Mamet's masterpiece lights up Merrimack

David Adkins, Todd Licea and Joel Colodner in Glengarry Glen Ross.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

The Merrimack Rep is perhaps our leading example of a great theatre constrained by its budget. They consistently operate in the black, and enjoy a great deal of support from their community (indeed, up in Merrimack you feel an extraordinary bond between the theatre and its audience, closer and more trusting than just about anywhere else).  But you can also feel in their season, which is typically devoted to small-cast plays, a sense of financial (and hence to some degree artistic) limits. This perception is particularly acute given the fact that their "big" play each season is so reliably terrific. One guesses that with only a little more funding, Merrimack could mount seasons that would consistently rival, and possibly eclipse, the best being done on the regional landscape.

Certainly Glengarry Glen Ross (through this weekend only) is the most powerful show currently on the local boards.  It's true I've never seen David Mamet's balls-out potboiler fail; given a competent cast, its nasty mix of coiled masculine anxiety, frustration, and aggression always grips.  After all, it's practically an X-ray of the power dynamics of the locker room, where the stakes are always high, and the men always naked (at least metaphorically).

What's more, alas, the script also makes one reminisce for the days before Mamet lost his mind to the sort of political and sexual paranoias one would associate with a denizen of one of his shark tanks. For Glengarry is not only perhaps this playwright's greatest play, it's also his last great play; in his next major effort, Speed-the-Plow, he crossed over from sympathy with his bad boys to literal identification with them. Women became the Enemy, and thus the ironic finale of Glengarry, which dashes any hope of honor among his masculine thieves, would prove the last of its kind in the playwright's oeuvre.

But at least we have director Charles Towers, and the cast at Merrimack (which is far better than competent), to remind us how electrifying the playwright once was. You could argue, I suppose, that this Glengarry plays everything by the book - but to my mind that only underlines the fact that, as the culture really moves so slowly these days, the play's constructs still feel up-to-the-minute. Mamet's men are stripped of any connection to society at large, much less the other sex. They seem to exist in a vacuum, and even their sales prowess is somehow evanescent; it's a skill - or a potency - that has no physical basis (it can evaporate at a customer's whim). Thus these men are only men when they believe they're men, and so their emotional predicament in a way feels timeless (even if the sums of money in play clearly date the script).

David Adkins and Will Lebow make a deal.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

They are, of course, not only near-tragic figures but snakes-in-the-swampgrass as well. As mentioned earlier, part of what makes Glengarry so much more bracing than later Mamet is that it's so unsentimental about the dishonesty and back-stabbing moving behind the solemn cult of masculinity. Mamet's real estate gods - so seemingly concerned with admiration and trust - are constantly cheating on the down low; their very livelihood, in fact, is based on proverbial Florida swampland. (Which may be why the play was at first misinterpreted as a critique of capitalism.)

Fortunately the cast at Merrimack is all but expert at floating between these opposed identities and moral poles - and their command of the famously staccato "Mamet-speak" (here at its hilarious height) is virtuosic.  As cocky top salesdog Ricky Roma, Todd Licea exudes a more open sense of predatory Las-Vegas charisma than usual, but he so smoothly manipulates each and every social transaction that his sales success is utterly convincing.  Ditto for Will LeBow's desperate Shelly Levene, a kind of lizard on his last legs who alternates between claims of prowess (he was once known as "The Machine") and pathetically low compromises, deals - and even thefts.

These two superb actors supply the engine of Mamet's own machine, but there are several remarkable performances elsewhere in the production. Merrimack mainstay David Adkins gives his Williamson (the shop boss, in effect) a stronger shot of alienation than callow slime, but he's intriguing all the same. Meanwhile Jeremiah Wiggins is just about perfect as the shop's latest mark, and Jim Ortlieb makes the aging, bumbling Aaronow a figure of true pathos.  I was only dissatisfied with Charlie Kevin's Moss, who had less of a hidden edge than I think the character demands - but after the play's opening gambit, his is a minor role.

In its look and feel, the physical production is likewise just right - from the blood-red backdrop of the Chinese restaurant to the cheap, off-white gypsum board of the burgled office (thank you, designer Bill Clarke).  All in all, Towers and company have practically built a time machine on the Merrimack stage (even the salesmen's 80's-era ethnic slurs have been preserved, along with the c-word, and a deluge of other profanity).  It all brings us back to the days when Mamet was a playwright of promise, and still had the talent (and self-awareness) to grip you by the lapels - and not let go.

David Mamet, the art of the con, and the M.V. (Part 2)

Ken Cheeseman and Cliff Odle wonder if they're up to the eightieth page yet at the New Rep.

I can tell you precisely the moment I gave up on David Mamet's Race; it's the moment when one character describes a hot night in Bermuda as like being "inside a big black c--nt."

You could almost hear Mamet giggling over that one; he got to say the c-word!  (Jeez, Mom would kill him if she knew!)

But all I could think was, "Why not go for it, Dave?  Why not n--gg--r c--nt, too?  Hmmm?"

After a moment, however, I realized - no, Mr. Mamet had chosen precisely the slur he wanted; he wasn't really interested in a double whammy.  For Race, despite its moniker, isn't really about racism - not his own, not his audience's, not anybody's. It's about sexism.  Or rather - it is sexism, kind of "personified," if you will.  It is the thing itself.

Oh, I know, everyone huffs and puffs throughout the play about racial grievances; much of the script - like so many these days! - is basically a lecture delivered by the playwright through transparent mouthpieces: two law partners, one white and one black, who've seen it all and want to tell the walls (or at least the fourth wall) all about it.  But what do these two really have to say?  Not much; indeed, near the top of the script, Mamet admits "a white man has nothing to tell a black man about race" (a paraphrase).  And he seems to mean it.  Okay - so why are you still talking, white man?


