How funny to think that a new play by David Mamet was once a source of fervent anticipation. After suffering through The Anarchist, The Penitent, China Doll (China Doll! A play written solely so that one character could brain another with a model airplane!) the impulse now is to cower somewhere safe until a run has ended. It isn’t that these recent plays were so disturbing – if only – but that they weren’t really plays, just thin veneers of words barely covering the whine and grumble of complaint. Were some of these words four-letter ones? Of course. It’s the Mamet way. Yet the language, like the contrarianism, has long since calcified into a pose – the lactic acid building and building and building the longer the pose is held.
Still, there was a time before – when the writing felt fresh, brash, defiantly alive, a way to inject sedate theaters with the rhythms of the streets. Maybe those rhythms were phoney even then. Or maybe Mamet’s current provocations (he was on Fox News this week, arguing that most teachers are inclined to pedophilia) have poisoned even the back catalog. How else to explain the absence of menace or pity or recognizable human feeling in the finely acted Broadway revival of American Buffalo, directed by Neil Pepe at Circle in the Square?
