Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✩✩
by David Mamet, directed by Kelli Fox
Headstrong Collective, Campbell house Museum, Toronto
April 9-26, 2015
Claire: “Every note you strike is false. I cannot assemble them into a rational composition”
Boston Marriage is an anomaly in David Mamet’s canon. The play from 1999 is his only work written for an all-female cast and it is his only work set in the 19th century. For a playwright famed for his male-oriented plays about competition in the here and now, Boston Marriage almost seems like a folly. Although the play receives a good production from Headstrong Collective in association with the Campbell House Museum, Mamet has made it so artificial in language and plot that it provides virtually nothing to contemplate.
The plot concerns two women Anna (Catherine McNally) and Claire (Deborah Drakeford), who are in what was called a “Boston marriage”, that is a situation when two women are living together not necessarily in a romantic or sexual relationship. With Mamet, this is a sexual relationship between the older Anna and the younger Claire. Anna is the mistress of a wealthy man and thus is the provider for the two. The action begins when Anna shows off the latest gift her admirer has given her – an emerald necklace that is also a family heirloom. While Anna wants to exult over the foolishness of men, Claire bursts out with the news that she is in love. This is hardly good news to Anna, especially when it turns out that Claire wants Anna to let her and her new friend have their assignations in Anna’s house.
What follows are a series of negotiations between the two over what this means to their own relationship and what trade-offs each will make to let Claire have her fling. What is most Mamet-like about the play is how each woman uses professions of love, emotional blackmail and downright bullying to get what she wants.
What is not Mametian at all is the bizarre form of language Mamet has concocted. Mamet is famed for his ability to write concise, naturalistic dialogue, but in Boston Marriage his dialogue is neither. Most theatre-goers’ models for 19th-century English-language dialogue will be the W.S. Gilbert’s librettos for comic operas composed by Arthur Sullivan or the plays of Oscar Wilde. Though Boston Marriage is a comedy, the language Mamet uses lacks the wit and ease of either Gilbert or Wilde. He usually chooses an archaic phrase over the still-current phrase from the same period as when he has a character say, “I have a boon to beg”. In one strange instance, a character tries to explain something to the hapless maid Catherine (Charlotte Dennis) and says, “It’s an edict, a ukase!” Since when would any sensible person use a recherché word like “ukase” to explain a much more ordinary word like “edict”?
Though Mamet writes perfectly natural dialogue for Catherine, the dialogue he gives Anna and Claire is so stilted and filled with odd vocabulary choices, it is almost impossible for the actors to make it sound natural. At the same time, Mamet deliberately points out the artifice of the language by inserting such 20th-century remarks as “Tell it to the Marines” or “Put a sock in it”. It is likely that Mamet does this thinking he is making fun of 19th-century language, when, in fact, it only highlights his own inability to write 19th-century dialogue convincingly.
If Mamet has written this play to dispel the widely held opinion that he is unable to create believable female characters, Boston Marriage will only strengthen that opinion. Why does Mamet have to explore relations among women in a faux-Victorian setting using faux-Victorian language instead of in the present day with modern language as he does in his male-centred plays? Why, also, are these relations seen as inherently comic, when in all-male plays like American Buffalo (1975) or Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) they are not?
The overall impression Boston Marriage leaves is of a playwright trying far too hard to be clever and thereby exposing his own weaknesses in the process. For her part director Kelli Fox, no stranger to 19th-century language from her years at the Shaw Festival, tries to make the dialogue seem natural by having the actors speak it as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this only gives the impression that the two main women are only pronouncing tongue-twisters at each other. There is humour in many of the exchanges but judicious pauses after significant words would help it make an impression.
On the other hand, Fox emphasizes the radical changes of mood in the dialogue with radical changes of position and posture in the actors as if using 19th-century melodrama as a model. This, of course, only reinforces the play’s artificiality. Directing the actors to course through the play at a breakneck speed also has Catherine the maid constantly entering (without knocking) and exiting as if she were the bird in a cuckoo-clock.
The actors do the best they can to make the material engaging. Charlotte Dennis has the most success as Catherine the maid. While Anna and Claire have both fought for the cause of women’s rights, that doesn’t prevent Anna from verbally abusing her maid whenever she appears. Anna insists on believing Catherine is Irish despite Catherine’s statement that she is Scottish, and a heavier Scots accent would help bring out the humour here to a great degree. Yet, Dennis projects a sense of innocence of someone straight off the boat and a befuddlement at the meanness of her “betters” that makes us wish she can find other employment as soon as possible.
Both Catherine McNally and Deborah Drakeford strive to make Mamet’s stilted dialogue as affective as possible – McNally perhaps with more undertone, Drakeford with perhaps more naturalness.
The women do outsmart the men at the end, but since Mamet has this occur in a patently artificial setting, does this mean the play celebrates women’s intellectual abilities or satirizes them? Mamet gives Anna and Claire a lack of geographical knowledge (“Is the North Sea the same as the German Sea?”) and has them use words like “tarsier” that they don’t understand. And their plan for solving their plight at the end by dressing as fortune-tellers is ludicrous and more inspired by fiction than reality. The whole work comes off as an exercise in archness whose point is hard to assess.
Fans of Mamet will want to see the show. The play is not that often staged and the Campbell House “withdrawing room” holding only 35 viewers provides the ideal setting with its intimacy and authenticity. Women will find the play provides much to discuss in terms of Mamet’s first and so far only play devoted to interactions only among women. Does the play redeem or confirm Mamet’s reputation as a famed playwright whose insight into humanity extends only to men? You will have to see the play to determine this for yourself.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Deborah Drakeford as Claire and Catherine McNally as Anna; Catherine McNally as Anna and Charlotte Dennis as Catherine. ©2015 Bonnie Anderson.
For tickets, visit http://headstrongcollective.com.
2015-04-11
Boston Marriage