Well, so he can grind his axe yet again about political correctness (as opposed to racism) to his putative audience onstage: a wealthy, older, white client who has been accused of raping a black woman.  Needless to say, he's willing to listen to Mamet's tired "liberalism is a con" rant, but he's also pretty creepy in general - still, he might be innocent.  By that I hardly mean the sex in question was "consensual" in the usual meaning of the term: money, or favors, or something was changing hands, in one way or another, we imagine - and as the assault occurred in a hotel room, with the victim clothed in a red-sequined dress - well, let's just say the lawyers have quite a bit to work with when it comes to defense strategy.

They protest otherwise, of course.  To them, racial sensitivities have made this case an open-and-shut loser.  And many would agree that political correctness has made battling this kind of accusation an uphill battle.  The tables have turned to some degree, in some arenas, on those in the ruling class.   The fix used to be in one way, now it's in another.

Still, this case hardly seems hopeless; and many a lawyer would be drawn to its challenges simply because they touch on so many political fault lines, and revolve around such a high-profile client.  Win or lose, this is the kind of case from which a skillful lawyer can emerge as a freshly-minted media player.  After all, Dominique Strauss-Kahn beat the charges against him - for it turned out he may have been set up (his horrifying behaviors quickly tripped him up again, of course).  And I didn't see any lawyers running from that case.  So the reluctance of Mamet's lawyers to take the job hardly seems realistic, much less up-to-the-minute.

But then Race isn't set in reality, it's set in Mametland, where the island of Bermuda is "in the Caribbean" (?), and postcards zip through the mails with the c-word printed on them (back in the 80's, no less!). What's more, this artificial construct (I won't  call it a play) is about as concerned with what is usually called "plot" as it is with reality: we never even meet the alleged victim, the scene of the crime is barely described, and there's nothing like an investigation of the facts of the case.  After all, that would mean Mamet would have to conjure more characters, develop a structure - so much work!  Who has that kind of time?

Luckily, once again the "Magic Vagina" (that's "M.V." from now on) comes to Mamet's rescue!   We've met the Mamet M.V. before - in Speed-the-Plow, Oleanna and elsewhere - and as I detailed in the previous post of this series, she not only serves as a projection of the playwright's paranoia, but also saves him most of the time and effort of actually writing a play.  She makes no sense at all as a "character" - with a consistent back-story, interior life, and arc - but as a plot device, she can't be beat.  If the play needs one more twist, the M.V. is happy to connive for no apparent reason; when it requires a climactic confrontation, she will return conveniently to the scene of the crime; when the dénouement demands a confession, she suddenly supplies it!  Whew!  The M.V. is basically the Ronco Pocket Plot-O-Matic for lazy playwrights!

The only problem with this sphinx-like crazy lady is that she's just not convincing as she drives the action with her covert actions (while the putative "plot" is hashed and re-hashed on stage).  Take the M.V. of Race, for instance, who is named Susan (not that it matters; she could be named "X") - a young black woman of few words from an Ivy League law school, who clearly has a chip on her shoulder about, you know, race and stuff, but clearly is suppressing it for the sake of her career.   From this we expect her to be smart, subtle, and always under control.

And yet, over the course of the play she basically commits professional suicide by undermining and destroying her client's case in a manner that begins with the improbable (she tricks her partners into taking his case) and quickly lifts off into the purest fantasy (she tampers with evidence, and divulges the firm's strategy to the D.A.).  Now trust me, I know the P.C. crowd - and I agree Mamet's right to call them out for ignoring facts and bulldozing the discourse - BUT - and this is key - they always do it to their own advantage.  They are careerists, not martyrs.

Ken Cheeseman tries to talk sense to Mamet's puppet (Miranda Craigwell).  Photos by Andrew Brilliant.

Susan, however, commits professional suicide without a second thought.  Yes, I know, Mamet floats a flimsy legal shield for her behavior - the firm investigated her background when she applied, which they didn't do to white applicants; so Susan could threaten a lawsuit if they retaliate for her actions.  But this is hardly enough to cover her you-know-what from all the professional fall-out of her betrayals.  Her partners may not fire or sue her, but lawyers do talk - and then there's the D.A.'s office . . . by the curtain, basically she's toast as a practicing attorney.

Of course Susan makes no sense internally anyhow, so it's pointless to wonder at her motives; but as a puppet, she has her function: she is designed as the Outsider, the Other, who attacks, and is then rejected by, Mamet's masculine community (so ironically enough, even as Mamet imagines he is skewering P.C. orthodoxy, he is actually unconsciously validating it, as he dramatizes women almost as a Nazi might dramatize a Jew).  Thus in Race, the testosterone brotherhood is able to resolve its differences and atone for its sins - partners Jack and Henry, after all, are now joined at the hip, and utterly loyal; and together, in a pivotal scene, they make Charles, their client, realize that he has, indeed, behaved in a patronizingly racist way to another man - to a brother.

But as for the sisters - well, Susan circles this heart-to-heart like a vulture, but cannot enter it; indeed, we realize later she has actually already engineered Charles's downfall - or at least his self-immolation.  For once the scales have fallen from his eyes, he trots right over to the D.A. and confesses, in a sudden spasm of expiation.

We never learn, though, whether he actually committed the crime he has "confessed" to - just as we never learn what could be driving Susan to ruin her own career.  Just as we never learn what made the other woman in question - the victim - accuse Charles in the first place.  We never really learn anything, in fact, except that David Mamet has now written eighty pages, and so the curtain must fall.

