ARTicles vol. 7 i. 4: A Mamet Reunion

Originally, the pairing of David Mamet’s short plays Sexual Perversity in Chicago and The Duck Variations was pragmatic rather than artistic. A marriage of convenience, the decision to perform the two works as a double bill in their 1976 premiere justified a full ticket price. Strong parallels, however, exist between the two works, particularly in their male friendships. Emil and George, the chums of The Duck Variations, may be viewed as older versions of Bernard and Danny, Sexual Perversity’s randy twenty-somethings.

Take this exchange from The Duck Variations:

GEORGE: Where?
EMIL: Look at her will ya!
GEORGE: That?
EMIL: What else? Go, sister?

And a similar sequence from Sexual Perversity:

BERNARD: Lookit this.
DANNY: Where?
BERNARD: There.
DANNY: Oh yeah.
BERNARD: My sweet goodness.
DANNY: Uh huh.
BERNARD: What a sensitive young lady.

At first glance, the two passages are interchangeable. But Mamet has hidden a parable on sex and aging inside these two examples of male banter. Only Bernard and Danny are actually looking at a half-naked woman. George and Emil describe a sailboat.

The Duck Variations begins precisely where Sexual Perversity left off.  In the final moments of Sexual Perversity, Bernard and Danny sit beside Lake Michigan ogling women in bikinis. The women ignore them as the men dish out insults:

(They watch an imaginary woman pass in front of them.)
BERNARD: Hi
DANNY: Hello there. (Pause. She walks by.)
BERNARD: She’s probably deaf.
DANNY: She did look deaf, didn’t she.
BERNARD: Yeah. (Pause.)
DANNY: Deaf bitch.

The Duck Variations begins with Emil and George alongside the same lake. But instead of drooling over babes, they contemplate the ducks.

Both Bernard and George are masters of comic exaggeration. For Bernie, the object of hyperbole is sex. In increasingly absurd stories, he describes lovemaking inside a plane, underwater, and in a hotel room in flames. But George, Bernie’s The Duck Variations counterpart, has more on his mind than sex. Trying to impress the importance of pollution upon his friend, George spins his tallest tale: “They’re finding ducks with lung cancer. There were these five or six stunted ducks sitting in a clearing hacking their guts out…they were trying to bum a smoke.”

George and Emil have become prudes in their old age.  In Sexual Perversity, sex is the central issue. But in The Duck Variations, copulation comes up only once, in a priggish exchange on duck sex:

GEORGE: They’re allowed to mate?
EMIL: This we do not know.
GEORGE: Eh?
EMIL: Only a few farmers know this.
GEORGE: Yeah?
EMIL: The mating of ducks is a private matter between the duck in question and his mate.
GEORGE: Yeah?
EMIL: It is a thing which few White men have witnessed…And those who claim to have seen it…Strangely do not wish to speak.
GEORGE: There are things we’re better off not to know.
EMIL: If you don’t know, you never can be forced to tell.
GEORGE: They don’t got those beaks for nothing.

But despite the parallels, Sexual Perversity and The Duck Variations have been divorced from one another for decades. Sexual Perversity proved much more popular with younger audiences, and Mamet penned the short curtain-raiser A Sermon to introduce it. This spring, the A.R.T. will reunite Mamet’s early comedies, juxtaposing them with one of his latest comic hits and allowing audiences to make their own connections among the works.

Sean Bartley is a second-year dramaturgy student in the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.