“Sabbath’s Theater” is a book of the novelist Philip Roth’s unreconstructed and randy old age. Written 27  years after the teenage libertinism of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” the later book takes as its subject sex on the grave’s edge. Now, nearly three decades after it won a National Book Award, the book schleps to the stage, adapted by Ariel Levy and John Turturro, who plays the aging puppeteer, a King Lear of menial means and perfervid fantasies. 

The play, directed by Jo Bonney at the Pershing Square Signature Center, conveys the pornographic pathos of Roth’s sensibility. Mr. Turturro’s Mickey Sabbath is a disgraced puppeteer, brought low by a telephonic sex scandal. His lover Drenka, a terrific Elizabeth Marvel, recalls Chaucer’s Wife of Bath had she hailed from Belgrade. Her death, from cancer, undoes Sabbath, whose wife, Roseanne, kicks him out. A man with nothing to lose, he searches for what remains amidst the ruins.