Word: edmond
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...EDMOND by David Mamet...
...where you belong," a palmist cryptically tells the hero of David Mamet's latest play. Edmond Burke (Colin Stinton) is not a classic conservative who spells his first name differently but a conventional 34-year-old who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side in middle-class complacency. He takes the palmist literally. Informing his wife that she is no longer spiritually or sexually attractive to him, he abruptly leaves home. Thus begins an odyssey into the sordid inferno of an urban sub-world...
Combining a lacerating ferocity with a sometimes silly sententiousness, the play unfolds in a couple of dozen revue-style blackouts without intermission. A stranger in a bar steers Edmond to a nightspot with B-girls, but Edmond quibbles over the whore's price and departs in a rage. In swift succession, he is conned and savagely beaten up in a game of three-card monte, and thrown out of a fleabag hotel by a seedy clerk. He pawns his gold ring and buys a "survival knife." When a black pimp tries to mug him, Edmond rewards his assailant with...
There is a method in Mamet's modishness. Edmond harbors horrified inner fears of blacks, homosexuals and, possibly, women. Raised to consciousness, these fears are exorcised. It is a quest for identity based on Joseph Conrad's admonition: "In the destructive element immerse. That is the way." The way to what? Quite probably, the way to understand and absorb the dark tenor and temper of the age, the kind of visceral awareness of anarchy that William Butler Yeats had in mind when he wrote, "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned...
RUNNING FOR the Republican presidential nomination early in 1968. Michigan Gov. George Romney did himself in when he admitted he had been "brainwashed" into supporting the Vietnam War. Seeking the Democratic nod for the Oval Office four years later, Maine Sen Edmond S. Muskie permanently crippled his front-running campaign when he publicly wept in response to spurious charges about his wife leveled by the tasteless Manchester Union Leader...