The Old Neighborhood

What does the name Mamet conjure up? Demonic males thrusting words like hand grenades in each other’s faces. And when that fusillade does not wipe out the opponent, a heavy metal chain (Homicide) or a dead-pig sticker (American Buffalo) will settle the argument. Offering advice about how to win friends and influence people, Al Capone–who like Mamet hails from Chicago–advised, “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

Last season a joke circulated in Cambridge about a panhandler who, scrounging for dole, accosted a dignified matron leaving the American Repertory Theater. “Neither a borrower nor a beggar be,” sniffed the dowager, “William Shakespeare.” “Fuck you,” shot back the panhandler. “David Mamet.” Despite the fact that the dowager needs to brush up her Shakespeare, the joke makes the point that in the popular imagination, David Mamet is the poet laureate of profanity. Although Mamet is a master of language as lethal weapon, this reputation does the artist–one of our most varied and accomplished writers–a disservice. Playwright and poet, scriptwriter and novelist, short story writer and essayist, Mamet has conquered every province in the republic of letters. Each of these genres uses language in a different way. If Mamet has succeeded in each, he incontrovertibly has at his disposal an extraordinarily large verbal palette, a palette in my opinion unmatched by anyone else writing drama in English today.

Furthermore, the range of topics Mamet has treated is not limited to buddy bonding and male braggadocio. He has also trained his astute eye on the difficulties Americans encounter establishing and maintaining intimacy (Sexual Perversity in Chicago, The Woods); the transition from adolescence to manhood (Lakeboat); the existential confrontation with old age and death (The Duck Variations); the love-hate bond that links children to parents (Reunion, Dark Pony, The Cryptogram); the bankruptcy of American myths and values (American Buffalo, The Water Engine, Glengarry Glen Ross); gender strife and the language of misunderstanding (Oleanna). A Life in the Theatre–an ironic valentine that both reveres and mocks the stage–dramatizes that life itself is metatheater, a performance conscious of its own flagrant theatricality. To extend the panorama, Mamet has written plays for children, and some of his most moving works open out into metaphysical speculation–a realm American playwrights, straitjacketed in realism, seldom tread (Edmond, The Shawl, The Verdict, We’re No Angels, Homicide). In short, no other contemporary American dramatist has painted on such a large and varied canvas.

Actor, director, playwright, Mamet is the consummate homme de théâtre. His plays work because he knows how to make the theatrical engine run. “Mamet’s plays are a gift to directors,” says Scott Zigler, who directs The Old Neighborhood. “David writes some of the most playable scenes you ever get to work on. He has an uncanny instinct for crafting a dramatic situation that is devoid of exposition. David allows both the story and the characters to reveal themselves totally in the unfolding of the action rather than in exposition.” In other words, Mamet does not tell an audience what a character or scene is about, he shows it.

A brilliant example occurs at the end of The Cryptogram, which had its premiere as part of the A.R.T. New Stages in 1995. Del, an old family friend, finally confronts Donny, whose husband has just left her. Perforce he agrees to explain why men abandon her. But Mamet halts the tirade with the untimely arrival of John, the little boy. The interruption irritates the mother, who lashes out at her son with the displaced rage she feels for the husband. And the play stops. We do not need anything else. We have seen everything. We have understood. The friend’s explanation would have diminished the emotional impact of the scene. But a lesser dramatist would not have resisted the urge to bring down the curtain with rhetoric.

“A good writer,” Mamet notes in On Directing Film, “gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains. What is the story? The story is the essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of his one goal. The point, as Aristotle told us, is what happens to the hero . . . not what happens to the writer.”

Actors also relish working in a Mamet play. “David is a brilliant writer,” says Debra Eisenstadt, who played Carol in the film of Oleanna. “His language has a tune. It’s like a heartbeat. It’s easy to learn because the rhythm dances in your body. That’s great for actors. It’s easy to learn and impossible to forget. The rhythm is engraved in your memory.”