I will say, however, that even given the limits of this script (its appeal is confined to some pretty good race-based stand-up early on), the New Rep cast, under the direction of Robert Walsh, didn't get as far as they might have (with one big exception).  The Broadway cast was famously restricted by Mamet's stated intent to flatten their performances (I'm not kidding), but lead James Spader at least managed to sneak some intriguing subtexts into his big scenes.  The New Rep version, by comparison, is far more expressive and flamboyant, but arguably more superficial (although the sleek stage design, by Janie E. Howland, was quite a bit better than Santo Loquasto's boring set on Broadway).  As lead lawyer Jack, Ken Cheeseman nailed all his laughs like a pro - and that's nothing to sneeze at - but never suggested any real sexual (or racial) tensions with Susan; meanwhile, as best bud Henry, Cliff Odle was likewise funny, but didn't manage to suggest any sense of scarred history with his partner.  Meanwhile poor Miranda Craigwell did what she could with Susan, but in the end came off as a poised and intelligent actress saddled with a terrible part.

The surprise here was Patrick Shea as Charles, that client from hell.  Mr. Shea has been acting in Boston since forever in Shear Madness, which has generally kept him off our other stages.  And more's the pity; he brings a complexity - even a twisted sympathy - to Charles that isn't even in the script.  For evidence that a great actor can transform a mediocre role, you need look no further than this production.  With all due respect to Madness, let's hope this isn't the last time we see Mr. Shea outside of a hair salon!

David Mamet, the art of the con, and the magic vagina, Part 1

So when do we speed-the-play?  The cast of Race at the New Rep.

It's hard to remember, as you watch Race (at the New Rep through November 4), that David Mamet was once a great playwright.  Admittedly, he was always a reactionary - a masculine reactionary, need I point out; even back in the 70's, the days of The Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Mamet's men were flawed, but basically lovable, while his women were opaque and treacherous.  At the time, however, feminism had flummoxed many American boys - and when Mamet avoided female characters entirely, in plays like American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, his talent burned bright indeed - so the sexist streak at the heart of this tough guy seemed easy to forget (or forgive).

It's harder to forgive it now, though - particularly as the playwright peaked in achievement almost thirty years ago, and the man himself has apparently devolved into a conservative crank (you only have to flip through his screed The Secret Knowledge to realize he really should be wearing a tinfoil hat).  Indeed, what may be tragic about David Mamet (and he is much given to musing on tragedy) is that he has by now thoroughly undermined his own early achievement; it's as if he has been determined to deconstruct his own success, and reveal the shriveled sensibility lurking within it.

To be honest, this behavior suggests the classic pathology of the idée fixe, the mental preoccupation which over time slowly dominates a psyche.  In fact it's my conviction that the playwright suffers from a double (if not triple) dose of this mania.  For Mamet has also always been obsessed with the art of the con; all his major (and most of his minor) plays have revolved around deceptions of one stripe or other.  But as long as these swindles were perpetrated by men on other men - as in Buffalo and Glengarry - Mamet was able to generate true drama from his obsession, as sexism, his second idée fixe, didn't prevent him from developing complex portraits of his villains.

When his two obsessions converged, however - probably around the time of Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna - Mamet's standing as a serious artist was suddenly compromised.  For ever since, his plots have repeatedly been dumbed down to turn on crude, predictable treachery, and his women (with the exception of the betrayed mother in The Cryptogram, which could serve as a poignant demonstration of his inability to forge a true vision from his psychological history) have long since hardened into mechanical villains.  Like the famous "magical negroes" whose special powers hurry along sentimental white narratives, Mamet's women have become "magic vaginas," figures - I won't call them characters - who are denuded of actual personality, and who implausibly speed-the-play by attempting to crucify the leading man whenever the playwright wants to wrap things up in 90 minutes (or less).

Meanwhile Mamet's men have morphed into totems of victimology - tragic phalli who are buddies at heart, and who would all love each other if they could only forget their damned competitive instincts! Indeed, one of the very weirdest aspects of Mamet, particularly in his later stages, is his apparent yearning to be homosexual. (If only he knew!)

Thus the once-great playwright has become a kind of theatrical in-joke - which, to be fair, he seems to realize himself, at some level; why else would he now coat his work with a sheen of sitcom-level one-liners? But then he's a smart businessman, and no doubt knows that his flattering of conservative guilt, along with the tension between the form of sitcom-fodder and the "outrageous" content he's allowed to fill it with on stage, are what keep him in commercial clover.

David Mamet- busy writing his own tragedy.

But on to Race - which I've had the misfortune to see twice (I also caught the Broadway run a year or two ago). And what can I say - it's not the kind of play that rewards repeated viewings.  The funny lines fly thick and fast the first time, I admit; but the second time around, you realize that not just two, but three polluted rivers in Mamet's mentality have converged in this poisonous little potboiler.

For even as his dramaturgy congealed into formula, Mamet's politics slowly became infected with his paranoid monomania, too.  The "art of the con" became the prism through which he began to see society at large, and "liberalism" in particular - which I guess he views as the equivalent of the non-existent destination called "Glengarry Glen Ross" in the play of the same name (as I recall, "Oleanna" was a  mythical locale, too). Thus in an embarrassing series of op-eds, articles, and books, Mamet has recently crowed that he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal," and has relentlessly excoriated those on the left - particularly those comfortably ensconced in the academy, Hollywood and the chattering classes - for hypocrisy, duplicity, and a host of other sins; in the world according to Mamet, they're all swindlers and crooks.

