On Stage
SIMON, JOHN
On Stage OUR WORDS AS THEY SPEAK US BY JOHN SIMON David Mamet, at 28, is a playwright to watch and listen to. What we watch for is his future; what we listen to is his present. As of now, Mamet...
...or from the cafes, offices and small apartments where middle-class speech thrives in shabby gentility...
...No man is an island," observes profoundly Aronovitz—or Varec...
...Debbie: How do I like the taste of come...
...Bern: So tits out to here so...
...The men can be didactic in their way as well...
...often what is disputed is a fact plain enough to be a truism, whereas what is assented to is the most palpable fabrication...
...The first man is indignant—either because he was misunderstood or, more likely, because he was too easily understood—and snaps, "No...
...likewise, the older, somewhat jaded and frustrated Joan's distrust and resentment of men sabotages Debbie's chances with Dan...
...Two old men, strangers, occupy the same lake-front bench in a Chicago park...
...With equal absurdity and role-playing, having a penis must embody some ineffable male mystique...
...The young playwright cannot be expected to equal Beckett, but he might at least have aimed for a more cosmic despair, a more than sexual laughter...
...Talk is the last, precarious hold on active life...
...It tastes like everything wonderful...
...Without a friend," says one oldster (I don't remember whether it is Aronovitz or Varec), "life is not" "Worth living," interjects the other, smartly...
...Some of the most outrageous absurdities are spun around the leitmotif of ducks...
...Bern admonishes: "When she's on her back and she's got her legs up in the air and she's coming like a choochoo train, remember...
...What is worth living if not life...
...It is all grotesque and would be preposterous, too, if it weren't, as the saying goes, so true...
...Holderlin's famous censure of his fellow Germans?that they were word-rich but action-poor—applies no less to Mamet's plays, though I must add that I did not catch his all too briefly seen The American Buffalo (1975), his latest and longest...
...In fact, she doesn't: She readily concurs that it smells like Chlorox...
...Yet such is the genius of his best plays that the dialogue or monologues of his characters, with their fantasies and reminiscences, simulate or evoke aotions, become words functioning as deeds...
...Here the pitiful fabrications of the ex-schoolgirl are almost as pathetic as they are funny: as great as the junior prom or—straight from the pages of the school literary magazine—an autumn afternoon...
...At another moment in bed, Debbie suddenly asks: "How does it feel to have a penis...
...Both plays are more than adequately directed by Albert Taka-zauckas, furbished with minimal but appropriate sets and costumes by Michael Massee, and punctuated with sparse yet effective electronic beeps (or is it music...
...They discuss when it is or isn't open season on ducks, and one man gravely explains that "the only time when it's not illegal to shoot them is when they're not around...
...It is meant to sound interesting, knowledgeable, even profund—to earn a little recognition and prestige before loneliness and death close in...
...in the language of B movies, it becomes something strange and wonderful...
...Early on in the play, if you don't consult your program, you may easily assume that these are not the same characters recurring in short scene after scene, but different men and women each time—so widespread are the attitudes, so typical the situations and talk, that you think this is a cross-section of Chicago, indeed the world...
...Now, to acquire prestige, one must know more than the other fellow: disagree with him, correct him, outmaneuver him...
...Bern: She wrote the route...
...Bern: You think she hadn't been around...
...Perhaps there something will happen...
...Almost always, they concern talking about making out, trying to make out, or having just made out...
...the smell may be lousy, but the taste is great...
...in Duck Variations, Michael Egan and Mike Kellin were even better...
...Dan: She knew the route, huh...
...Dan: Yeah...
...the rest has solidified into formula...
...After a very long pause, Dan says, meditatively, "Strange," and, after a very short one, "Strange and wonderful...
...he believes that it shapes our attitudes and actions rather than the other way round...
...Dan, conversely, doesn't want it to taste like everything wonderful...
...Or to anyone else," Varec —or Aronovitz—sagely elaborates...
...Dan: No shit...
...Bern: She hadn't gone the route...
...Joan warns: "You have a grown man who's a child and who wants nothing better than that you lick his penis and laugh at his bizarre ideas...
...What is crucial is the older and more experienced Bern's contempt for women as mere pieces of arse, which infects Dan's attitude toward Debbie...
...When the girls are alone together, didacticism joins sexuality...
...he has also, however, hustled pool and Ping-Pong, held manual jobs, been in the Merchant Marine—as if in pursuit of the infusions of racy illiteracy...
...Is this ludiorous, or is it heart-rending...
...Dan: I always thought it might taste like Chlorox...
