Coming of Age: Mamet at Sixty
By Robert Vorlicky
This was a big birthday year for David Mamet.
At sixty, he is as productive as he ever has been. He's writing essays,
giving many interviews, maintaining a blog promoting his new Broadway
play November, speaking about his new book of cartoons Tested
on Orphans, writing commercials for the Ford Motor Company, writing
for the popular TV military series The Unit, enjoying the critically
positive reception of his new movie Redbelt, which he wrote
and directed, and glowing in the rave reviews of Keep Your Pantheon
(a world premiere now playing at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles
on a double bill with an earlier male-cast play, Duck Variations).
In the press, there's a lot of talk about what Mamet's up to in 2008.
He's hot news again, and he appears to be basking in the attention.
He has now moved into a rarified group of "semi-elders" among American
artists, becoming a living cultural torch-bearer.
All in Mamet-land is not rosy celebration, though.
Some think he lost his mind shortly after turning sixty this past November
30. On March 12, 2008, Mamet published an essay in The Village Voice
entitled "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'" In New York
academic circles, actor-training studios and theater blogs, the essay
caused an immediate stir. Nearly all the participants at the Third International
David Mamet Conference in Brussels, Belgium, which I attended in April
2008, were keenly familiar with it. Mamet's opinions, it seems, travel
very fast.
Toward the opening of the essay, Mamet prominently
mentions his political satire November, the title of which
captures the culmination of the election season in the United States,
in addition to being the month of Mamet's birth. November is
now nearing the end of a critically mixed run at the Ethel Barrymore
Theatre on Broadway. The show, directed by Joe Mantello and starring
the comic legend Nathan Lane, opened on January 17, 2008. A surprise
to many--when one considers its sterling theatrical pedigree in author,
director, and star lead--November closes on July 13, having
been nominated for only one 2008 Tony Award. November is Mamet's
first world premiere on Broadway in his long and distinguished career.
As he remarked to Campbell Robertson in May 2007, "It just seemed to
be a Broadway play."
November has been praised as a comedy
"destined to become a classic" (Christopher Byrne) as well as belittled
and diminished as a "sitcom," an "attenuated sketch" (Adam Feldman),
"a wasted opportunity" (Jennifer Vanasco), and (along with Caryl Churchill's
male-cast Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?) a "migraine inducing
play" (Charles Isherwood in the New York Times, who also called
it the "most irritating play of the season"). "My play," Mamet writes
in his now infamous essay,
turned out to be about politics, which is to
say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The
argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested,
corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist
speechwriter. The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's
at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between
the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist)
view. . . . I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe
I have changed my mind.
While Mamet may have "changed his mind," his
reasoning in the essay is uneven and reactionary--even for an often
scrupulous debater like Mamet. This is not to say that the man can't
say exactly what's on his mind and own it as his personal "truth," but
his most recent work for the stage does not wholly reflect his alleged
retreat to the ancient binarism of "reason/faith," "tragedy/perfectionism."
Even his pairings (reason and the tragic versus faith and the perfectionist)
are deceptively rigid and at odds with one another. Mamet's conscious
effort to reason his position in the world--also common in his other
essays and prose works--reminded me, here, of Arthur Miller. Miller's
theorizing about his works never quite matched what his plays were doing.
The theorizing often fell short of the works' depth and breadth.
But unlike Miller, who would refer specifically
to his plays, Mamet does not explicitly apply his new political thinking
to November. The essay works as an implied context
within which to think about this play, and also to reconsider his complete
canon. If the reader decides to map Mamet's thinking in March 2008 onto
November, then so be it. The trouble is, such thinking would
align the author's allegiance with his character President Smith, the
corrupt executive running for a second term. Mamet goes to some length
in his essay to demonstrate the similiarities between a former hero
of his, John F. Kennedy, and George W. Bush; in Mamet's new view, the
liberal martyred President and the maligned, currently seated conservative
President mesh as one. This may indeed be where Mamet's political thinking
is now located. He identifies President Smith as "realistic," a characteristic
that he has long admired.
At times, while reading "Why I Am No Longer a
'Brain-Dead Liberal,'" I wondered if Mamet's pseudo-polemics, his "eye
opening" confession were a bit of a "con" -- a beautifully crafted piece
that challenged the reader to think for herself or himself. In this
way, Mamet challenged us to think about our relationship to the public
realm of politics and its impact on our private lives. But Mamet was
speaking from a different subject position -- now, as an allegedly converted
right-winger, he challenged his former left-wing brethren to see the
error of their ways.
