David Mamet: Ducks and Sex

Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago
A Double Bill of two of David Mamet’s early comedies
Zero Arrow Theater
Cambridge, MA
June 11-28, 2009

It felt like David Mamet used both ends of a telescope to write these two short plays about friendship now playing at the Zero Arrow Theater in Cambridge. For Duck Variations he put the big end of the tube to his eye to look far into the distance of senior citizenship. For the other he used the spyglass to get a close up of two young men in all their callow, fragile, testosterone-addled, 1976 minds.

It’s one thing to grasp how completely Mamet nailed male insecurity in the night's second play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago. After all, he authored it when he was 27 and living smack in the middle of the disco 1970s. The needle on the record album was stuck on SEX, at least as far as the two twenty-something men in the play are concerned. The two young women are less deeply etched in Mamet’s short play and seem to be foils for the men’s misogynistic feelings. In Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Mamet plumbs the effect one alpha friend can have on a less dominant one. If you’re squeamish about coarse sexual language, rent a movie and stay home.

There isn’t a pair of knockers, excuse me, that Bernard doesn’t see without objectifying and sexualizing. His experience with them seems to be rooted in his imagination. And is the way he so aggressively berates homosexuals a sign of homophobia or of a self-loathing closeted young man? In any case, Bernard's effect on his pal Dan is toxic. How much of Dan's behavior with his love relationship with Deborah is influenced by a know-it-all (fear-it-all?) Bernard and how much of it is men’s genetic inability to relate intimately with women?

Bernard (Tim Eliot), Dan (Scott Lyman), Deborah (Susannah Hoffman), and Joan (Laura Parker) are members of the A.R.T. Institute For Advanced Theater Training.

It’s another thing to witness the evening’s first play, Duck Variations. How would a twenty five year old Mamet be able to convincingly grasp the worn-as-an-old-flannel-shirt interplay of two old timers sitting on a park bench within quacking distance of a pond.

This is Mamet the intellectual having fun with a witty conversation between two smart-alecky pals whose friendship can tolerate, even flourish in, disagreement. This feels like a sunny, funny, poetically dazzling version of Waiting For Godot.  Actors Thomas Derrah as Emil Varec and Wil Lebow as George S. Aronowitz have known each other for more than two decades. And (excuse me for saying so Tommy and Wil), they’re pretty close to the stage ages of the two characters. No need to artificially add gray to the hair or beard.

A conversation about the ducks - flying overhead, waddling on shore, paddling insouciantly on the pond - morphs into a conversation that alternates from bumper car aggressiveness to wing-men flying off into the wild blue yonder together.

The ideas boing around like the silver orb in a pinball machine. George’s observation of the duck formation overhead leads to a treatise on leadership, group energy, mortality, commitment and destiny. That's only the first scene. The two actors are a two-man formation. One takes the lead through the intellectual firmament and the other is right on his tail, ready to take the lead with a contradictory idea built on what the other has said.

From time immemorial, park benches have been launch pads of conversations from the ridiculous to the sublime. This little play oscillates between both and is it ever fun. The title of each segment, highlighted by giant cue cards illuminated stage left and right before each variation, is the first sentence either George or Emil iterates. Who knew a mallard could inspire contemplations about the order of the universe, the contents of the stratosphere, air pollution, life, death, human nature - and once in a while something gloriously bogus like Emil's theory about the flammability of the ocean, to which George asks, “Did you make that up?” -  they're not beyond embroidering on a toothpick of truth. Whether made up or not, you wonder what these guys are smoking and wouldn’t mind scoring some after the show.

Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity In Chicago suggest Mamet is working out some Jekyll and Hyde feelings about the fibers that weave together male friendship. In Sexual Perversity the friendship is a straightjacket that squeezes the life out of it. In Duck Variations it’s the warm cardigans in which two gray haired men fit comfortably.

We’re left to ourselves to figure out what the trajectory is between young men and older men but one message is clear. Choose your friends wisely.

Comments

[Peggy Campion]

i wish i could write (or think clearly) the way you do.
one correction, i think will lebow is maybe 60? hardly an old timer anymore.
i say bring on the gray hairs, but then i haven't yet seen the show.

thanks for the review.