Playwright: David Mamet
At: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Phone: ( 312 ) 443-3800; $10-$35
Runs through: April 23
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
David Mamet's new play features many of the things we have come to expect from the author—the testosterone-fueled dynamics, the stuttering verbal rhythms and the salty-mouth vocabulary ( including, this time, a thesaurus of xenophobic expletives so euphonious and comprehensive, it ought to be set to music ) . What's missing, however, is the payoff—when the mighty fall, or the meek triumph, or SOMETHING happens to change the tide of battle.
It's apparent from the start that our personnel are neither the familiar bottom-feeders-with-nothing-to-lose of the playwright's early fables nor the genteel defenders-of-the-status-quo populating the writer's later experiments. In the first act, we are in a courtroom with an obstructive defendant, two attorneys whose personal lives keep intruding on their duties, and a judge rendered drowsy by too many antihistamines. In the second, little has changed except the magistrate's medication, which now promotes pseudo-psychotic episodes—not just in His Honor, but EVERYBODY—as if sprayed through the ventilators. This aberrant behavior is characterized—that's right—by a quasi-Tourette's Syndrome compulsion to confession of deviant acts.
But what can one confess in 2006 that will elicit universal shock and outrage? Premeditated murder, maybe, or animal torture? Certainly not homosexuality, or pedophilia, or gender harassment—practices held to be socially unacceptable ( or not ) as their times and culture dictate, but none provoking agitation at their very utterance. Repugnant racial/ethnic/religious/sexist diatribes are nowadays shrugged off with sticks-and-stones urbanity. And since our plot's Big Revelation has been telegraphed 30 minutes earlier, all that we can do is to shake our heads at the venality lurking beneath the surface of rational respectability. Golly, whoever would have guessed?
Fortunately, director Pam MacKinnon's cast cares about its play, even if Mamet doesn't. Matt DeCaro, stepping in for John Mahoney, along with Steve Pickering, David Pasquesi, Christian Stolte, and Ron OJ Parson, as well as youngsters John LaGuardia and Matthew Krause, keep the adrenaline forthcoming and the delivery in control. But despite Romance's claim to be a commentary on the Middle East situation, the impression it leaves is that of off-duty actors having bawdy fun with an I Love Lucy-era screwball comedy.