The following is an excerpt from a
June 1999 review of David Mamet's Boston Marriage, in its
world-premiere production directed by the author at the Hasty
Pudding Theater in Cambridge, MA. Appended are Mr. Straw's
thoughts on the play's New York premiere directed by Karen
Kohlhaas, which opened at The Public Theater in November 2002.
David Mamet's new play, Boston Marriage,
is magnificent. It's one of the strangest new texts for the theater
I've encountered this year and the strangest yet in Mamet's career.
Nothing he has done--not the spooky innuendo in The Cryptogram
or the gaps and disjunctions in The Old Neighborhood or
the creepy betrayals in the films House of Games and
The Spanish Prisoner--comes close to the leap of faith
he took in this witty and unpredictable piece, which extends his
new interest in historical period (shown for the first time in
The Winslow Boy) in a wonderfully nutty direction. There
are significant problems in the premiere production directed by
the author at the Hasty Pudding Theater in Cambridge (an ART production),
but, as with The Winslow Boy, the material is so strong
that its splendidly odd texture and tone shine through anyway.
The only recent play I know of that compares meaningfully with
Boston Marriage is Impossible Marriage by Beth
Henley, which opened in November at the Roundabout Theater to
mostly dismissive, and even some contemptuous, reviews. Boston
Marriage is no less brave or bizarre than Henley's marvelous
play, with which it shares major themes and conventions, and in
all likelihood it will provoke similar grumblings of discontent
and annoyance among startled followers who thought they had the
playwright's experimental range more or less nailed down. Interestingly
enough, both these playwrights are heterosexuals experimenting
in the traditionally gay field of precious wit where ostentation
coupled with flamboyance can swiftly annihilate dull conventionalism.
Production matters aside, it will be telling indeed if (as the
recent New York Times review of Boston Marriage
indicates) the male playwright is treated with more critical respect
than the female was when his studiedly artificial play comes to
New York.
Boston Marriage is one of those brilliant puzzlers that
is so much fun to try to figure out in performance that it seems
a shame to give away too much of its plot. Plot, in any case,
often takes a back seat to proudly frivolous arguments and crypto-sexual
banter spoken by the all-female cast in a heightened and mannered
language that sounds drafted by Wilde or Coward but finished by
Genet. Wearing exquisite, floor-length turn-of-the-century dresses,
the two main characters, Claire (Rebecca Pidgeon) and Anna (Felicity
Huffman), occupy a synthetically silly, Dufy-esque painted set
(designed by Sharon Kaitz and J. Michael Griggs) that reads "games
afoot" before either woman opens her mouth: a pastiche of pastel
washes and chintz effects punctuated by serpentine curlicues,
red roses behind a robins-egg-blue loveseat and a striped banner
at the proscenium edged by life-saver-shaped ornaments. From the
outset, such basic questions as who these women are to one another,
and what the real occasion is for their meeting, rush forward,
only to recede into the delectation of Mamet's poisonous verbal
candy before rising again later.
"I beg your pardon. Have I the right house?" asks Claire upon
entering. "What address did you wish?" responds Anna. "Two forty
five." "The number is correct in all particulars." "Then it is
the decor, which baffles me." "Have you not heard that this one
or that, in an idle moment, conceives the idea to redecorate?"
This could be an exchange between Gertrude Stein and Alice B.
Toklas, with its intense histrionic familiarity and its ambiguous
pronouns that hang in the air. The conversational edges, however,
are uncomfortably sharp and grow sharper, and the lesbian innuendo
alternates with stories of sex with a man. Anna tells Claire that
she has acquired a male "protector," who has paid for her redecoration
and given her an emerald necklace (a family heirloom that will
figure importantly in the plot). Berating Claire for her "so cruel
and prolonged absence," Anna seems to think her friend should
be happy about the income "sufficient to support both me and
you in Comfort," but Claire stuns her with her own surprise announcement:
she is "in love" with a pretty young girl. Ignoring Anna's acute
jealousy, Claire further announces that she has invited the girl
to the house this day for an attempted seduction, presuming upon
Anna's "universally known and lauded generosity."
All this may sound perfectly clear, but it is far from straightforward
in performance. The dynamic between the women is governed by strict
unspoken rules that make it impossible to tell at any point how
either really feels. Effete locutions suddenly give way to more
typically Mametesque gutterspeak--"You Pagan slut," "Get off my
tits"--without obvious cause. "I am sorry I was moved to speak
with enthusiasm," says Claire after a minor altercation. At several
other points, Claire pedantically corrects factual errors in Anna's
conversation, as if Anna were stupid, even though her vocabulary
is enormous and she quotes from a daunting array of literary sources.
The intensity of the women's involvement with each other does
imply mutual infatuation, but the audience is kept constantly
off balance by the extremely arch and elliptical nature of the
dialogue and by the self-conscious artificiality of the acting
(which I'll come back to).
There is also a third character, a Maid named Catherine played
with fine feigned obseisance by Mary McCann, who at first seems
meek, a violet withered by comically excessive verbal abuse beyond
her ken. Anna: "Cringing Irish Terror, is it? What do you want?
