Altared state

Mamet goes Wilde in Boston Marriage

by Carolyn Clay

BOSTON MARRIAGE, Written and directed by David Mamet. Set design by Sharon Kaitz and J. Michael Griggs. Costumes by Harriet Voyt. Lighting by John Ambrosone. With Rebecca Pidgeon, Felicity Huffman, and Mary McCann. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Hasty Pudding Theatre through June 27.

Oscar Wilde's Gwendolyn and Cecily, each as formidable as Lady Bracknell, are lesbians in Boston Marriage, David Mamet's latest, which is in its world premiere, courtesy of the American Repertory Theatre, at the Hasty Pudding Theatre. Certainly the piece is a departure for Mamet -- though less so than his recent, elegant film of Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy. In this dizzyingly arch comedy of manners, which is set at the turn of the century, Mamet has a gay old time fusing his own rat-a-tat style with that of the Wilde-Somerset Maugham-Noël Coward set. (There's even a Madame Arcati riff.) Although the dialogue is redolent with words like "reticule" and "rodomontade," it is also punctuated with the staccato "Do you see?" in the manner of Oleanna. And if the play is but a sophisticated lark, in which a couple of corseted women exhibit as much calculating sexuality and frosty swagger as any Mamet man, it's wickedly, wittily entertaining.

Written in three short, brittle scenes, Boston Marriage turns on the negotiations between Claire and Anna, two sharp but sheltered, hilariously arrogant ladies living by the seat of their skirts on the fringes of upper-class, fin-de-siècle society. The play takes its title from a late-19th-century euphemism for a lesbian arrangement, but, to whatever degree Mamet means the work as a serious statement, it's about the shifts and sacrifices, jockeying and jealousies, even the duplicity, endemic to any long-surviving "unity of two." What makes the play, which does not run deep nor mean to, such brilliant fun is its marriage of glinting period artifice and contemporary frankness. "Men, what can you do with them?" frets a bow-tied, starched-bloused Claire, clutching her parasol. "Just the one thing," replies Anna, obviously, from the fluted settee.

As the play begins, Claire, just back from a "sojourn," pops her head cartoonishly into the drawing room. She is soon joined by a slinky Anna, who pops sweetmeats and sports a valuable new necklace. As it happens, each woman has news. In Claire's absence, Anna has acquired a "protector," some smitten old swain whose generosity will underwrite her and Claire's shared life. "Good for you, good for the side!" is her paramour's reaction. Anna, however, is less taken with Claire's news: the younger woman has fallen in love, with a still younger woman, and wants to use Anna as a beard to facilitate an assignation -- that very afternoon. Into this crisis intrudes the play's only other character, the maid Catherine, at whom Anna flings, with unerring political incorrectness, every conceivable cliché held by the turn-of-the-century American aristocracy about the Irish. To wit: "What do you want? Home Rule and for all small children to raise geese?" The joke is that the earthy if intimidated and oft-tearful Catherine is Scottish.

By the end of the first scene, however, Claire and Anna have suffered a "reversal." The object of Claire's lust has turned up at the offstage front door and inquired why Anna is wearing her mother's jewelry. Oh, oops. It seems Anna's benefactor and Claire's sweetie's dad are one and the same. "I am undone," opines Anna. "I have lost my income and alienated the affection of my one true love." "You have fucked my life into a cocked hat," sums up Claire. Lady Windermere meets David Mamet.

All of this is delicious if slight, and very well carried off in the ART production, which is directed by the playwright with less than his usual clipped stylization. The piece is stylized, to be sure, but in the presentational manner of drawing-room comedy, with the performances less hemmed in by the automaton-like, rhythm-dominated delivery Mamet the director often applies to his own work (notably to Oleanna and The Cryptogram, both of which had their world premieres at the ART). The three-woman cast consists of seasoned Mamet veterans Felicity Huffman, Mary McCann, and Rebecca Pidgeon. All are members of New York's Atlantic Theater Company, which was founded by Mamet (Mr. Rebecca Pidgeon) and William H. Macy (Mr. Felicity Hoffman). And the three appeared together in a recent Atlantic production of J.B. Priestley's 1932 work, Dangerous Corner, during which the idea of Mamet's concocting a period piece for them reared its head.

Some of Mamet's early works, in particular Sexual Perversity in Chicago, have become period pieces, but this is his first to start out as one. It is also his first play for an all-female cast, none of whose members, not surprisingly, holds much with the argument that the playwright can't write convincingly for women, that he turns them into either cold monsters like Carol of Oleanna or ambiguous evangelists like Karen of Speed-the-Plow. That, of course, ignores the heartbreaking Jolly of The Old Neighborhood. But we are certainly in a new neighborhood here, one occupied less by credible, complex women than by Mamet characters in the guise of Late Victorian ladies.

Within that framework, on a whimsical set festooned by a black-and-white-striped proscenium valance and hand-painted placards announcing intermissions, the three actresses lounge and sweep and bustle with panache, impeccably putting forward Mamet's fast, furious mix of period formality and bitchy sniping, arcane construction and cheeky contemporaneity. Pidgeon, looking a bit like Helena Bonham Carter in her curls, is pert, straight, and quick as Claire, whereas Huffman, as Anna, exhibits the hauteur of a Grace Kelly. McCann, in her more demure and servile way, gives as good as she gets. So, though his epigrams aren't on a par with Wilde's, does Mamet.