...Dan: You gotta be fooling...
...Because it is so perfectly balanced between the two, the play keeps our reactions similarly poised between opposites, our minds and emotions exercised...
...The age, you may well conclude, is the only variable (a wobbly one at that...
...Part of the originality lies in the way the work unfurls: tiny vignettes for two, sometimes three, characters in different combinations, as neatly constructed as cabaret sketches...
...He has written two lesser pieces, and a children's play and love tragedy are in the offing...
...where then would be the sacrifice, the woman turning into a whore (her true self) for his sake...
...Bern: Twenty a couple years old...
...Remember: Power means responsibility...
...The talk is not limited to ducks, though...
...How great...
...Like the junior prom...
...Debbie: Well, it smells like Chlorox...
...It becomes more overtly metaphysical...
...by George Quincy...
...Dan: Yeah...
...But it tastes like the junior prom...
...A Although the earlier play, Duck Variations, seems even less consequential on the surface, something larger looms beyond its facade of flimsiness...
...Dan: Yeah...
...What is happening...
...What Mamet has not yet acquired —at least in the two one-acters that are now being done off-Broadway, Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) and Duck Variations (1971)—is something to look at: something that could not as well be conveyed over the radio...
...Whereas other contemporary playwrights in the international repertoire, say, Genet, Ionesco, Peter Weiss, Slawomir Mrozek, are relatively action-packed, Beckett is certainly action-less...
...In the Mamet plays I know, the words are flavorous, even suggestive of character, but they do not quite create a world through which bodies and minds can be seen moving...
...But the meanings are still a bit static and must learn to move...
...What, then, is missing...
...Bern: Are you fucking kidding me...
...In very Jewish constructions and cadences, they start talking...
...Sexual Perversity in Chicago is about Bernard Litko and Danny Shapiro, pals who work in the same office, and Deborah Soloman and Joan Webber, friends who share an apartment...
...Better it should taste like Chlorox...
...Commonplaces and idiocies are equal grist for these tired old mills...
...The duologue becomes a curious mixture of argumentativeness and corroboration...
...Still, the illusion of enjoyment must be maintained even at the cost of logic...
...In Perversity, F. Murray Abraham, Jane Anderson, Peter Riegert, and Gina Rogers were all good...
...Debbie: Ask me 'How do you like the taste of come?' Dan: How do you like the taste of come...
...David Mamet's plays not only sound right, they also marshal sound toward meaning...
...Here, for instance, are Debbie and Dan, living in his pad and in bed together...
...As of now, Mamet writes dialogue gleaned from the dives, parks and street corners that are the breeding-grounds of lower-class speech...
...Happen...
...Around twenty, huh...
...And in a sense it is...
...After a moment's reflection, the other replies, "That depends on the duck...
...In essence, the play deals with how Dan and Debbie come to live together in his apartment, and how Bern and Joan, their more sophisticated, cynical or simply destructive mentors, help break up the affair...
...Debbie is clearly acting out a role: A swinging chick must enjoy the taste of semen...
...In the end, the four characters are back, literally and figuratively, where they started from: We last see Bern and Dan ogling a new set of girls on the beach...
...they sound equally deep to them...
...Dan: Yeah...
...the conversation takes off from and keeps returning to what is in front of them: ducks...
...Is anything supposed to happen in the post-Beckett-and-Pinter theater...
...Yet one also seeks approval by agreeing with, even praising the other chap's insights...
...To which Debbie responds, with as much sourness as gratitude, "Someday, Joan, I'll be thankful to you for this...
...Like an autumn afternoon...
...Bern: Nineteen, twenty...
...what matters is not making sense, but hanging in...
...or, if movement there is, it is the prefabricated one of a phonograph needle in a groove of platitudes...
...Bern: So...
...someone may ask...
...I love it...
...When the guys are among themselves, they are even more sex-obsessed, can talk only about their conquests...
...One of the men asks the other whether he would not agree that a duck is a noble (or some such epithet) animal...
...The young Chicago dramatist—college-bred, well-read, himself a teacher of playwriting—is obviously acquainted with polite conversation...
...Leaving aside Pinter, whom I consider a poseur and second-rate, there is certainly Beckett...
...Language fascinates him...
...All the verbal flotsam spouted by trivial old people, bored with the past and afraid of the future or its lack, is there: pitiable platitudes, pontifications, half-remembered newspaper and magazine items, fantasies propounded as gospel truth, nuggets of fact mixed in with quicksands of fiction...
Vol. 59 • August 1976 • No. 17
