How Good is David Mamet, Anyway?

Writings on Theater--and Why It Matters

John Heilpern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415925471
• eBook ISBN: 9781136691522
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

First Published in 2000. Why do we go to the theater? There's a question! Or put it this way: Why, oh why, do we go to the theater? If we go to a movie and it isn't any good, well it's not the end of the world. We're usually quite content just the same. It passes the time. Though, as Samuel Beckett pointed out, the time would have passed anyway. But if we're disappointed at the theater, everything changes dramatically. We cannot while away the time at the theater. Time becomes precious. This is a collection of writings about the world of the theatre and includes pieces about Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, Arthur Miller, Michael Bennett, Noel Coward, Barbra Streisand, Ralph Fiennes and more.

Angels in America Parts 1 and 2

PART 1

There can be no doubt that Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is as great a play as you have heard. Part 1, entitled Millennium Approaches, which has just opened at the Walter Kerr, is triumphant—the finest drama of our time, speaking to us of a murderous era as no other play within memory

Its scope and daring, fully realized in George C. Wolfe’s superb production, send us reeling from the theater, convinced we must have witnessed some kind of miracle. As with all great stories, it evokes the three most beautiful words in any language: What happens next?

At the end of three and a half hours—and thirty mesmerizing scenes—I’m certain I was far from alone in thinking, “Tell us what happens next! Bring on part 2!” The angel-messenger has arrived, crashing through space and closing part 1. That’s some end, some fantastic beginning.

Heralding what? Perhaps hope, or salvation, in this contemporary epic cradled in sorrow. Yet the story within Mr. Kushner’s vast apocalyptic canvas is intimate (and often wildly funny). It is ultimately mind-bending. There is one gay couple: a young Jewish self-loathing liberal and courthouse word processor who deserts his AIDS-stricken WASP lover. There is a married Mormon couple: a Republican lawyer and closet homosexual, working in the same courthouse, who deserts his unloved, hallucinating wife. And there’s Roy Cohn, Saint of the Right or Antichrist. From that small, unexpected base, Mr. Kushner weaves his glorious tapestry of an entire 1980s era and the collapse of a moral universe.

His specific message is a call to arms to the homosexual community in the AIDS era to march out of the ghettoized closet, as the rabbi in the opening scene reminds us of the heroic journey of persecuted nineteenth-century Jews from the ghettos and shtetls of Europe to the promised land of America. The spectral embodiment of Roy Cohn, mythical witch-hunter and closet homosexual dying of AIDS, offers pragmatic guidance to his prodigal son, the repressed Mormon lawyer. “Was it legal?” he says of his fixing “that timid Yid nebbish on the bench” during the Rosenberg trial. “Fuck legal. Am I a nice man? Fuck nice. You want to be nice or you want to be effective?”

Angels in America is subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” though I didn’t quite see it that way. It is memorably about heartlessness and responsibility during the Reagan years and beyond. Its supreme achievement is its portrait of America Lost, perhaps to be regained. In its richness and pain—“Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind. Reagan’s children”—I saw Millennium Approaches more as a modern morality play, with a debt to the guilt, justice, and iconography of the Old Testament rather than the New. It is, among other things, about good and evil, the disintegration of tolerance and cities and dreams. It asks: Where is God? And yearns for an answer, a prophet, a messiah, or salvation. It is, in its searing essentials, about love.

Mr. Kushner is too witty to be preachy. To the contrary, this near-feverish outpouring of visions and ideas is rooted in an episodic economy of means and a wonderful theatricality. For some years, I have been searching in vain for the new American drama of imaginative ideas, a form of magic realism transcending the bourgeois or the naturalism of movies. Angels in America is that landmark drama. It is, on the one hand, painfully concrete; on the other hand, it delights in the theater of magical images. The playwright is good-humored: “Very Steven Spielberg,” says the dying Prior Walter, an esthete, as the world splits open before his eyes (and ours).

This writer of plays is therefore justifiably playful. The ambitious narrative sweep takes us seamlessly from Manhattan to Antarctica. You cannot second-guess it for a moment. At the same time, the sheer pleasure Mr. Kushner takes in theater itself empowers him to establish his own conventions and take us anywhere he wishes. It seems reasonable and irresistible when, for example, the thirteenth-and seventeenth-century British relatives of Prior Walter visit his deathbed for a chat. Those two cheerful angel’s heralds, ghostly survivors of historic plagues, are a theatrical riot. So the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg appears to the dying Roy Cohn to say, “The shit’s really hit the fan, huh, Roy?” Actors double in virtuoso walk-on parts; actresses play male roles (not always, let it be said, with equal success). But the delight of a true ensemble is created and with it another dimension, a timeless troupe of traveling players.

I could have sworn that there were fifteen or so actors in the cast. In fact, there are eight. At least four of the performances scale the heights. The reptilian bravura of Ron Liebman as Roy Cohn gets as near to going over the top as all great bravura performances must. Is this the role of his career? It would seem brilliantly so (though watch for his brief reincarnation during the action as a campy Tartuffe). Stephen Spinella’s Prior is so transcendentally moving, it is impossible to imagine anyone else playing the role or equaling his mysterious saintly aura. Joe Mantello as Louis, lover of Prior and self-loathing posturing intellectual in search of easy absolution, is exactly right. Marcia Gay Harden as Harper, unloved Mormon in search of escape and a fantasy New World, was first cautious, I felt, in capturing the lyrical (her comic flair is beyond question), but she is a wonderful actress. David Marshall Grant, as her Mormon husband in tortured rectitude—again, terrific. So, too, the immensely gifted Jeffrey Wright as Belize, nurse, ex-drag queen, and conscience, a role that could easily spill over into high camp, but doesn’t.

