Play by David Mamet
Directed by David Zoffoli
New Repertory Theatre
Watertown, MA
With Melissa Baroni (Catherine), Jennie Israel (Claire), Debra Wise (Anna)
It is strange to see a Mamet play that is not about a bunch of guys cursing while maneuvering through a series of shady deals, but I guess that is what the adventure of writing is all about. One might be inclined to say that it is what compensatory writing is about, but I think it is reasonable to give an easily objectified artist a chance to break out of the mold without suffering too much indignity.
Here, instead of the cursing guys, are two women, at the turn of the 20th century, lesbian lovers, maneuvering around one another. There is still a lot of manipulation in all the maneuvering, and, despite the Edwardian setting, some number of curses still show up. This is a self-conscious comedy, almost a farce, which seems particularly odd for Mamet, whose successfully realized comedy seems so often to rely on a tragic base. The tragedy, if there is one here, is the underlying social scorn of homosexuality, but it is here posed as an oddly inconsequential piece of the landscape rather than as a grim, encompassing horizon. The machinations of the plot, rather than tightening a noose, as they so often do in the Mamet tragicomedies, become here a kind of decorative macrame. It is nice to see it woven, but it does not make one scream with pain, or with the sort of laughter, so close to pain, that one associates with Mamet.
The characters in Mamet’s great tragicomedies – American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed the Plow – are off-putting, right off the bat, but Mamet’s genius is to draw us into their worlds and make us love something about their passionate vulgarity. Through his intentionally rhythmic poetry of four letter words in these works, we are insulted and seduced by the unembarrassed nakedness of Mamet’s chamber musicians of the gutter and made to empathize with them while they scorn our sympathy.
It is easy to fall right in with the characters in American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, but here, in Boston Marriage, things seem a bit distant and forced. Playing in the Victorian-Edwardian time frame is an interesting exercise for a guy who specializes in shady late 20th century deals and cursing, but it doesn’t quite feel like its embedded restraint naturally emanates out of Mamet’s heart. I remember when The Winslow Boy, a film of the Terence Rattigan play Mamet adapted for the screen and directed, about a boy at an English boarding school, came out. It also seemed a bit off-genre for Mamet, though it was well done. Interestingly, Boston Marriage and The Winslow Boy were both done in 1999. Some atavistic urge must have been afoot in Mamet’s creative life. Was he put up to it by someone, or was this a naturally sought after complement to the run of salty contemporary dramas for which he had become known? It appears to have been a strange direction for him to go in after those earlier works, but maybe this was just how a new and appealing form of restraint presented itself.
Though, overall, Mamet’s major works seem at loose ends in many ways, they are, in fact, not so at all. The morals of the characters are certainly at loose ends, and they are certainly loose-lipped, but, otherwise, the plays are tight. Plotted carefully and economically, their dramatic engines are taut. And the language, though blue, is rhythmic. According to a well-known story, Mamet, when directing or consulting on productions of those plays, would beat out the rhythm of the dialogue, especially if it were salty.
So, the idea of having constraint of some sort is not really alien to Mamet’s work at all. But, here, imposed by the formality of the turn of the century setting, it seems too easily pasted onto the work. The genius of American Buffalo or Glengarry Glen Ross comes across because the contraints of plot and dialogue do not show themselves, but effect the passionate quality of the result from the inside.
The combination of external constraint, in Boston Marriage, seems too easily complemented by the force which seeks to oppose it. Here, it seems like Mamet is working too hard for laughs. In Glengarry Glen Ross, he seems to get the laughs effortlessly. To hear Ricky Roma, the shady real estate salesman of Glengarry, do his come-on with prospective clients in a Chinese restaurant, is a scream. But, there, it is funny because it is sad to see such brazen manipulativeness, and Mamet paints it beautifully in garish and unsettling colors. But, in Boston Marriage, Mamet intentionally constructs funny lines, and their intent emerges from the constraint of the background in a way that does not seem as natural.
Boston Marriage, Wikipedia
Boston Marriage is about a pair of middle-aged female lesbians, one of whom, Anna (Debra Wise), has worked hard to doll up the apartment she has received from her unseen and unwitting male consort, so that her real consort, Claire (Jennie Israel), will come to live with her there. But Claire has fallen for a young girl and pleads with Anna to provide her apartment as a setting for Claire’s trysts with the girl. Because of the illegitimate nature of all the goings-on, the moral textures are about feeling rather than rule, and the navigation of these feelings – of urgent desire, of aging passion, and of aging alone – forms the subtext of the play. Overtly, Anna still wants Claire, despite Claire’s lust for the young girl, and, outwardly, the play is all about the negotiation of the deal that will make their relationship endure despite it all. There are a lot of funny little plot twists about the girl and her parents and the necklace that Anna has received and how all of this can be managed via a seance to make everyone happy. Boston Marriage has a bit of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest about it in its entertaining embellishments, and were the play not about lesbians who throw out salty Mamet words from time to time, one might think it indeed came from the same era.
If the play is not so successful as a farcical comedy, it is a good way of seeing into the workings of Mamet’s talent with plot construction. It’s easy to overlook that aspect in Mamet’s harsher plays where the force of the gritty characters and dialogue often overtake the ingenuity of the plot. But Mamet does weave plot artfully, and, in this case, the plot rises up over everything else.
I could not see from the evolution of the story why, in personal terms, things turn out as they do. There is a lot of mechanism around resolution of the farce, but it’s not clear what drives the final character choices. If this were a more successful character study, that sort of thing would be more obvious.
There is also a lot of silliness that is intended to entertain but comes across as frivolous. There is, for example, a lot of banter about the maid, Catherine’s (Melissa Baroni), identity – is she Irish, is she Scottlish – and a lot of supposed-to-be-funny confusion about her name – which seems like groping after comedy. I’d suggest going back to Ricky Roma for inspiration.
The production is decent, though it still seemed a bit green when I saw it. Everything is done very broadly, which seems fine, in general, for this sort of farce. But it is done so much so, here, that it kept striking me as such, which is a pretty clear indication that it is too much. Since Mamet himself, in the setting, seems to aim for restraint here, I think a slightly more restrained approach in direction and acting might have been more suitable. The tricky thing is that the setting is restrained, but the writing is broad, and it is understandably pretty confusing for a director, and actors, to know how to deal with that not entirely happy combination.
Jennie Israel (Claire) is an actress I have enjoyed greatly in her performances with Boston’s superb Actors’ Shakespeare Project – with whom the New Repertory Theatre seem to share considerable talent – and she is broad, histrionic and amusing here, while conveying the pathos of her character’s failing race against age. It is nice to see her in a contemporary play after seeing her in so much Shakespeare. Debra Wise (Anna), also verbally and tonally sharpened, gives a reasonable feeling for the fear of impending loss while desperately weaving the machinery of retrieval. Melissa Baroni (Catherine), as the maid, manages to bear the indignities of the downstairs role, and the butt of the silly jokes, with aplomb.
Glengarry Glen Ross: A Play by David Mamet
– BADMan
Leave a Reply