Now I could never argue that many liberals aren't hypocrites - I've said precisely the same thing, so I'd be a huge hypocrite myself if I did!  But in these screeds Mamet usually rambles far beyond that highly defensible position to a bizarre vision of a white, Christian nation devoted to the occupation of the West Bank (??),  and of course sorry for its past sins, but beset and besieged by liberal "cons" like affirmative action, sexual harassment suits, and sympathy for the Palestinians.  Mamet never actually engages with the questions of historical justice behind liberal positions (for that would completely complicate their status as "cons"!).  He simply asserts, essentially, that any attempt to rectify the wrongs of history (except in the case of Israel, that's different!) only creates some new kind of swindle because - well, just because, okay?

Well, at least the Palestinians don't appear in Race (although I'm sure Mamet tried to work them in). But we do get just about all his other hobbyhorses, piled atop each other - the sublimated homosexual buddies, the magic vagina (ahem, "m.v." from now on), the twin evils of feminism and affirmative action - this isn't a political play, it's a psychological case study penned by the patient himself from within his rubber room.

Beyond these appalling psychological dimensions, however, lies the script's appalling lack of craft. But we'll consider that more fully in the second part of this series.

Plowing Mamet - and his man-traps

He said/she read; Aimee Doherty and Robert Pemberton in Speed-the-Plow.

The question about David Mamet has always been, "Is he a misogynist - or does he just hate women?" That rap as a hater could probably be traced as far back as Sexual Perversity in Chicago, but it was cemented by Speed-the-Plow, and then set it stone by Oleanna, two plays which, perhaps due to the office sex on the red-hot Mad Men, are once again hot, too; indeed, the New Rep has followed in Broadway's footsteps by just opening a new production of Speed-the-Plow, which runs through November 7.

But for what it's worth, Mamet strikes me as not so much a misogynist as a gynophobe. What's the difference, you ask? Well, a misogynist actively hates women; a gynophobe "merely" fears them. That's splitting hairs on a Coke can, you say, and you may be right - most gynophobes end up as misogynists. Only it's interesting to note that Mamet isn't really disgusted by women, or outraged by them, and he doesn't really belittle or mock them.

No, he's just afraid of them - women, or at least heterosexual women (gay women are in the boy-club), are often his villains of choice, at least on stage. And why? Because they have a secret weapon: sex, which destabilizes and undermines the savage power games of men. In short, to Mamet, men may be animals, and it's a jungle out there, but women are the snakes in that jungle's tall grass - because sex is sneaky and unfair (it's like Kryptonite).

Speed-the-Plow is probably a pivotal text in this artist's "development" (even though it's hardly one of Mamet's best), in that after the masculine bloodsport of American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, it marked the return of women to the center of the playwright's oeuvre, indeed to the middle of the combat format he'd perfected in Glengarry. And weirdly, the playwright suddenly revealed an affection for the brutal buddy system he'd seemed to eviscerate before. The guy-land of Hollywood in Speed-the-Plow is unsparingly, but sympathetically, rendered; these "players" may be assholes, but we understand them. They have, you know, like a code we remember from junior high.

To Mamet, however, sex is always below the belt (literally), and has no such code - and maybe it doesn't. But somehow that idea seems to be pounded down onto his female villains without any further attempt at insight. Take "Karen," for instance, the temp who temporarily up-ends the power structure of Speed-the-Plow; she's not so much a character as a device, and an internally contradictory one at that. (Warning: spoilers ahead for those who've never encountered the plot of this high-profile star vehicle.)

Karen is first presented as clumsy and sweet - an innocent piece of sexual bait floating in the Hollywood shark tank; immediately, and predictably, Mamet's "Charlie" bets his buddy "Bobby" that he can't bed her by midnight. And so the game is, like, on. But the trick Bobby uses to lure Karen to his crib - he asks her for a 'courtesy read' of a pretentious new novel - backfires when she begins to play not only on his horniness but his inner doubts about the adolescent fodder he churns out with Charlie (who has a Tom-Cruise-like star on call waiting). One candlelit conversation and a quick roll in the hay later, and Karen has replaced Charlie in Bobby's affections, Bobby's about to greenlight a deal with that earnest courtesy-read's author, and the deal with Tom Cruise may be down the drain.

Luckily, an improbable contradiction in the plot comes to Charlie's rescue! Which ties into whatever larger interest the play may have, outside the accuracy of Mamet's ear for male banter and Hollywood babble. Said intrigue revolves around the true nature of Karen: is she a naïf who's wandered into incredible good fortune, or a calculating player herself? Exploring either option, however, would require a play of substantially larger proportions than the 80-minute Speed-the-Plow (a title once memorably parodied by David Ives as Speed-the-Play). Hence, Karen does something that wraps the script up neatly, but makes any explanation for her behavior impossible: in a key moment, she admits to Bobby that she slept with him merely to secure the movie deal.

Hmmm. The problem with this twist is that it makes Karen a bit like Bertrand Russell's barber who only shaves men who don't shave themselves. If we "buy" the naïve honesty of her third-act confession, then her second-act subterfuge makes no sense. But if we take her seduction of Bobby for what she says it was, then her confession seems bizarre; why would (and how could) she pull off Act II so flawlessly, then suddenly come clean in Act III?

It is a puzzlement. But the question doesn't matter to Mamet, because to him Karen's just a prop - a Gumby with boobs to be twisted as he chooses; indeed, after she loses her dreams, big time, he hardly bothers to even give her any lines, but instead has his buddies merely crow over her downfall. Curtain! We're done here.