That we have an ensemble as fine as this, and a production as great as this, is due to director George Wolfe and the spare, emblematic poetry of his design team (Robin Wagner, Jules Fisher, and Toni-Leslie James). In one astonishing scene, Mr. Wolfe frees the stage for a quartet of characters, the gay couple and the Mormon couple. They are separate, emotionally explosive scenes happening simultaneously, like a split movie screen. They are about the pain and death of love; both scenes, both worlds, become spell-bindingly one. At times, it is just incredible what we see at work and at play here.

I have run out of space and superlatives. Part 1 of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America has arrived! Bring on part 2! Save us!

PART 2

In the history of blind dates, we haven’t looked forward to anything with quite so much nervous anticipation as part 2 of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.

But the angel that crashed through the ceiling at the close of part 1 turns out not to be the fantasy-redeemer of our dreams. Mr. Kushner’s fabulous three-and-a-half-hour Perestroika is no sweet fable. It is more uncompromisingly realistic than that, more ambitious than part 1, denser, furious (and therefore funnier), sprawling, flawed, more challenging, a feverishly imaginative achievement. In its thrilling sweep and ambition and chaos, Angels in America remains the landmark drama of our time.

“Change! Change!” cries the old Bolshevik, blind prophet of the prologue at the dawn of the new age of perestroika, of the exploding of history and the death of all old orders, Reaganism included. Give the old Bolshevik warrior a new theory and system, and he’ll be there at the barricades! Apocalypse or paradise? Doom or change in the AIDS era? Mr. Kushner’s answer is that there is no perfect answer—no system, no book of divine revelation, no God, no savior-angels. In the turmoil, there is Truth, if you will, and the hope that humanity can change, confronting the wreckage and lies of our American lives. “Stop!” the angel seems to be saying on orders from above. “Stop, and look around you.”

Yet the more painful the message, the funnier Mr. Kushner becomes. Has there ever been a more mesmerizingly comic and ultimately pathetic figure than Ron Leibman’s prince of darkness, Roy Cohn? Now dying of AIDS in a Manhattan hospital, cared for by the ex–drag queen Belize (Jeffrey Wright, terrific again), dosed with AZT, symbol of illicit power and money, Mr. Leibman’s monumental monster creation can even touch on our sympathy. “Hold!” he screams to approaching death, as if pushing the hold button on his third arm, which is his phone—his wire to the outside world, as his deathbed tangle of tubes is his lifeline.

John and that leftish intellectual weasel, Louis (Joe Mantello), are the only characters in part 2 who do not grow and change. We cannot say, then, that Mr. Kushner is “unfair” to both the Left and the Right. But for me, the whining, overtalkative wimp Louis is a case of a dramatic character who has outstayed his welcome. Only once does he speak with blazing conviction. Breaking with his new lover, the Republican Mormon lawyer Joe (David Marshall Grant), he pleads to passionate effect that gays are not a legal technicality but equal citizens. (And for God’s sake, think and do the right thing.)

How glad we are when Joe’s wife and Valium fantasist, Harper, finally leaves him in the dust, hopefully to get her ill-fated life in shape. Marcia Gay Harden has grown wonderfully as Harper, and gives another superb performance—as does Kathleen Chalfant, playing, among other roles, the Mormon Hannah Pitt, a sensible, generous mother, it turns out, and grace note of the play. The extraordinary Stephen Spinella could not be finer as the dying Prior. He’s wickedly comic. “The stiffening of your penis is of no consequence,” the angel tells Prior, who’s at the point of orgasmic ecstasy. “Well, maybe not to you,” he replies. At the same time, Mr. Spinella brings to his character a heroic dimension, taking the ravaged Prior from terrible fear, and even cowardice, to graceful understanding and courage in the time he has left on earth.

That’s a kind of miracle! And, let it be shouted from the rooftops, this is a tremendous production. In its fluent magic realism, George Wolfe and his team have created visions for us. Set designer Robin Wagner and lighting designer Jules Fisher have achieved their very finest work. The vast, dizzying canvas moves effortlessly from epic fantasy to reality—from mad dioramas at the Mormons’ Visitors Center to Roy Cohn ripping his IV from his body in a shattering nightmare image of blood and plague to the ultimate vision of heaven in chaos as a celestial San Francisco at the barricades.

Yet I feel in my gut that all concerned would have still killed for three or four weeks more work on part 2. In the heat of Broadway deadlines and Mr. Kushner’s urgent last-minute rewrites, there is a looseness to some of the writing within the colliding scenes. The muscularity of the drama dips, for example, in the reunion of Harper and her gay husband; the moving and forgiving kaddish for Roy Cohn, spoken with the help of the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, is undercut by a graceless “Sonovabitch!” and Louis’s amazement at being in bed with a gay Republican would be an easy laugh in underground theater. There can be too many jokes, though not necessarily in the sense of the emperor’s advice to Mozart, “Too many notes.”

I mean the missing note of the authentically spiritual. The angel—jokey novice—speaking in tongues, is as much an angel of death, offering the potential prophet Prior death. (Die to be reborn as prophet or savior.) In the most moving speech in the play, the dying Prior rejects prophetdom and chooses life: “I want more life.” And the heaven he witnesses shows the gods in disarray, and God heartlessly absent. I wish only that Mr. Kushner had brought the leading player onstage. Bring God on! For had there been a genuine debate between them, