THE STAGE

...Although there are occasionally sophisticated radio scripts, like Archibald MacLeish's The Fall of the City, willing to embrace negativism if only as a warning, the standard 1930s radio melodrama series would have saved Charles Lang a beat or two before the final commercial...

...The optimism of radio melodrama had its more elegant counterpart in the theme of the Chicago exposition...

...The other plays—particularly American Buffalo and Sexual Perversity—understand that rhetoric can be reality...

...or that the violence implicit in Teach finally surfaces, but that Mamet's understanding of the nuances of ordinary speech lets us see the way societal platitudes invade everyday language and bring along the impulse toward and justifications for destructive action...

...In his Sexual Perversity in Chicago, the language dictates the attitudes of the characters and wrecks any chance of their sexual or personal fulfillment...

...The serious implications of The Water Engine may have got a little lost amid the quiche and coffee at the Theater Cabaret, but its theatrical virtues made it a hit...

...Simple participatory fun, then, but I think Mamet has something more serious in mind, as his violations of both his borrowed genre and the spirit of the Chicago fair suggest...

...Weales' prediction proved accurate...

...As Mamet told Ross Wetzsteon (The Village Voice, July 5, 1976), "words create behavior...

...As soon as The Water Engine can be seen in terms of the bargain as controlling metaphor, its relation to American Buffalo, Mamet's best play, becomes clear...

...Originally written for radio, it is a large-cast piece in which a radio play is being performed and in which the audience experiences both the broadcast melodrama and the presentation situation...

...Clearly a Chicago script, despite the fiction of its being broadcast from New York, the play gives the audience the mechanics of the old radio shows—the sound effects, the music under, the artificial urgency of the voices, the significant silences...

...He is menaced by two lawyers—a jovial one (David Sabin seems to have found his characterization by watching Walter Connolly in 1930s movies) and a threatening one—who represent big business's need to get and destroy the plans...

...That bargain, on a personal level, delivers Lang to the lawyers and the convivial language of one, the menacing rationality of the other finally destroy him...

...The Water Engine, which is one with the other Mamet plays in tonal rightness, uses the* artificial language of radio to emphasize the distance between rhetoric and reality...

...The Water Engine closed shortly after moving uptown...

...The Water Engine is identified as another in a series called The Century of Progress after the Chicago World's Fair which provides both the impetus for the play and in part the setting...

...Mamet stands in the late 1970s, looking back to the years before he was born, and adapts the instruments of generic and ideational optimism to express a contemporary American dis-ease that persists even though the system has presumably been born again...

...Comically portentous lines like the often repeated "Much is known, much is not known, much will not be known" suggest such series, echoing the tone of The Shadow's "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.'1 When Lang turns to the newspaperman for help, those of us who remember the intrepid Steve Wilson expect journalistic rescue, but Mamet's newspaperman shrugs off his platitudes even as he speaks them and defeats the expectation which is still entangled in the opening proclamation of Big Town: "The freedom of the press is a flaming sword...

...Perhaps it will take on depth in its new setting, but I rather suspect it will dwindle to packaged nostalgia...

...American Buffalo is ostensibly about three men in a junk shop who almost commit a burglary, but it is really about the way personal relationships are sacrificed to social attitudes and the language that reflects and creates them...

...His newspaperman, to fill space, dictates a high-sounding paragraph in which the American dream is described in terms of the bargain made and kept...

...The playgoers become accomplices of the production, applauding on cue, playing the live audience at a broadcast that is supposedly taking place as 1934 turns into 1935...

...The general attitude of the fair, in both its trivial and its serious aspects, is summed up in the definition Charles A. Beard offered in A Century of Progress, the book he edited for the occasion: "it implies that mankind, by making use of science and invention, can progressively emancipate itself from plagues, famines, and social disasters, and subjugate the materials, and forces of the earth to the purposes of the good life...

...After all, Broadway is the range on which American Buffalo died while Dracula and Annie flourish...

...GERALD WEALES Editor's Note: Mr...

...Lang and his sister are finally murdered, but the plans are saved, passed on to the bright little boy in the candy store who will presumably continue the tradition of Charles Lang, the good side of the play's often reiterated line about science as knowledge "for good or evil...

...Late in February it moved uptown to the Plymouth...

...When I was a boy, we all knew that the ever-burning light bulb and all those other wonderful inventions had been buried beneath the needs of corporate greed...

...Nostalgia on the friendly side of parody, it suggests those sequences in Mamet's A Life in the Theater in which the two actors, whose real story takes place backstage, perform in conventional theater pieces...

...In so far as Mamet is a social playwright—and he certainly sounded like one in the New York Times interview on January IS—his concern is with language...

...Whatever it is that holds Don and Bob together—friendship, affection, a surrogate father-son 14 April 1978: 244 attachment—it is endangered with the entrance of Teach, who wants to replace Bob in the planned burglary and who makes his case by restating the rules of sound business procedure in the rhythms of the street...

...Even with the implied promise of the candystore boy, The Water Engine suggests that invention will either be co-opted or destroyed by big business...

...The important thing about American Buffalo as a play and as a social comment is not that it equates business and burglary (shades of Brecht...

...Although the suspicion that we are regularly being poisoned or ripped off by big business might make so simplistic an assumption attractive once again, if that were all that The Water Engine had to say, David Mamet would be one with Russell Myers, whose Broom Hilda comic strip trotted out that folk myth a few Sundays ago...

...STRONGER THAN WATER THE STAGE David Mamet's The Water Engine, which opened the new Theater Cabaret at the Public Theater, is a perfect play for a serious theater organization's initiation into cabaret because it has a great many surface virtues and substance enough to interest anyone who begins to ask questions about the obvious games it plays...

...There were men who questioned die idea of celebrating progress in 1933-34, but the contemporary contrast between faot and ideal is not the propellant that drives The Water Engine...

...More sustained than the bits in Life, The Water Engine is so cleverly written that it sucks the audience into the story of Charles Lang and his invention of an engine that runs on water...