Right. See, here's where that "misogynist" tag got stuck on Mamet's back. Because why, precisely, should we be cheering on Bobby and Charlie? Another puzzlement; the only answer available seems to be "because they're guys." And that answer has begun to pop up repeatedly in the Mamet canon; he has avoided heterosexual female characters more and more in his output, replacing them with lesbians (Boston Marriage, November) or just dispensing with them entirely, in such all-male comedies as the oddly (or aptly?) named Romance, and the current gay sex farce Keep Your Pantheon. It also seems worth pointing out that the affectionate parody of buggery in Romance and Pantheon throws Mamet's women in an even more curious light - why is sex suddenly so harmless when it's just between guys?

But while all this has made Mamet a lesser artist, in a way it has made him a greater pop-cultural avatar. Speed-the-Plow has become the template for many imitations on both stage and screen, and of course Mamet's homosocial/heterosexual stance is now the default mode of Judd-Apatow-style Hollywood comedy - ironically enough, given Mamet's supposed contempt for Tinseltown. But when you consider that Mamet cast Madonna in the premiere of Speed-the-Plow, and Jeremy Piven in its revival, his horror of Hollywood whoredom becomes harder to credit. (And at any rate, his parody of the Cormac-McCarthy-like doomsday novel that Karen falls in love with renders his satire of La-La Land largely toothless.)

So given the surface-flash but internal-weakness of Speed-the-Plow, it's no surprise that the New Rep production sometimes glitters, but doesn't really satisfy. Director Robert Walsh seems to have come down on the side of Karen's innocence in his interpretation, which, like any answer to the "Karen paradox," must be wrong, but probably more wrong than making her a cunning little vixen. "Conniving Karen" leaves you with a contradiction near the end of the third act, when she hardly has any lines anyway; but "Clueless Karen" leaves you with a long second act that makes no sense.

And sure enough, Act II sags in this version, and actress Aimee Doherty, though superficially appealing as ever, can't make much of it. And without much to play against, the capable Robert Pemberton (hasn't he played this role before?) is left shadow-boxing on Eric Levenson's sleek set. He puts a spitting shine on his Mamet-speak, however, whenever he's chumming with Charlie, here given ferocious life by Gabriel Kuttner, an undersung local actor who may with this role break out to a larger public. Kuttner has an eccentric physical presence, but he always somehow makes his characters work, and he brings a compelling force to both Charlie's desperation and outrage that brings this Plow to an electrifying finish. Both he and Pemberton could bring stronger undercurrents of self-contempt (Bobby) and resentment (Charlie) to their co-dependence in the first act, but together they bring the curtain down with a vengeance on Mamet's hapless man-trap.

The dick variations

The "sitting ducks" of "The Duck Variations" at the ART.

I caught up with the finale of the ART's "Mamet Celebration" last night - after seeing Romance toward the end of its run - and began to wonder if the whole effort hadn't begun to turn into a "condemnation" rather than a "celebration." It's true that half of the program - "The Duck Variations" - was generally charming (if slightly over-rated by the local critics), but the other half, a new version of "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" starring and directed by ART Institute students, proved so bizarre that it was hard not to take it as some sort of ironic parody of the playwright, or at best the most back-handed compliment imaginable. And what kind of "celebration" doesn't include the centerpieces of a writer's achievement (which must count as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross)? Indeed, as I left the theatre I began to wonder if I was wrong in my esteem for even those plays - if staged afresh, would they look as sketchy and thin as much of the "Mamet Celebration" has? In other words, are we overdue for a Mamet "re-calibration"?

Well, perhaps; but first the good news. The ART has done well by "The Duck Variations," an early Mamet piece which showcases his budding talent, but never quite coalesces into the bittersweet gem we keep hoping it's going to prove to be. The one-act is a long consideration of two elderly gents kvetching on a park bench (clearly in Chicago, clearly on Lake Michigan) about whatever passes by: boats, the occasional blue heron, but mostly, yes, ducks. And as these two ramble on, via "variations" that are structured like vaudevilles, we sense their own fears and concerns, often expressed through subtle ellipses (any direct mention of avian death, for instance, draws anguished protest from one of these "sitting ducks"). At the same time, we can perceive an unusually benign, even rueful variant of Mamet's trademark lean staccato taking shape; the script is a lovely exercise in masculine elocution, but it remains, I'm afraid, an exercise - and a somewhat overlong one at that (although its length is partly redeemed by a haunting final scene).

And the ART production, while certainly strong, isn't quite perfect. Director Marcus Stern has conducted the all-important rhythm of the dialogue superbly, and Thomas Derrah and Will Lebow play against each other with precision and generosity - as a tennis match, this production could never be excelled. But it must be pointed out that Derrah depends on technical contrivance much of the time - he connects with the emotional core of the character only intermittently - and some of his technical tricks (lolling tongue, bulging eyes) seem to have been borrowed from Carol Burnett. Meanwhile Lebow works his customary double magic, maintaining a pristine technique while never losing touch with the inner life of the role. So in the end, this tennis match has a clear winner.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Although perhaps there is something wrong with the ART's set - they've once again re-purposed chunks of the Onion Cellar's cabaret décor, which feels, well, cheap, and completely inappropriate to the play at hand. (Ditto the clink of beer bottles and the whispering waitress.) The design works better, however, for the second "vaudeville" on the program, "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," perhaps because many of its black-outs and sketches actually occur in a bar. Too bad nothing else works well, however. Indeed, this must count as the biggest belly-flop at a local professional house in years - the show isn't just miscast, it's also mis-directed (and mis-costumed). The production's embarrassing enough, in fact, that you kind of feel these kids should all get their very-advanced tuition back.

"Sexual Perversity," to be fair to the students attempting to resuscitate it, feels very much of its era (the mid-70s), and thence further away from us than, say, Chekhov or Shakespeare. Which isn't to say that in it Mamet doesn't flex his chops - many of the lines are still funny, there are one or two muscular flights of monologue, and there's clearly a sharp intelligence shaping its many Pinteresque lacunae. But the play's formal interest is undercut by the fact that in it, Mamet had his finger on the pulse of a now-vanished cultural moment - i.e., the sexual revolution in mid-thrash. And no doubt in 1974, the play's frankness, as well as the misogyny and anger that came with it (the "c-word" figures prominently) counted as shocking, and its whole sense of masculinity-at-sea seemed urgently Important. Today, however, it feels passé, and thanks to the Internet sex itself has lost much of its mystery and power; therefore sexual anxiety seems faintly ridiculous, too. Just chill, dudes, we keep wanting to tell the on-edge protagonists of "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" - and somehow you get the impression that's what the actors and director want to tell them, too.

But stripped of its animating spirit, the play's thin construction suddenly collapses, and we feel intensely the lack of dramatic back-up for its two female contrivances (you can't call them characters), man-hating cynic Joan (Laura Parker) and intentionally-blank sexual slate, Deborah (Susannah Hoffman; both above left). Even within what Mamet gives them, however, neither actress makes much of an impression; Parker seems unwilling to bestow on Joan her bitter due of misogynist cliché, and Hoffman holds back from even the playful sensuality that Mamet affords Deborah. The men fare a little better - partly because they simply get more stage time - but really, not all that much. Tim Eliot is so strangely miscast as the lying lothario Bernie that we spend much of his many monologues simply scratching our heads; we should be watching a highbrow version of one of those National Lampoon louts from Animal House, not an ironically self-aware wit from Metropolitan (costumed in a bizarre pink-and-gray-plaid ensemble, no less). Somewhat stronger is Scott Lyman, who's roughly right for the seemingly-innocent Dan, but even Lyman basically misses the giddy arc of sexual connection (followed by emotional frustration) that's one of the few structural elements in the script.

Even in its current flattened state, however, that arc lands him in something like a younger version of the duo from "The Duck Variations" - alone with his fucked-up buddy, ogling babes (rather than ducks) at the lake. In this version, we get to ogle them, too - they're in their best Fire-Island speedos, in an apparent gesture toward the incipient sexuality of their emotional arrangement (not coincidentally, both have had homosexual encounters in the past). I'm not sure, however, that actual homosexuality is quite what Mamet had in mind (although I'm sure he was conscious of this possible interpretation); I think that, as usual, he is instead hinting at a kind of virtual homosexuality, in which hetero-sex is experienced as an aspect of male camaraderie, as the natural state of his not-so-noble savages. That camaraderie, of course, is also reminiscent of the slur-fest that climaxed Romance; it's kind of the flip-side of the absurdist desert that Mamet sees as the battleground of the sexes.

Indeed, what the ART's "Mamet celebration" has at least made clear is that Mamet is rather like an insecure, putatively straight Edward Albee, only with mating rituals in his absurdist sights instead of the bourgeoisie. And it's interesting to note that one of his great themes has always been ignorance; his characters don't really know or understand the world, or each other, or even themselves. And they're inarticulate to boot. Thus the famously sculpted staccato dialogue is an attempt to create a kind of meaning out of scraps, to will into being a livable environment from nothing. The pathetic humor of this gambit certainly retains its appeal, but it's already been imitated throughout the general culture, which may be why much of even Romance felt oddly dated (while parts of "Sexual Perversity" now play like bad Seinfeld). And beyond that, the plays generally don't have all that much richness, or texture, or even plot, to offer - and thus it's hard to see what "new angle" can be found on them. Maybe that's what the Institute kids eventually discovered about "Sexual Perversity in Chicago."

Isn't it "romantic" . . ?

Will Lebow holds court in Romance.

I checked out the ART production of David Mamet's Romance last weekend because there was IRNE buzz around Will Lebow's performance, so I felt I had to see it. But I have to confess the play was somewhat more interesting than it's been given credit for being (somewhat more interesting, that is). And the production, directed by Scott Zigler, was very slick, with a nifty set by Michael Griggs and a generally crack ensemble.

It's true that the play isn't quite as interesting as the cleverly engineered November was at the Lyric last fall (nor was the ensemble actually any stronger - the Lyric cast was brilliant). But then Romance is more a sketch than a play - it's really just funny fragments glued together in a thematic mosaic, whereas November is a rather well-structured farce. Although even November wasn't quite what the playwright wanted to pretend it was (he blew all kinds of smoke about it being a battle between the "tragic" and "optimistic" views of life); the sad fact is that Mamet hasn't produced an important play since Speed-the-Plow (if even that one is truly important), and it does seem that things have really been thinning out recently. Perhaps sensing the flyweight nature of this latest, the ART floated the idea to a few naïve reviewers that there was some kind of cultural throughline to this year's season, apparently leading from Chekhov (The Seagull) through Beckett (Endgame) to - wait for it - Mamet. Right. ROFLMAO.

Elsewhere the ART took the more sophisticated tack that Romance was somehow bracing and subversive because of its barrage of ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual slurs, but so many comics, radio hosts and cable shows have mined the same territory that none of this plays out as particularly transgressive. Not that Mamet's inventive insults are quite "archaic," as the youngest critic in town put it, because occasionally the bickering does tap into current political live wires (as when the playwright takes aim at our hands-off attitude toward Muslims, or pedophile priests). But generally all the bigotry plays more as coda than salvo, like the crude "Americana" of Mel Brooks's The Producers, which after 9/11 somehow transmuted ironic bigotry into patriotic gesture.