In interviews surrounding his 1976 play American
Buffalo, Mamet spoke ruefully of the "tragic" demise of the power
of the conventional hero, the heterosexual white male. He saw an evacuation
of meaning and value for this otherwise traditional protagonist. Now,
in 2008, he elevated this figure to the Presidency. Even if Charles
Smith's efforts to hold onto power appear unlikely, there is every reason,
the play suggests, that another, very similar man will fill his shoes.
The fraternity that holds the balance of power appears to remain intact.
If the reader of his essay espouses liberal politics,
Mamet suggests, then she or he needs to confront the degree to which
this position is fraught with contradictions. At sixty, Mamet finds
himself defining liberalism, or the "synthesis of this worldview," as
a politics of "everything is always wrong." Clarice Bernstein, the liberal
lesbian speech-writer in November, sees the world this way,
and her view, the playwright implies, is exactly why today's liberal
is "brain dead." Clarice's sort of "brain deadness" is what Mamet now
claims to have escaped.
However, clever Clarice is really not brain dead.
In fact, her brain is alive and well; it guides her in being actively
successful in getting what she wants. Her world is not as black and
white as Mamet theorizes. Against all odds--that is, against the playwright's
conception of the rigid polarization he claims to have created in November--she
materializes her "utopic" vision and thereby makes it real. She outsmarts
the man in power and gets power, forcing him to officiate at her legal
wedding to her lesbian partner.
This is what happens in the play, but the playwright
argues otherwise in his Village Voice essay. The play and the
essay are at odds. It's as if the genres of dramatic writing and the
personal essay clash at this moment in Mamet's hands: the visibility
of Clarice in the play versus the presence (or visibility) of Mamet
in the essay (which renders Clarice invisible). In order to claim the
death of liberalism for himself, Mamet--at least in his essay--erases
the success of his liberal character in November. The play
doesn't support the theory of his fall from liberal political sympathies
after forty years.
How did Mamet arrive at his newly revealed conservative
altar? He noted that "a brief review" of his life revealed that "everything
was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community
in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong
in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and
mobile classes of which I was at various times a part." Mamet acknowledged
that for the past forty years, his work had been both prompted and informed
by a belief that "people are basically good at heart."
As of March 2008, however, he no longer believed
this. He argues in his essay that he does not think that people are
basically good at heart. In fact, he thinks "that people, in circumstances
of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only
a fit subject, but the only subject of drama." Turkeys figure prominently
in November, written when Mamet was in his late fifties, yet
at sixty he appears preoccupied by pigs. Albee got into goats in his
seventies, so perhaps we have much to look forward to here.
In November, President Charles Smith
is on the verge of a resounding, humiliating defeat in his re-election
campaign. "Why is everyone turning on me," Smith asks his personal lawyer
and confidant, Archer Brown, to which Brown responds, "Because you've
fucked up everything you've touched." Confined to the Oval Office, Smith
is scheming with Brown about how to finance his Presidential library.
The method they hatch is to blackmail a lobbyist for the National Association
of Turkey By-Products Manufacturers. How? "Convince a Native American
chief to say that the Pilgrims ate codfish instead of turkey on Thanksgiving--and
called it tuna by accident." Indeed, President Smith is a "swine" among
turkeys, as he flings the "F" word around the stage, offending nearly
every "ethnic, religious, and racial group on the planet." One-liners
proliferate as the play is dominated by Smith's stand-up, Borcht-Belt
comedic turns laced with profanity and slurs.
The twist comes with the arrival of Clarice,
his Jewish lesbian speechwriter, who, plagued with a bad case of the
flu, has just returned with her partner from adopting a baby in China.
As only one critic has noted (Jennifer Vanasco), Clarice grounds the
play--even though, as Michael Feingold notes, the play is a "cartoon
analogue for presidential corruption." November is no Wag
the Dog, as Linda Winer observes, calling that film the "most prescient
piece of politically subversive comedy to ever make it to the screen."
Yet, grounding--that is, the creation of meaning within its own idiom
and on its own terms--even exists in Mamet's farce, and this is what
I think most critics are missing in November. I also believe
it's something that Mamet himself fails to acknowledge in his own creation.
