What do you get when you cross the
distinctive dialogue of David Mamet with a Victorian drawing room comedy?
One obscenely funny, complicated play.
Once dubbed the “poet of the f-word,”
Mamet’s signature clipped tone and often vulgar style makes a surprisingly
believable (if occasionally awkward) marriage with the florid turns of phrase
that proper ladies in turn-of-the-century America employed. Much of the credit
for this surely goes to the actresses playing each half of the play’s other
marriage, the one mentioned in the title.
Jill Rittinger (Anna) and Tamara Farias
Kraus (Claire) both make their Blackfriars debut in the current production of
Mamet’s Boston Marriage.
The play may take place a century
before Massachusetts legally recognized same-sex marriage, but there’s no other
word to describe the relationship between these two women. Right off the bat,
though, the relationship sours after each delivers her own “good news.” Anna
tells Claire she’s provided for them both by taking up as a wealthy merchant’s
mistress. (It’s in the drawing room he’s provided her, in fact, that the action
takes place.) Not to be outdone, Anna has an announcement of her own: She’s fallen
in love with another girl, and she wants Claire’s help to seduce her.
Conversation between the two descends
into name-calling and worse (delivered artillery-like, in rapid succession),
their marriage threatening to disintegrate before the audience’s eyes. As they
spiral downward together, the two lurch back and forth between affectionate
pleas and vicious jabs, sometimes a bit too abruptly to be altogether
believable.
The entire play is restricted to the
drawing room, a restriction that — like the marriage — feels by turns both
intimate and claustrophobic. The drawing room’s exquisite set design — with
its ornate period furniture and elaborate furnishings — only enhances the
role the room plays.
That effect is leavened a bit by the
third character, Catherine, the maid (Dawn M. Sargent). Her constant entering
and exiting suggests a world beyond the intense bubble in which Claire and Anna
seemed locked.
An emotional breath of fresh air,
Catherine’s presence brings the addition of pathos to the typical slapstick
role that servant classes often get stuck with. And her naïveté —
convincingly evoked by Sargent — is the perfect foil to the cynical innuendo
that saturates her superiors’ barbs.
Mercifully, the staccato cadence of the
play’s opening is eventually tempered. The shift comes after a startling
revelation at the end of the first act seems to shatter both women’s plans for
the future. Forced to reconsider their lives and each other, the two women
abandon the crisp Mametesque style of dialogue in favor of a more measured,
nuanced one — a shift that suits Rittinger and Kraus’s talents.
Here they sort out between them the
everyday emotional and personal habits that lie just beneath the obvious sexual
overtones. They tackle the mundane stuff that makes up the real substance of
marriage. This is the heart of the play, and it demands a considerable breadth
of expressiveness, but Rittinger and Kraus prove they’re up to the task.
It’s a testament to the skill of
director Linda Starkweather that this complex subject matter doesn’t get
overshadowed by the abundant — and often hilarious — sexual humor that
moves the play along.
You should go
if you always wanted to lock David Mamet in a drawing room.
Boston Marriage through
October 8 | Blackfriars Theatre, 28 Lawn Street | $24 | www.blackfriars.org,
454-1260
This article appears in Oct 5-11, 2005.
