The gospel truth: Crow’s Theatre’s ‘Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary’ is a cryptic, impenetrable Bible drama

She’s done it with canonical works like “King Lear” and “The Iliad,” flipping their narratives to become “Queen Goneril” (focusing on Lear’s three daughters) and “Ransacking Troy” (about the wives of the men fighting the Trojan War). And now she’s taken on the granddaddy of them all: the Bible.

She’s titled her new work, a commission from Crow’s Theatre, “Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary,” and it’s inspired by the stories of at least four people in the New Testament named Mary. But while many of her previous revisionist plays felt fresh and invigorating, her new play — which you could call “There’s Something about Marys” — feels cryptic and impenetrable.

Most people with a passing knowledge of the Bible know the figures of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, the former familiar from dozens of Christmas carols and the latter a major player in works like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

But do you recognize Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus — he who rose from the dead? What about Mary Salome, the mother of James and John and the wife of Zebedee?

Fragments of their stories pop up in this play, but unless you’re a biblical scholar, you might miss them.

The reason? Shields has chopped up their stories and divided the text among a series of actors identified in the program as Mary 1 (Michelle Monteith), Mary 2 (Sabryn Rock), Mary 3 (Nancy Palk) and Mary 4 (Belinda Corpuz).

The quartet, outfitted by British designer Moi Tran in matching red tracksuits, often recite the text as a chorus, which makes it challenging — both for the actors themselves, who must speak in unison, and for the audience, who lack a story or framework to support these disparate voices.

There is a fifth performer in the play, cheekily called Not-a-Mary, dressed in contrasting blue and played with ebullient joy and incredible physicality by Amaka Umeh. It’s telling that the scenes with Umeh — which include them being a glib TV interviewer talking to Mary Magdalene (Rock) in front of a studio audience, or morphing into an insensitive director trying to get the Virgin Mary (Monteith) to wordlessly wince at the lashings given by Roman guards to her son, Jesus — are among the production’s strongest.

Umeh also has a remarkable scene as Salome, the daughter of King Herod who notoriously danced, seducing her dad, and then asked for the head of John the Baptist as her prize. The actor even gets laughs playing the so-called Three Wise Men, proffering gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the newborn Jesus.

On Tran’s rather monotonous red-hued set of platforms and ramps, a ring of lights in the shape of an oversized crown of thorns shines down from above (lighting designer Christian Horoszczak), and these sequences work because they show us, rather than tell us, something.

It’s too bad Shields didn’t employ a figure approaching this world from the outside — a contemporary scholar, perhaps, doing research on women in the Bible. Through this character, she might have been able to tell us how Mary Magdalene has been misinterpreted for centuries, all because of an error by a pope in 591 CE. (The story is in the show’s program.)

But Shields, perhaps inspired by the four Gospels, lets her Marys present their own testaments. And the material, which contains some poetry and biting humour, would work better as a radio drama.

UK director Ellen McDougall attempts to give the work some shape and momentum, underscoring sequences with subtle sounds (Olivia Wheeler is the sound designer), and making the most of a couple of energy-boosting musical sequences, nicely choreographed by Esie Mensah.

It’s not that Shields doesn’t have something compelling to say about the role of women in the Bible. One clever early scene suggests those miraculous loaves and fishes didn’t cook themselves.

But good theatre shouldn’t be this difficult. That’s the gospel truth.