th century? Rather unusual, especially if the writer in question didn’t know how to read.
When the English mystic Margery Kempe set down her observations and adventures in “The Book of Margery Kempe,” she apparently dictated it. And when you watch John Wulp’s “The Saintliness of Margery Kempe,” a curiosity of a comedy inspired by the memoir, you know that this is something its grand, restless, flailingly ambitious heroine absolutely would do.
The great Frances Sternhagen played Margery in the original Off Broadway production, in 1959, opposite Gene Hackman as her put-upon husband, John. The delightful news about Austin Pendleton’s uneven revival at the Duke on 42nd Street, starring Andrus Nichols as Margery and Jason O’Connell as John, is that the standard for those roles hasn’t slipped a millimeter. Both veterans of the theater company Bedlam, these are actors whose names on a cast list are a tipoff: If they’re in it, exciting performances are likely afoot.
From the moment we meet Margery, bristling with anger, and John, who soon shifts from placating her to suggesting an exorcism, Ms. Nichols and Mr. O’Connell are delicious to watch. I kept wanting to put them in a Charles Ludlam play.
Ms. Nichols imbues the scheming Margery with the radiant expressiveness of a silent-movie star. With chipper self-delusion, Margery leaves John and their passel of children behind to go out into the world: first to sin as hard as she can (she buys a brewery and a dozy cart horse, beautifully played by Thomas Sommo), then to become a saint. She blithely disregards her unsuitability for pretty much everything she puts her hand to, because home is so tedious, with so very many people needing her attention.
Mr. O’Connell, meanwhile, has a flair for spineless bumbling shaded with poignant vulnerability, and when he doubles as an unwillingly obsequious friar (a role played in 1959 by Charles Nelson Reilly, for goodness sake), his comic talents are in full blossom.
No matter how ridiculously self-dramatizing Margery is — and she definitely is that — Ms. Nichols never lets you forget her yearning for a life beyond the one she’s expected to live. Neither does Mr. Pendleton, whose staging smartly highlights the peril she faces. But the play is most fun when it moves at high speed, and a languor overcomes the slack first act.
Mr. Wulp — whose oddball charmer of a musical “Red Eye of Love” got a New York revival a few seasons back — is making a kind of bookish joke here, yet there are stretches where it wears thin. And not all of the casting is as spot-on as the leads.
Still, this production gives the impression of a play that has aged into a new resonance. Reviewing it in these pages nearly 60 years ago, Brooks Atkinson called the real Margery Kempe “one of the most tiresome women of all time.” More tiresome than the man’s world she lived in, though? Probably not.
Through Aug. 26 at the Duke on 42nd Street, 229 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; margerykempe.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.
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