What does it mean to come out as a newly baptized conservative when
your latest works are empowering a liberal agenda of gay and lesbian
rights? And what does it mean that Mamet placed gays and lesbians center
stage -- and in a much less negative light than in his pre-conversion
days -- at a time when he was also undergoing a much-publicized return
to Judaism, the faith of his childhood?
Clarice's words and actions challenge the assumed
authority in this otherwise male-cast play, a familiar Mametian world
of men among men. The dynamic recalls Mamet's earlier Speed-the-Plow
(1988). But Clarice's challenge is significant and, to quote Linda
Loman, "attention must be paid" to its outcome. The similarities between
Mamet's Jewish lesbian Mom (Clarice) and Miller's Jewish heterosexual
Mom (Linda) are striking.
Moments before the end of Act I (which occurs
in the morning), President Smith and Bernstein have this exchange, after
Smith realizes that his legacy will die the upcoming Tuesday when he
fails to be reelected President of the United States:
Smith: A harsh world, Bernstein, is it not…?
Bernstein (waking up): Sir…
Smith: Harsh world. Especially for YOU.
Bernstein: For me?
Smith: As you are a lesbian.
Bernstein: In essence, yes.
Smith: Thus, your day, must abound with constant horrendous disappointments,
insults and betrayals.
Bernstein: I endeavor, Sir, to live my life with self respect.
Smith: That's laudable, Bernstein. It's more than laudable, it's saintly.
Bernstein: Thank you, sir.
Smith: In spite of your loathsome, and abominable practices. For,
Bernstein, you have been a good friend to me.
Bernstein: Thank you, sir.
Smith: A good friend to a failure. Yes. A man, who looks back. On
his life. What does he see? But missteps, squandered opportunities,
betrayal…loss.
Bernstein: I'm sorry for your troubles, Sir.
This is all that Bernstein gives her employer
throughout the play: she recognizes and acknowledges the truth of his
personal failures. While she is a loyal employee, she neither hides
that she is a lesbian nor writes speeches that betray her belief in
equal rights for all Americans. She simply refuses to act in a self-betraying
manner. Liberal, yes. Effective, yes. It is not beyond her to "repeat
and revise" history, as Suzan-Lori Parks does, in order to give the
President what he needs. Yet no one suffers from her brainstormings
except the President.
Smith: You're what I love about this country.
Bernstein: I am sir?
Smith: You bet. I know what you would like, is to take over the government
of the United States by force, promoting your vision of a godless,
stateless paradise of homosexuality….is that correct….?
Bernstein: Essentially.
Clarice still gets what she wants by using her
gift of language--her ability to write moving speeches--as a bargaining
chip. She refuses to write until she gets what she wants from the President,
which is for him to officiate at her same-sex marriage.
Smith: I like you, Bernstein. You
know why? You're great at what you do. Do I respect you? Fuck no.
Why? Your head is full of trash. But you can sling the shit. I'll
pay you for that. I will pay you for that speech--What do you want?
Bernstein: I want to marry my partner.
Smith: I can't do that.
Bernstein: Yes, you can.
Smith: It's against the law.
Bernstein: Figure it out.
Smith: Write me my speech.
Bernstein: You figure it out, I'll write your speech. Hands him
a speech.
Smith: ….This is my concession speech. …. I want the other
speech.
Bernstein: I told you my terms.
Smith: I cannot do what you ask. It's illegal.
Bernstein: There is a higher law.
Smith: Oh, bullshit.
Bernstein: There is a higher law.
Smith: What's it called, if you're so smart.
Bernstein: It is the law of love.
Smith: Oh, that's a law? Where is that law written? On your Chinese
amulet? . . .
Bernstein: Mr. President.
Smith: I cannot marry you to a girl. It. Is. Illegal.
Bernstein: Did you ever have a homosexual experience?
Smith: I'm not telling. (pause)
The latter half of the play is dominated by President
Smith's efforts to coerce Clarice to "craft a speech that will turn
around his sagging poll numbers," or at the very least, initiate the
rhetoric of a plausible legacy. Smith has no support from his party,
no cash, and his poll numbers are in single digits. To this, Bernstein
again appeals to the President "to do something pure. . . . To marry.
Two people who love each other."
Smith: It's not legal.
Bernstein: You could make it legal.
Smith: At what cost, Bernstein? Riots? Backlash? We don't
know… . . .
Bernstein: We aren't a "nation divided," Sir. We're a democracy--we
hold different opinions. . . . I'm not at all sure that we don't love
each other. (pause)
Smith: This is a great speech, Bernstein.