In The Old Neighborhood, A.R.T. audiences will encounter Mamet exploring the personal terrain of memory. The play is made up of three segments that work together in a subtle but powerful way. Bobby Gould, the protagonist, returns to Chicago after a long absence to try to come to terms with his past–personal, familial, ethnic–and the playlets ask disquieting questions about how to deal with a legacy that, as it slips through our fingers, shapes our lives. The first segment, The Disappearance of the Jews, establishes a dialogue between the protagonist’s mid-life crisis and his anxiety about having lost any vital connection with his cultural and religious heritage. Mamet has written frequently about what it means to be Jewish in America: in essays (“The Decoration of Jewish Houses” and “A Plain Brown Wrapper”), in poetry (The Hero Pony), in a short story (“Passover”), in a play (Goldberg Street), and, most significantly, in film (Homicide). Both the protagonist of Homicide, Bob Gold, and the protagonist of The Disappearance of the Jews, Bobby Gould (the similarity in names cannot be accidental), share a sense of multiple and conflicting identities. Both feel alienated from Jewish traditions. Both want somehow to heal the severed connection. Neither succeeds. Both the play and film end with Bobby and Bob confused about who they are.

According to Professor Jonathan Sarna, who teaches American Jewish history at Brandeis, “Mamet has dramatized Marcus Hansen’s thesis that what the second generation seeks to forget, the third generation seeks to remember, a thesis Will Herberg expatiates on in Protestant, Catholic, Jew. We see this phenomenon at Brandeis all the time. Students feel something is missing in their lives, and they hope to find it in the world of their grandparents and in the spiritual dimension of Judaism. The question remains, however, can it be recovered? These students live in a different time and a different place than the world their grandparents left in Eastern Europe. Have we lost our ability to understand the Judaism of our grandparents? This revival is not easy to accomplish. Others ask if we can formulate a rich Jewish culture in touch with contemporary America that will survive into the twenty-first century and beyond. The central question of American Jewry is are we assimilating or are we transforming Judaism?”

This question–and it faces all minorities in the United States–informs the anxiety Bobby Gould experiences. But it is just one strand in a highly textured play. Like much of Mamet’s work, The Old Neighborhood also deals with the dangers that haunt intimate relationships. Shattered by an impending divorce, Bobby returns to his childhood home. He wants to reconnect to his past in an attempt to figure out who he is and where he is going. But returning home, he discovers, is not possible. Time has radically altered him and the old neighborhood, and he and Joey, his best friend from high school, bicker constantly over exactly what happened in the adolescent experiences they want to relive. Bobby feels as if he is sinking into the vortex of time. As he desperately tries to grasp the past, it, like the present, dissolves into mist and dreams.

Mamet has adapted one short story and three plays by Chekhov (“Vint”; The Cherry Orchard; Uncle Vanya, seen at the A.R.T. in 1989; and The Three Sisters, seen at the A.R.T. Institute in January, 1987). The Old Neighborhood is Mamet’s most Chekhovian play–not only in mood but also in dramatic technique. Nothing seemingly happens. People sit around and schmooze. The conversations start, stop, and wander off nowhere. But in the dense, oblique subtext, the characters sift through the psychological issues they are afraid to confront head on. ” No one really says what they mean,” Mamet once observed about his dialogue, “but they always mean what they mean.” When Bobby’s friend Joey romanticizes about the ancestral past and how wonderful it would have been to live in a shtetl when ritual consecrated life and the warm pulse of community gave everyone a sense of belonging and purpose, Bobby cuts in:

Bobby: You think they fooled around?

Joey: Who? In the shtetl?

Bobby: Yeah.

Joey: I think it was too small.

Bobby: But when they went to town.

Joey: When they went to town?

Bobby: Yes.

Joey: With Polish whores . . . ?

Mamet’s humor undercuts Joey’s nostalgic vision of an unsullied Golden Age. But underneath the banter, the two men struggle to deal with the difficulties of monogamy. Joey, who has recently joined a synagogue with his wife Judy, secretly longs to commit adultery. At the same time, he is afraid and racked by guilt. Despite himself, he lets slip how much he resents his wife and family. Bobby, on the other hand, never lets on that his marriage to a high-status shiksa is falling apart.

The dramaturgical structure of The Disappearance of the Jews mirrors perfectly its thematic concerns. If the conversation and mood recall Chekhov, the sense of stasis and the rhythm of the dialog reflect Beckett:

Joey: I wish I had a cigarette.

Bobby: Yes. I do, too. (Pause)

Joey: You wanna go get some?

Bobby: I almost do, but I shouldn’t.

Joey: No. I shouldn’t either. (Pause). Isn’t that something?

Bobby: Yes. It is.