The disjuncture between this supposedly "offensive" banter and the play's oh-so-innocent title mystified several local critics, but the text is, indeed, obviously a romance, or rather a "bromance" - because, for one thing, there are no heterosexual women in it, which means Mamet is able to lower his defenses and conjure something like an atmosphere of fraternal affection out of all his bigoted, but at least honest, bathos. To Mamet, heterosexual women are a deep existential threat, and if they're present in one of his plays, it often devolves into some kind of trap for its hero. Homosexual women are a different story, however - Mamet kind of digs them, and he's not particularly homophobic toward gay men, either - we're allowed in the testosterone treehouse (although there's an intriguing meta-insult toward my tribe embedded in the play; more on that later).

But what is it about Mamet and heterosexual women? It is a puzzlement. Heterosexual women don't seem fully human to Mamet, and unsurprisingly, their opinion of him tends to mirror that assessment. Years ago, I went to the same gym that Mamet did in Harvard Square. And the few times I mentioned this to friends, the women present would always ask, "Have you ever seen him naked? How big is his penis?" Now don't worry, I'm not telling. I only mention this because I've never had women ask me that particular question about any other guy. Ever. So perhaps Mr. Mamet should be aware of what exactly his writing has suggested to approximately half of his audience.

Or maybe it's just that, as Harry told Sally, sex ruins everything for Mamet. Strange, then, that man-on-man love is what ties up all the loose narrative ends of Romance. The story, if you can call it that, revolves around the trial of a chiropractor for - well, we never know what, exactly, that's the play's MacGuffin. The script's genuine action begins when the defense lawyer, in private consult with the Jewish defendant, explodes that a particularly recondite rhetorical strategy is "talmudic . . . so Jewish . . ." He immediately apologizes profusely, and awkwardly, for this blast of seemingly honest ethnic contempt. As an excuse he claims he's exhausted, because he had to get up early to drive his kid to a hockey game at church. To which his client calmly responds, "So, do you think the priest will have his dick out of your kid's ass by the time you pick him up?"
Nice. And things move on, or perhaps down, from there; the scene devolves (or escalates!) into a wild orgy of slurs, some second-hand, but genuinely clever, others newly-formed things of beauty. Then comes the odd meta-insult of the play - a weird scene between the gay prosecuting attorney and his be-thonged lover, in a sex pad decorated in something like Caravaggio-meets-David-Hockney, in which it's revealed that this kike Mamet has no idea how actual faggots like me behave. (In case you can't tell, this review is taking the same stylistic turn as its subject.) Or maybe that is the idea (after all, later on a key character inquires of that gay attorney, "So what do you guys actually do?"). 


 Still, if the scene is unbelievable on its surface, it resonates slightly structurally, because Mamet intends us to understand that gay sex is the hil-arious mystery secret, the double-identity charm that will allow this farce to function. In ancient times, of course, this secret was usually identified with someone at the bottom of the social strata (a woman, or a slave) - and at the ART, that be-thonged lover isn't just gay, but also black, just to touch both bases, apparently. Most interestingly, he's also accorded a name (all the other characters are described by social role) - "Bunny." Thus, he's human, and not defined by his function - or is he? After all, "Bunny" is a kind of patronizing insult that references the ass - and yet is also weirdly close to "buddy," the ultimate man's-man term of affection. (See this is one of those moments that I think maybe Mamet should just suck some cock to get it over with.)

But I digress. All these scenes, it turns out, have been mere prep for the wackily operatic slur-fest that takes up the entire second act, in which the trial resumes, with a judge (Will Lebow, above) who has overdosed on his allergy medication and thus begun to experience "psycho-active side-effects." Here Mamet pretty much abandons all plot, and motivation, too, and just goes after thematic pastiche and silly effects: because he wants to show us that his 'characters' are getting emotionally naked, for instance, he has the judge tear off his clothes for no reason, and Bunny likewise makes a surprising, gay-us ex machina appearance because the playwright needs to wrap things up, etc. 


Thus Romance basically stops being a play, but it remains a pretty funny essay, at least as delivered by Lebow, who manages to constantly connect the very disparate dots of Mamet's dialogue. And Lebow somehow channels a Paddy-Chayefsky or Norman-Lear-like Jewish-liberal befuddlement (we half-expect Bea Arthur to rise from the grave and do a walk-on) that keeps the goings-on endearing, and dodges the WASP-wannabe chill that is the ART's dominant mode.

For this, I suppose, is Mamet's sentimental point; in his world, it's the cold manipulation of masculine language that keeps us apart; once we just begin to get sloppy and honest, it doesn't really matter that we're insulting each other, because everybody has a secret shame that we'd all just be better off exposing. (Ah, that locker room again.) Indeed, at the end of Romance, characters begin spontaneously confessing to everything under the sun, while across town, a Mideast peace conference falls apart because of a single insult. Just one insult. Wow. Isn't that ironic? I mean romantic?

Well, thank God we've had Will Lebow to sell us this weird, over-extended but under-developed piece of dramaturgy. Indeed, rarely has a "play" depended quite so much on its central performance. Watching him take his bow, it struck me just how versatile this mainstay of the ART and Huntington has proved over the years (to be fair, Thomas Derrah and Remo Airaldi both crackled here, too) - and how much less we may be seeing him under the disco-gospel directorship of incoming Artistic Director Diane Paulus. Or should we actually be glad that the ART is cutting its already-tiny acting company loose, because that way we'll get to see them in better, more serious productions elsewhere? Let's hope that's the silver lining glimmering from the clouds of this theatre's coming season.