In the final act, the morning after the play
opens, Bernstein, dressed in a wedding gown in the Oval Office, hands
over the rest of the speech that Smith will deliver before a national
television audience. The President profusely thanks her--the speech
will be "my legacy," Smith beams. He agrees to do anything she says
and wants, while Brown, the Chief of Staff, continues to question why
Bernstein is in a wedding dress. Bernstein, however, holds the final
word: the speech isn't completed -- and the President will not see it
until after Bernstein and her lover are married.
Bernstein: We thought, you'd marry us on TV
first, and, then, I'd give you your speech. (pause)
Smith: Don't you trust me, Bernstein?
Bernstein: Sir? I don't trust anyone. But, if I did? I'd
trust you first.
Archer reminds the President that it is illegal
for him to marry a same-sex couple:
Smith: What is legal? Is it "legal"
for the State to deny two perfectly good citizens, the right to "get
married," just because they're both girls?
Archer: ….yes.
Smith: Well, that's a crime…
Archer: Yeah, it's a damn shame.
Smith: It allows, uh, uh, uh, "other" people to get married.
Archer: That it does.
Smith: At one time. It prohibited. . . . . uh, uh, uh people of other
races from marrying ….. it prohibited people of other races, from
marrying people of other races.
Archer: It ain't going to fly . . .
Smith: No, they have rights, just like regular human beings.
In a smart, thoughtful on-line review in "AfterEllen.com,"
an off-the-mainstream-radar lesbian blog, critic Jennifer Vanasco wrote
several days after the play's opening that "the most astonishing thing
about David Mamet's new, manic Broadway play," is its "lesbian hero."
As Vanasco rightly concludes:
Bernstein is a lesbian revolutionary working
for a president who is a racist, misogynist, homophobic extortionist.
And yet before the play is over, Clarice will endanger her life, stick
to her ideals, and work hard to convince the incumbent President that
he should officiate at her and her partner's wedding on national television,
thus setting a precedent for gay and lesbian couples throughout the
United States. . . . It is Clarice who changes his mind. Sort of.
Well, OK, it's not ever clear that she changes his mind, but she at
least writes a speech that he is desperate to give, and in that speech
she talks about how it is exactly this play of difference upon difference
that makes America strong, especially when it is tempered by the liberal
idea that despite these very differences, we should respect (and maybe
even have affection for) each other anyway.
In the New York production, Clarice, decked out,
awkwardly, in her fluffy wedding dress, hands over her speech to the
president and makes it very clear what she expects him to do. She has
already explained to the press that Smith is going to marry her at the
beginning of the telecast. In the meantime, the Chief of Staff has convinced
Smith that he can marry the women, but that the TV cameras will be turned
off. This counterplot is foiled, however, as Clarice overhears the plan.
The spectator has every reason to believe that if President Smith goes
back on his promise to Clarice, the lesbian speechwriter, her partner,
and the baby would still find their way to the national screen. Clarice
is not without the balls of Mamet's men. She is a voice of idealism,
but idealism wedded to action, as she cuts and negotiates deals on her
own in order to advance her agenda of equal rights. She insists that
her liberal politics see the light of day. She's committed to seeing
that her ideals are enacted -- that they become a part of the "real."
Moments before the play ends, the President seems
to waiver as to whether or not he'll marry the lesbian couple. Clarice
hands over the speech and she is accused of having brought bird flu
with her from China, which will infect the U.S. population. She is intimidated,
but is she also selling out? We don't know for certain, since neither
the president nor the spectator knows exactly what the content
is of the text she has given to him. It may well be bogus. Just as those
in the Oval Office are about to make their way to the TV cameras, a
Native American, Dwight Grackle, barges into the room, demanding the
return of stolen lands. He shoots a poisoned blow-dart at President
Smith as Bernstein "interposes herself between the assassin and the
President." The president is deeply moved as he gazes at the lesbian's
"dead" body: "She took a poison dart for me….She gave up her life for
her country."
But then, like the phoenix, Bernstein rises.
"How has the white woman survived," asks the Native American, "the poison
has never failed." "I think the dart struck my amulet," responds the
speechwriter. "You risked your life for me, why?" asks the president.
Bernstein: Sir, you're the President. The people
voted for you.
Smith: They were mistaken.
Bernstein: That's their right.
Smith: Bernstein, you know who I am--I'm just some guy in
a suit.
