ARTicles vol. 7 i. 4: Cambridge Marriage

David Mamet’s marriage with the A.R.T. was brokered by an unlikely go-between: Anton Chekhov. In 1988 Robert Brustein, a long-time Mamet collaborator, commissioned the playwright to adapt Uncle Vanya. Brustein saw Mamet, famous for his spare but poetic language, as the perfect choice to render Chekhov’s dialogue into contemporary American rhythms. According to Brustein, the production, starring Christopher Walken, was “an act of deconstruction designed to exhume the living energies of Chekhov’s writing from under the heavy weight of ‘masterpiece topsoil.’”

Four years later at the A.R.T., Mamet scored an incendiary hit directing his new play Oleanna. Starring William H. Macy and Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon, the piece tackled sexual harassment in the wake of the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill train wreck. A controversial success in Cambridge and New York, Oleanna inspired roundtables in The New York Times and engaged academics in heated debate. No other Mamet play has inspired critics to spill so much ink.

After a performance, a female student asked the playwright whose side he was on, the strutting macho professor’s or the guerilla feminist’s. “I’m an artist,” Mamet replied. “I write plays, not political propaganda. If you want easy solutions, turn on the boob tube. Social and political issues on TV are cartoons; the good guy wears a white hat, the bad guy a black hat. Cartoons don’t interest me.”

Although in Oleanna Mamet created a complex feminist firebrand, the play also used Mamet trademarks—testosterone-drenched dialogue and physical violence. With his next play at the A.R.T., Mamet explored a new path. Set in a living room rather than a male workplace, The Cryptogram dramatizes the tension between a boy and his mother as they struggle to deal with the parents’ divorce. When their worlds collapse, the two turn to and on each other. Tinged with tender bitterness, the play shows an astonishing capacity to dramatize the fragile world of a ten-year-old who, eager to go on a fishing trip with his father, cannot fall asleep. “When is Dad coming home?” the boy keeps asking his mother. But the father never comes home. In this semi-autobiographical work, Mamet also created one of the most fascinating women on the contemporary American stage. As Felicity Huffman, who played the mother, told the Boston Herald:

“He writes difficult, challenging roles for women, but he also writes difficult, challenging roles for men. No one’s the hero. There wasn’t a hero in The Cryptogram, but it has a brilliant part for a woman. No one’s the hero in Speed-the-Plow. He gives his women, along with the men, really difficult jobs to do, and you can get so mad at his women. In Speed-the-Plow, for example, the only female character has the tough and often maligned job of speaking the truth. So I don’t think it’s true that Mamet doesn’t write well for women. He’s certainly written well for me.”

After The Cryptogram’s success, Mamet penned The Old Neighborhood, a trio of short plays starring Tony Shalhoub and his wife Brooke Adams. The pieces follow Bobby Gould, a man who tries to reconnect with his Chicago roots. By going back to his past, Bobby hopes to find the strength to move forward into the future. In an interview with A.R.T. Literary Director Arthur Holmberg, Mamet revealed the identity crisis at the play’s core:

HOLMBERG: Although they both try, neither Bob Gold in Homicide nor Bobby Gould in The Old Neighborhood seems to be able to find any kind of meaningful way to be Jewish in the United States. Why do they both fail?
MAMET: Because they’re Jewish in the United States.

Mamet’s next play, his fifth at A.R.T., caught critics and audiences off guard. Boston Marriage, a comedy of manners, was Mamet’s homage to Oscar Wilde. Starring Felicity Huffman and Rebecca Pidgeon as feuding lovers, the play featured Mamet’s first all-female cast and was set in a turn-of-the-century drawing room. The title was a nineteenth-century euphemism for a loving attachment between women. Claire, the older of the two, has snagged a wealthy protector. “Is he married?” asks Anna, her young lover. “Why would he require a mistress,” Claire responds, “if he had no wife?” Anna has her own surprise. She wants to use Claire’s boudoir to seduce an even younger woman. The younger woman turns out to be the protector’s daughter as the convoluted plot bubbles and boils and thickens. Mamet’s elegant dialogue, dotted with polysyllabic epigrams, showed new colors on the author’s linguistic palette.

With Romance, Mamet tackles courtroom farce. At first Mamet’s trial, presided over by a pill-popping judge, seems ordinary enough. Soon, however, the courtroom’s solemnity is shattered. Spurned lovers and sadistic doctors arrive, hurling cookware and bodies across the room. By the time the near-comatose judge declares his verdict, such bedlam has arisen that the audience never learns the charges against the defendant.

Chekhov once quipped: “There is nothing new in art except talent.” During his two decades at the A.R.T., Mamet has stretched his prodigious talent in unexpected ways. Freed from the commercial pressures of Broadway, the playwright used the A.R.T. stage to break new ground: he took on new genres, expanded his linguistic registers, and enlarged his gallery of female roles. With Romance he presents A.R.T. audiences with his wackiest dramatic world yet.

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