Mary Said What She Said, Mar 2025

Dale, Jere, and I saw *Mary Said What She Said* at NYU's Skirball Center on March 1, 2025. It's a one-woman about Mary Queen of Scots, starring Isabelle Huppert, adapted by Darryl Pinckney , and directed by Robert Wilson. I've been a big fan of Huppert's movie work since I was in my teens and am lucky enough to have seen her onstage four or five times. And Robert Wilson is a singular artist - - hit or miss but always fascinating, always worth seeing.

Here's a trailer from the run in Paris:

Darryl Pinckney assembled/arranged text by Mary Queen of Scots. My impression is that every word we heard was written by her and put together by Pinckney in a surprising and theatrical way. Director Robert Wilson is a notorious control freak so I think it's safe to assume that he collaborated with Pinckney on the script. I was amazed by the text itself, it was remarkably abstract and peculiar. I found some promising links online, I look forward to reading some of the letters in their original form.

There was a fourth person credited at the top of the program, composer Lucovico Einaudi. To me it sounded like music from a Masterpiece Theatre series - - not a police procedural, like we see so often on PBS these days, it had the brooding sonority of a show about a troubled aristocratic family. It was a little much at times, I got very tired of hearing repeated four-bar phrases. There are other choices, try out one or two.

The first thing we saw was the silhouette of Huppert. She spun around so slowly and so smoothly that I assumed she was on a turntable but no, that was her moving with her feet. Such control over her instrument, it was a thriling way to start the show.

I've seen five or six shows directed and designed by Wilson and while they're each distinct they all feature his signature combination of movement and stillness, his chilly lighting, a fair amount of repetition, and a bizarre sort of grandeur. They all invariably add up to something not exactly meaningful but definitely memorable.

The show was only an hour and a half long but even at that brief length it felt too long! I was eager for it to end. It felt like Pinckney and Wilson built in two false endings - - a scene that had the aura of an ending...which was followed by a quiet scene in a haunting visual style, which felt like an epilogue...and then it went on for another 15 or 20 minutes! Come on. It felt like they knew what they were doing and they were deliberately misleading and annoying the audience. Maybe this was their way of conveying how Mary felt being imprisoned in The Tower for 18 years waiting for her execution? Maybe they just don't care about me and my needs?

One of the most fascinating scenes was late in the show. We heard the prerecorded voice of Huppert saying five or six lines followed by Huppert onstage saying one or two lines three times, sort of a refrain. Throughout this scene Huppert was walking forward on a diagonal and then walking backwards on the same diagonal, the arms going up and down in what I'm sure was a precisely planned pattern, speaking VERY fast. We all wondered how she was able to time everything so well, with the music and everything else apparently laid out ahead of time. It was engrossing and I don't know why.

The music at the end of the show was shaved down to just a piano solo. The harmonies sounded familiar at first - - it slowly gained focus and I realized it was music I knew from a commercial from a New York City hospital! The commercial was about a little Black girl who was waiting for a kidney transplant, talking about her life and how she wants to continue living. One shot I remember had her on a swing at an amusement park, getting rained on and screaming and laughing. Other New Yorkers, do you know this commercial...?

The three of us spent five or ten minutes doing a post mortem on the sidewalk after the show. We all talked about what a marvel it was that she memorized something so strange and repetitive. Jere said it was an amazing performance and unlike anything he had seen before. The fact that he didn't really UNDERSTAND it didn't take away from it at all. Dale said he read in The Times that Huppert about to turn 72 years old! Yeesh. She's not growing old with grit and vitality - - she is simply not growing old.