Bernstein: Sir, with respect? So were all the other guys who sat here.
Smith: What? George Washington ?
Bernstein: Guy-in-a-suit.
Smith: Abraham Lincoln?
Bernstein: Guy in a suit.
Smith: Bernstein, Lincoln freed the slaves. I can't free the slaves.
Bernstein: You could marry me and my partner. (pause) It would be
your legacy. . . .
Smith: Bernstein -- wash your face -- you're getting married.
Archer: It'll cost you the election.
Smith: Damn job's a pain in the ass. Too much stress. . .
Bernstein. Come on. I'm giving you away. . . . Jesus I love
this country.
In what many might see as an unexpected ending
to a play by David Mamet, the lesbian couple get their wish at the end
of November--they are to be married by a sitting President
of the United States, a federally sanctioned acknowledgement of their
right to be legally married and recognized as a family, with their adopted
child. This staged utopian vision of legality has contemporary resonances
offstage, most recently in the California Supreme Court's ruling on
May 15, 2008 that permitted same-sex marriage in the state to begin
on June 16. This fact, however, is glaringly absent in nearly all of
the criticism to date on the play.
Critics were equally blind to, if not dismissive
of, any redeeming gay relationships in Mamet's last play, Romance,
which premiered on March 1, 2005 at the Atlantic Theater Company. Nearly
all saw this slapstick courtroom farce as a schizophrenic romp of out
and closeted gay characters whose behaviors skewered the U.S. judicial
system. As Caryn James wrote, the play "seemed so out of touch with
its moment. . . . it was a sometimes-clever misfire that strained to
be outrageous." Yet, very few critics noted that Mamet actually presented
a romance in the male-cast Romance. The characterizations were
admittedly trite, but Mamet put front and center his first believable
gay male couple, the Prosecutor and his young lover Bernard. I certainly
don't want to overstate the significance of this relationship, or idealize
or romanticize it. Its value is in the fact that it was there.
When one considers how he has presented gays
and lesbians in past works, Mamet has come a long way. We might recall:
Robert's repressed "ephemeris" (a kind of "don't ask, don't tell") sexual
feelings toward John in A Life in the Theatre (1977); the sado-masochistic
relationship between Edmond and his dominating cellmate lover in Edmond
(1982); the profound alienation between John and his younger lover,
Charles in The Shawl (1985); and the self-loathing homosexual
Del in The Cryptogram (1994). In Boston Marriage (1999),
Mamet's first female-cast play, which was also his first effort to narrow
and sustain his focus on the dynamics of homosexualities, he set his
historical drama of lesbian desires, secrets, and lies in the late 19th
century. It's as though the distance from the contemporary period eased
him into a world he could only imagine--the public constraint and the
private liberties of the Victorian era provided him with the dramatic
space to be a voyeur into his sexual and gendered "other." But from
another perspective, as Ira Nadel points out in his recent Mamet biography,
"what is the impact of Hollywood on [Mamet's] dramatic work? Does it
explain why genres begin to dominate his writing, satire for example
controlling Boston Marriage, farce governing Romance?" Interestingly,
the plays Nadel cites are those dominated by lesbian and gay characters--and
their genres are satire and farce.
I see Romance as the first play in Mamet's
historically noteworthy, albeit modest, "gay" comedic trilogy (which
also coincides with the period following his (re)conversion to Judaism)--the
other two plays being November and the one-act Keep Your
Pantheon, or On the Whole I Would Rather Be in Mesopotamia (which
first aired on BBC Radio 4 in May 2007 before its stage premiere at
the Mark Taper). As Sean Mitchell wrote in the Los Angeles Times,
the play's three main characters are out-of-work actors led by Strabo,
a middle-aged "gay wannabe star" whose "jealousy of another (possibly
better) acting troupe drives him to distraction while desperately scheming
to escape a death sentence issued by the emperor (and drama critic)
Julius Caesar." "Making matters more vexing," writes Los Angeles
Times head critic Charles McNulty recently in his rave review of
the play, is Strabo's "hankering to bed rosy-face Philius," a twenty-something,
apprentice actor and boy-toy, who thinks Strabo is "disgusting but is
set on becoming an actor." As in Romance, homosocial, homoerotic,
and homosexual relationships abound in Pantheon, and the boundaries
of sexual exchange remain fluid throughout its action. Out of the sixteen
characters in Mamet's last three plays--this "trilogy"--fifteen are
men and one is a lesbian (Clarice). What I am pointing out is that,
since 2005, Mamet has returned to writing male-cast plays--a choice
that characterized many of his prized earlier works--but unlike in those
earlier plays, gay and lesbian characters are now central figures whose
sexuality is far less problematized.
