Word: mamet
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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...
Squirrels, the first affront of the evening, is a pedantic and ingrown mockery. David Mamet has trundled out the theme of a reversal between two artistes, the aged veteran and the anxious ingenue, and bandied "concepts" about the stage for the better part of an hour before switching the characters' roles in a sleight of hand so fast it would have dazzled Houdini. The reversal, developed with delicious deliberation in A life in the Theater, happening so awkwardly here, so long after we have lost all interest in the characters, serves only to leave an unpleasant taste of dissatisfaction...
...formula, after two endless evenings, is clear: two dreary, realistic plays followed by a crowd-pleasing cartoon. One might feel sympathy if these were unknown, generally unproduced playwrights, but few of them are. (In the next program we'll see plays by David Mamet and actor Cliff Robertson.) This smacks of cowardice: the APS might have attracted a devoted following if it had produced good or at least ambitious plays by unknown playwrights rather than the poor scraps of the well-known. If artistic director Tom Bloom knows how bad two-thirds of these plays are but decided he needed...
...refuses to let these betrayals unwind in their own frenetic fashion. Scenes of furious violence are undercut by his reluctance to leave the action before every angle has been explored. The result is a collection of brilliant scenes which don't seem to be related in time. Playwright David Mamet has taken most of the xenophobia and complication out of Cain's novel, and left in their places huge gaps for Rafelson to muse over. But one suspects Rafelson didn't even notice...