Thus Bobby and Joey end the play like Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot, refusing to take action as they wait for something or someone to validate their lives. This final, iconic scene reveals them to be, like Didi and Gogo, existential anti-heroes, sinking into a dead sea of bad faith. And like Beckett, Mamet filters his existential anxiety through irony and humor.

In the second segment–Jolly, the most emotionally taut of the three–Bobby calls on his sister, Jolly. Here Mamet revisits the territory he charted in an autobiographical reminiscence entitled “The Rake,” the lead article in The Cabin, dedicated to Mamet’s sister Lynn. Like the conversations in The Disappearance of the Jews, the chatter between brother and sister seems at first deceptively casual and meandering. Jolly begins by telling Bobby about a recent phone call she had with their stepbrother. Before long, flashes of emotion–repressed for years–break through the surface. The anger Bobby and Jolly felt about the divorce of their parents and the subsequent psychological damage inflicted on them cracks the hardened crust of denial. A pattern emerges of a dysfunctional family culture stretching back for generations. As the play moves to its climax–and Mamet has never written a more harrowing scene–the sister recounts a dream she had as a child in which her mother wants to kill her. Much later, the mother visits Jolly, now married and a mother herself, and asks what the grandchildren need.

” ‘And I’d say shoes. They need shoes. . . . The kids need shoes.’ The end of her stay, she would give them, God bless her, these, two, incredibly expensive, what are they, ‘vanity sets.’ A desk. A desk to put on makeup . . . a ‘vanity set’?”

Jolly and Bobby continually return to the point that as children they never received the presents they had requested. For two adults to dwell on this fact with such virulence after so many years dramatizes its lasting psychological significance. As children, their wishes and desires did not count. Consequently, they internalized a sense of self-loathing and a feeling that life is futile.

But the play is not depressing. Like tragedy, it moves through recognition and insight to catharsis–a purging of emotions. By confronting the ghosts of her past, Jolly lays them to rest.

Jolly: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if any of ’em. I was going to say, if any of them liked women. Yes. That is what I mean. The Europeans. The whole thing. Do you Know. Separate galleries in the Shul. Do the Worsch, lie down, shut up. . . . Look at Mom. And papa Jake. . . . He never loved her. Never loved her one day. And she knew it. Spent her whole life. Looking for. That love she never got. And she could not admit it. “Yes. I’m bad. I’m so bad. I’m bad. Yes. Mistreat me. . . . ” With Dad . . . with that swine “Mistreat me . . .” her whole life. And at the end. You know, even at the end. Who was there? Who was there for her? Who was there?”

Bob: You were, Jol.

Among the many surprises lying in wait in The Old Neighborhood, not the least is that David Mamet, bulldog of male invective, attacks the patriarchy for the psychological damage it inflicts on women through contempt and the demonstration that everyone–men as well as women–pays a high price for this damage. Jolly claims that she has broken the cycle and refuses to pass on to her daughters the pattern of emotional abuse she had inherited. But we never see her relationship to her daughters in the play. We only hear her describe it. Since we have nothing but her own testimony to go on, the playwright leaves it up to the audience to decide how far to believe her.

In the last segment–D., the most subtle and complex of the three–Bobby revisits the first great love of his life–a woman he abandoned. The structure of the play is unusual. Virtually a monologue, Bobby says almost nothing in response to the woman’s–we never learn her name–rambling conversation. He is afraid to talk. What does one say to a woman one jilted twenty years ago? And she is afraid to let him talk. So she talks. Talks about her professional success as a buyer and an accountant. Talks about her love for gardens and her inexplicable failure to grow one herself. Talks about the folly of passion and the function of rituals. And talks about early frosts and smudge pots.

But submerged in layers of protective metaphor and understatement, they communicate to each other what they must. As the play moves to the inevitable “good-bye” at the end, Bobby and the woman have had their final say. They loved each other, they parted. She was not what he needed. When the final good-bye comes, it tolls like a death knell. But with the parting, one feels not only sorrow, but also release, the release that comes from the possibility of rebirth. One must neither forget the past, nor be bound by it. The past is not forgotten, but anger and bitterness are transcended, which is the secret of The Old Neighborhood. As Bobby leaves the woman and stumbles back into the night, one hopes that her message of faith in the possibilities of life–her last gift to him–has not fallen on deaf ears.

Arthur Holmberg is the Literary Director of the American Repertory Theater.