Eight months before November's world
premiere, Mamet was quoted in the New York Times and the International
Herald Tribune as saying that it was about "three men in a room
trying to work things out"--presumably he was referring to President
Smith, Chief of Staff Brown, and the representative from the turkey
industry. Clarice Bernstein, who is onstage as much as any other character
besides the president, is rendered invisible in Mamet's remarks. She
is not to be counted as a person who shares space in a room where "three
men….are working it out." This, despite the fact that the sound-bites
in May 2007 on posters, bus billboards and radio clips announced November
as a play about "civil marriage, gambling casinos, lesbians, American
Indians, presidential libraries, questionable pardons and campaign contributions."
In this context, lesbians and American Indians were depleted of their
subjectivity, meriting mention only in a cataloguing of "things." Ah,
marketing.
Once November opened on Broadway to
mixed reviews, Caryn James wrote an expose in the New York Times
entitled, "In Mamet's Political World, the One With Ideals is Odd Woman
Out" (February 20, 2008). James wrote that Clarice's efforts "to get
the president to perform a wedding ceremony for her and her partner"
-- or the gay marriage plot -- "seems a tired bid for Oleanna
topicality." James is quick to say that the Chief of Staff, whom she
considers the most vital character on stage, and the audience share
the same cynicism -- they encourage the president to double-cross Bernstein.
But here's where I disagree. First, in James's universalizing of the
spectators' perspective(s). Second, in her failure to acknowledge that
Clarice does get what she wants. The fact that a lesbian, non-crossdressing
marriage plot is nearly realized in the work of a major American playwright
on Broadway is a substantial leap in U.S. theatrical representation.
To see it happen in the play rather than anticipate its occurrence after
the curtain will be a next step in theatrical history.
After Mamet's "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead'
Liberal" appeared in the Village Voice, the publication received
a great many letters to the editor (in print and on-line), continuing
for several weeks. Here is a sampling:
"Mamet's pseudo-controversial essay was about
as facile as the author's past decade of writing. . . Mamet's 'privileged
class' status has rendered him both basic and boring."
"The point Mamet needs to deal with is when
he stopped giving a fuck about anyone else outside his rarified circle.
Or, in the vernacular of his characters: Suck it, Mamet."
"Thanks to Mamet for writing it, to the Village
Voice for having the courage to publish it, and to Rush Limbaugh
for mentioning it on his radio show."
Following the weekly and blog responses to Mamet's
essay, New York Times theater critic Isherwood weighed in on
April 6, 2008, commenting not only on Mamet's "recently proclaimed political
conversion from liberalism" but also on his "troublesome" play November.
Isherwood comments on "the play's unconvincing conclusion, which finds
the president agreeing to take the noble step of presiding over the
marriage of his speechwriter and her partner, [which] is like putting
a Band-Aid on a bullet wound." He was disturbed that the "real message
of the play is that it's all right to laugh when people shout insults
like 'lesbian swine.'" As with James's article, I'm uncomfortable with
Isherwood's universalizing of spectators' responses and deducing from
this faulty observation what he believes to be the "real message" of
November. From my seat, a lesbian got what she wanted--and
she did so without compromising her principles. And I wonder why so
many critics find it difficult to grant her this success. Mamet is the
one who stated in his essay:
I think that people, in circumstances of stress,
can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject,
but the only subject, of drama.
Rather than vicitimizing Clarice in the world
of the play as a "lesbian swine," spectators have the agency to consider
the source of the insult. After all, Clarice does. Why shouldn't we?
The audience is not powerless. It knows whence its laughter comes, and
it comes from many different bodies. Many of these laughing bodies know
who the swine is on stage.
Many are more than capable of identifying pigs.
Many also know what they hear and see in November
-- and they are capable of calling it for what it is.
I say, let's face it. The lesbian wins.
Happy (belated) sixtieth birthday, David Mamet
-- who would have thought you would write what precious few have called
admirable, even "heroic" gay and lesbian characters at this time in
your life? You seem to have arrived at an artistically, politically
and personally liberating--albeit complicated--juncture, as revealed
in the live performances of your most recent, humorous works.
How utterly conservative of you.