November wins in a landslide

Adrianne Krstansky, Richard Snee and Will McGarrahan inhabit the (very) Oval Office in David Mamet's November.

In his recent essay "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'," David Mamet declared that his latest play, November (at the Lyric Stage through Nov. 15) was "a laugh a minute."

And he was right about that. This silly satire of presidential politics is a laugh a minute - at least for long, blissful stretches - and the Lyric production is the funniest show in town, hands down, and whatever your politics are you'll enjoy it, so run out and see it immediately.

But Mamet also declared that November was "actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views."

And boy, was he wrong about that.

So any reviewer of November faces a small quandary - how to accurately assess a play that succeeds brilliantly at what it's not intended to do. If Mr. Mamet had announced an intention to hybridize Neil Simon with Saturday Night Live, we would be forced to throw roses at his feet; for here is Lorne Michaels's familiar apology for white male asshole-dom (in the person of a very Bush-like Chief Executive) transported whole onto the stage - only served up with far better jokes, timing, and comic construction than SNL could ever manage.

But Mamet's goal, it turns out, was actually "a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view." And at this he utterly fails. And I mean utterly fails. As in, "Are you kidding? The 'disputation between reason and faith' never happens in your play!"

Now I know what you're thinking: that essay's just a publicity stunt, an incoherent pastiche of paeans to the Constitution and the jury system (good things, both) designed to build some political buzz for November. Sure, the play sports a few potentially offensive jokes about torture and extradition (in which the author comes off, alas, a bit like a Nazi chuckling over the Holocaust). But if Mamet's not 'brain-dead,' then he's still definitely liberal, because November closes on a note so sweetly left-of-center, it might have been penned by a Kennedy.

But here's the rub (at least for me): I actually wish Mamet had delivered the play he's pretending he delivered. If only he had made a case - some kind of a case - for conservatism; Lord knows, with the Bush administration socializing the banking system, the libertarian mask has slipped from the Republicans' face, and they need some kind of identity other than their current one as conduits for upper-class financial interest and under-class bigotry. But Mamet doesn't even try to supply a conservative M.O. - worse, he doesn't seem to be aware that he isn't trying.

And this gap does, I'm afraid, completely undermine the beautiful perpetual-motion machine that is his plot. If we pause even for a split second (luckily, Mamet never gives us that much time) to ponder the motives of his characters, November suddenly collapses, because its story makes no political or personal sense. The play is set in the Oval Office (here cleanly - and cleverly - evoked as a literal oval), with election day fast approaching, and a W.-esque Chief Exec, "President Chuck Smith," facing the fact that he's so unpopular, even his own party will no longer buy him air time. But inspiration strikes when a rep for the American Turkey Association shows up with a few gobblers to be pardoned for Thanksgiving, and the Prez puts on the squeeze for some big bucks - actually, 200 million bucks. At the same time, the presidential speechwriter - oddly, not a born-again Christian but a Jewish lesbian - has just arrived from China, with an adopted baby and her same-sex partner in tow. Oh and a bad case of bird flu. Can you write the rest? Well, maybe not till I tell you that she's just written President Smith the greatest speech of his (and her) career - only to get it, he's going to have to marry her and her partner on national television.

Now can you write the rest? Well, you couldn't write it as brilliantly as Mamet has; he's smoothly restyled his macho rhythms into the template of classic farce, and this whirligig all but glitters as it whirls. But if we pause to look beneath its machinery, we suddenly realize that the President doesn't really have any leverage with the American Turkey Association, and why, exactly, a Jewish lesbian would be serving in his administration is a complete mystery. In fact, the President himself is a complete mystery - his desperate, dopey self-awareness has some charm, but as a character he's an empty shell, a contrivance to keep the one-liners coming - or to occasionally serve as Mr. Mamet's (or the Israel lobby's) mouthpiece. Alas, Bernstein, his speechwriter, is likewise little more than a mouthpiece for NPR, and his major domo, Archer, is something of a cipher.

But how much more interesting November would have been if they weren't! If only Mamet had had the balls to craft a real Republican lesbian, like Mary Cheney or (dare I say it?) Condoleezza Rice, November might have been a play for the history books. For how better to thrash out a polemic of conservatism than among people from whom it requires personal sacrifice, or even internal contradiction? (And don't tell me such themes couldn't play out as farce - hell, they're playing out as farce right now, in real life.)

But for whatever reason, Mamet dodged that challenge, and so has written merely a very funny vehicle for very skilled farceurs. And the Lyric has put a posse of them at the wheel, with Daniel Gidron giving precise directions from a detailed map. As President Chuck, Richard Snee gives what is probably the technical performance of a lifetime; he catches every nuance of every wisecrack in the script. He doesn't supply, however, the inner life the text lacks - nor does he maintain the needy, egomaniacal energy that could make the play's gears spin faster and faster. Still, for the most part you'll be laughing so hard at his wackily stentorian delivery that you'll hardly care. As gal Friday Bernstein, the skillful Adrianne Krstansky doesn't exactly limn a character either (how could she?). But she manages her half - i.e., the only half - of the "polemic" with sympathetic, understated skill, and thus is always likeable, if only believable in her precisely-rendered bird flu. Will McGarrahan is equally deft as First Admin Archer, but perhaps could exude a bit more menace as we begin to sense he's one of many powers behind this particular throne. Meanwhile Neil A. Casey knows exactly what to do as the flustered turkey king, and of course does it impeccably. Alas, as the politically-incorrect Native American casino chief who arrives late on the scene, Dennis Trainor isn't quite in the same league as these old pros, but he does pull off a hilarious war-dance. And by then you'll have given this production your vote anyhow.