THE NEW ART OF LYING
By Abraham Lincoln Straw
Boston Marriage
By David Mamet
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.
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