Home Rule, and all small children to raise geese?" Catherine:
"I'm Scottish, miss." Gradually, however, one notices that this
maid is unsurprised and unscandalized by all the goings on, and
is "acting" her meekness as Claire and Anna are "acting" their
classist arrogance. She eventually comes out with openly cheeky
and self-aware remarks that make it clear she is in on the elaborate
game, itself a fairly obvious reference to Genet's The Maids (one
of whose characters is named Claire). It's a mark of Mamet's superb
control that while one recognizes refined and cynical scheming
all along in the vein of Liaisons Dangereuses, the use of Genet's
more extreme idea of a totalizing playacting ritual (encompassing
everything, in retrospect, even the plot's apparent coincidences)
comes as a complete surprise.
Mamet has often worked through manipulation of familiar conventions
and, as Stanley Kauffmann pointed out in a fine recent review
of The Winslow Boy in The New Republic, one
of his favorites is the well-made play. Surprise curtains based
on secrets known to some characters but not others, key information
imparted in letters and sudden arrivals, tension and suspense
built around elaborate schemes (in the third act of Boston
Marriage, for instance, the women dress in gypsy veils and
pretend to be soothsayers): the twin emphases of strict logic
and ruthless competition in this 19th-century form make it a perfect
vehicle for Mamet's lifelong theme of deception.
But Kauffmann's piece on The Winslow Boy pertains to
Boston Marriage in another way as well; he is one of
the only critics I know of willing to talk honestly about the
white elephant in the room where Mamet's recent work is concerned.
I'm speaking of Mamet's casting of his wife, Rebecca Pidgeon,
in prominent roles whose demands she is flagrantly unequipped
handle. She lacks the color and range to bring palpable life to
such characters as Claire, Catherine in The Winslow Boy,
and Deeny in The Old Neighborhood, and the dulling effect
of her narrow repertoire is exacerbated when she appears beside
seasoned and resourceful actors such as Huffman and McCann. Guided
no doubt by Mamet's notorious preference for "simple directed-but-uninflected"
acting (as described in his book True and False), both
Huffman and Pidgeon devote much more attention to deadpan mugging,
rhythmic delivery and hitting the right raised tones of voice
than to creating believable emotional connections. Huffman, however,
finds rich nuance and enduringly odd suggestion in her actions,
whereas Pidgeon merely makes hers seem like deadly exercises in
actorly obedience and rote memorization.
Reasonable people can differ over whether Mamet's stiffly controlled
directorial style is the ideal means of maximizing the force and
resonance of his language, as he thinks. It seems clear to me
that the actors who have shown his work to greatest advantage--such
as Joe Mantegna, Kevin Spacey, W.H. Macy and Macy's wife Huffman--have
allowed themselves wide latitude beyond his eccentrically stringent
restraints. Boston Marriage, in any case, like all his
plays, will be performed in time by many better balanced casts,
perhaps even by young boys (as Genet called for in The Maids),
and regardless who is right about Mamet's current casting and
staging choices, those productions will reveal much in his fine
work for the first time.
Three and a half years later, as it happens, Boston Marriage
arrived in New York with an embarrassing thud. In Karen Kohlhaas’s
production at the Public Theater, the play seemed inert, repetitious
and strained, and most critics drew the straightforward conclusion
that the writing was weak. My own feeling is that Boston Marriage
is difficult--probably the most difficult play to direct in Mamet’s
tricky repertory because its playacting aspect is so fluid and variable--but
the fault here was primarily the director’s.
Kohlhaas’s trouble began with her central decision to lean
almost exclusively on the style and idiom of Wilde, as if the discovery
of that allusion in the play were clever (it is glaringly obvious)
and as if the sunny execution of Wildean mannerisms and locutions
were a generic cure-all able to sustain audience interest in the
most underdeveloped of character dynamics. Dressed in 19th-century
finery and situated in a comically narrow and hot pink but otherwise
realistic period drawing room, Kate Burton and Martha Plimpton acted
the roles of Anna and Claire like a Gwendolyn and Cecily manqué--a
pair of spoiled little rich girls trying on arch and sarcastic attitudes
like hats and shoes. Plimpton, at least, vaguely looked the part.
Burton’s cute behavior was utterly anomalous and forced. One
wished the whole time that she would rise suddenly to her grande
damish reputation and chuck all the attitudinizing, seize Plimpton
by her alabaster throat, and either kill her, make love to her,
or both.
The two actresses were so preoccupied with keeping up the manner
imposed on them--keeping it the same throughout and the same between
them, even to the point of mimicking the moments when each dropped
her accent--that they entirely missed the chance to develop a coherent
and interestingly varied friendship. They quickly became predictable,
and their bitchy, overdone language became suffocating and inadvertently
serious. The maid too, played by Arden Myrin, was disastrously one-note,
weeping or furrowing her brow in apparently genuine offense at every
insult and affront. She was utterly devoid of the inscrutability
that makes this deliberately irritating character an interesting
puzzle. Even the narrowness of the set (by Walt Spangler) seemed
to exacerbate the lack of air in this production.
Boston Marriage is a play that lives by keeping the audience
guessing about what its game is, and any production that decides
too early or too sweepingly on a dominant idiom or style effectively
names the game at the beginning. The pleasure of guessing disappears
and the Genet-like questions of sexual power-politics and soul-deep
roleplaying never meaningfully arise. Wilde’s comedy-of-manners
world does have a fantastical aspect, but its trappings have been
around for so long that, used as drapery as in this instance, they
become just another grounded convention. Mamet, bless him, didn’t
write a grounded play but rather a bizarre experimental escalade.
He took, again, a leap in the dark and imagined a place outside
his expected field of gravity where the fun depends on one’s
never quite getting one's footing.
THE
NEW ART OF LYING
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