Telling Triumph

By Christopher Porterfield

ST. MARK'S GOSPEL

The simple audacity of the enterprise is breathtaking. English Actor Alec McCowen, casually dressed in a sports coat and open-necked shirt, strolls onto a stage furnished only with a table and three chairs and recites, from memory, the entire Gospel according to St. Mark, then strolls off again. It is the sort of feat that inevitably is called a tour de force; yet a tour de force is precisely what it is not. The performance, quietly magnificent as it is, nevertheless is purged of all bravura. It is compelling theater that is at the same time nontheatrical.

During some disarmingly offhand remarks made before launching into his text, McCowen makes it clear that he has no theological reasons for choosing Mark over the other Gospels. His concern is with words, not the Word. Mark happens to be the shortest (two hours, ten minutes in this performance, with one intermission) and "the easiest one to tell aloud." The fact that most biblical scholars believe it is also the earliest and the closest to original sources seems to be an incidental benefit.

The operative word for McCowen is tell. He tells Mark's story, he does not intone it. He clears away the ponderousness and singsong preachiness of centuries of Bible reading to rediscover the urgent, living voice of a man who is recounting nearly contemporary events, many of them derived from eyewitness accounts.

Through that living voice, living people begin to inhabit the stage: the scribes and Pharisees, hardened by suspicion and orthodoxy; the Disciples, stalwart but muddled; Jesus himself, patient and determined but often exasperated ("Perceive ye not yet, neither understand?").

McCowen sketches in these characterizations with a few gestures--flinging up his arms, walking a few steps, sitting, taking a well-judged pause for a sip of water. But mostly this is acting, as the saying goes, from the neck up. It rests on vocal virtuosity, powerfully abetted by the matchless pith and vigor of the King James version.

McCowen's narrative throbs with excitement or drops to an astonished whisper during his recounting of the miracles. He stifles a yelp of laughter at supplicants removing the roof of a house to get at Jesus (one of several surprisingly humorous moments). He rises to a tipsy bellow as Herod offers Salome a reward for her dancing, then sheers off into girlish silliness when Salome, as if for want of anything better, asks for the head of John the Baptist.

Only in the somber final chapters, through Gethsemane and the Crucifixion, does McCowen abandon these shadings for an almost severely straightforward manner. With a sure instinct, he realizes that here a minimum of effects will achieve the greatest effect.

Fine actors, like fine singers, can be divided into recital artists and operatic rafter ringers. McCowen, 53, with his refined emotional pitch, his dryly witty intelligence and his meticulous craft, is one of the recitalists. He has had showpiece roles--notably the title role in Hadrian VII and the psychiatrist in the original London production of Equus--but even these called more for finesse than fire.

In St. Mark's Gospel McCowen has found a vehicle perfectly suited to his range. For the material most resembles an extended song cycle. Nuance, focus and miniaturized drama are the order of the evening. Piety aside, the broader and deeper emotions are not often invoked. The performance unavoidably remains a bit rarefied, which is no doubt why it is booked for a three-week run in the small (249 seats) theater of Manhattan Marymount College. After a similarly modest beginning in London, however, it escalated into one of last spring's solid West End hits. McCowen is scheduled for a three-month tour of the U.S., including another visit to New York and culminating in a return to London for a one-night stand at Westminster Abbey.

Gospel, of course, means good news--which these plans certainly are for the theatergoers in both countries. As delivered by McCowen, Mark is a triumph of the human voice and the English language. -- Christopher Porterfield

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