Scott Klavan: Mary Said What She Said

Mary Said What She Said
Text by Darryl Pinckney
Directed by Robert Wilson
NYU Skirball Center
Reviewed March 1, 2025

By Scott Klavan

At the start, one of the world’s most revered actors, Isabelle Huppert, stands frozen in a black period gown, her face shaded out, on an empty stage in front of a wide white screen with amorphously undulating lighting, for the long opening sequence of Mary Said What She Said, a surrealist interpretation of the diaries of Mary Stuart, the doomed 16^th-century Queen of Scotland and France. The 90-minute solo theater piece, performed in French with sub-titled screens, adapted/written by Darryl Pinckney and directed by Robert Wilson, with music by Ludovico Einaudi, played for just one week at the handsome downtown venue of  NYU Skirball Center For the Performing Arts, where this critic saw its closing performance March 1. It originated at the Theatre de la Ville in 2019 Paris, and has had performances throughout Europe ’23-24. Mary Said…is more of an event than a play, more intriguing and hypnotic than moving or conventionally dramatic, successful as a visceral theatrical experience, not so as a rational, emotionally involving tale.

During the second and third sections, the lighting brightens, and Huppert is freed, moving haltingly around the stage in the style of an automaton or doll, continuously intoning lines from Mary’s diaries, a rap veering from sing-song to guttural. Presumably, this is a fantastical depiction of Mary’s enraged despairing mind-state in her nearly twenty year prison ordeal in castles in England, put there by her cousin and rival, Queen Elizabeth I. The solitary torment of Mary’s captivity, leading to her beheading, causes her thoughts to obsessively circle the past: the past is forever present, Is the Present: her forced abdication from the throne of Scotland, after being accused of conspiring with her lover James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, to murder her husband Lord Darnley. She leaves behind infant son James, now officially the Scottish King, never to see him again. Fleeing to England, she seeks aide from her cousin, Elizabeth I. Instead, Mary is imprisoned, charged with and long years later, finally convicted of planning the assassination of the Queen.

The last section puts Mary behind the wide screen, clouds hauntingly rolling in and around her, suggesting her execution and transformation to supernatural being, both living and dead, corporeal and spiritual, caught, trapped, as we all are, between the visible and invisible, here and gone.

Passages of Pinckney’s adaptation of Mary’s diaries are beautifully written, but the words tend to blur as subtitles quickly flash on screens above and to the left and right of Huppert. In fact, this reviewer found the screens too far above the head and to the side of the actor; he often lost touch with her. Given the adventurousness and rigorous imagination displayed on stage, this might seem a petty complaint, but, well, tough: tickets cost money and a flaw this rudimentary could have been fixed; it comes close to derailing our connection with both the sole character and text. There are opportunities for emotion in the writing, as in the memory of Mary’s lost son, but they are rejected by the play and performer, a purposeful, if ultimately frustrating, choice.

The facts of Mary Stuart’s history are practically incomprehensible here. But ordinary comprehension doesn’t matter in the work. (A brief recorded audio scene between a man teaching a child—the lost son James, Mary herself, both?—features lines “I am here. I am not here. I am not not here,” existentialism straight out of Beckett.) The piece expresses itself to our subconscious, the cornerstone technique of what in 2025 might be called Robert Wilson’s “traditional” avant-garde. The founder in 1992 of the innovative Watermill Center on Long Island, Wilson, 83, has presented numerous provocative and revolutionary shows over the past fifty years, many with full musical scores, many at BAM in Brooklyn, original pieces including The Black Rider, in collaboration with Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs, Einstein on The Beach, with Philip Glass; revivals/reinventions of The Three Penny Opera and Krapp’s Last Tape, as well as Orlando, a monologue from Virginia Woolf’s novel, also with Pinckney and Huppert.   

What Mary Said… gains in visual and audio brilliance it loses in grounded heartfelt sentiment and humor. (Humor being a regular feature of Richard Foreman, a downtown experimental NYC favorite, sometimes linked with Wilson as stage explorers of consciousness, whose recent death is currently being acknowledged in a tribute by NYU and in the Skirball lobby.)  If you want a more conventional telling of Mary and Elizabeth, there are plays by Schiller and Maxwell Anderson, movies with Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, and others. What Wilson aims to accomplish, he does.

The sheer body and vocal strength and ferocity of Isabelle Huppert, now 71, is amazing to witness and with her list of over 100 films, including Elle and The Piano Teacher, matched by dozens of overseas plays, in leads such as Blanche in Streetcar, Solange in The Maids, and Amanda in Glass Menagerie, she embodies the dedication to both film and theater still found in the best European actors. (This Broadway season features several American film stars in upcoming and current plays, including George Clooney, Jake Gyllenhaal and Denzel Washington. But top-level U.S. actors’ theater work, while appreciated, sometimes seems to be, in the parlance of the past, “slumming,” giving a brief condescending nod to something earthy and plebeian, old and quaint.) Huppert’s performance is mostly an astounding technical achievement but several moments of downstage face-front confrontation, with Mary’s enemies/the audience/God(?), stand out as explosively bitter.

That the performance is Happening rather than full, fully satisfying Play was evidenced by the arrival of Hillary Clinton at the performance March 1, sitting as unobtrusively as possible a few rows in front of this critic, as well as several New York media types scattered around the orchestra. Mary Said What She Said, like our life, blasts into the psyche, mesmerizes and confuses, offering sensation but no explanation, then, seemingly as soon as it has come, disappears.

Scott Klavan, theatre writer at Escape Into Life, is an actor, director, and playwright in New York. Scott performed on Broadway in Irena’s Vow, with Tovah Feldshuh, in regional theater, and in numerous shows Off Broadway, including two productions of The Joy Luck Club for Pan Asian Rep. His stage adaption of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” was produced off-Broadway by Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB), and his play Double Murder was published in Best American Short Plays of 2006-2007. For twenty years, Scott was Script and Story Analyst for the legendary actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and for companies including HBO, CAA, and Viacom. In 2015, he was featured in A Soldier’s Notes, an episode of the Web Series Small Miracles, alongside Judd Hirsch, and earned a nomination for Outstanding Actor in the LA Web Series Festival. Scott directed the one-woman show My Stubborn Tongue, written and performed by Anna Fishbeyn, off-Broadway at The New Ohio Theater and at the United Solo Festival; and directed and appeared in the solo play Canada Geese, by George Klas, in the 2016 New York International Fringe Festival. In 2019, he directed a 60-minute version of the Sondheim/Lapine classic Into the Woods, cast solely with senior actors, for Music Theatre International (MTI) and Lenox Hill Neighborhood House; the show was written up in The New York Times. He helped to develop and directed Eleanor and Alice, by Ellen Abrams, about Eleanor Roosevelt and her cousin Alice Longworth, for the Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park and the Roosevelt House in NYC. He directed Night Shadows, by Lynda Crawford, about the poet Anna Akhmatova, for the On Women Festival at Irondale Center. He is a Lifetime Acting Member of The Actors Studio and a member of the Studio’s Playwright/Directors Workshop (PDW), where his own play The Common Area, was chosen as part of the PDW’s Festival of New Works in 2019. During the pandemic, Scott figured out how to direct on Zoom! Scott teaches at the 92nd St. Y and other arts organizations.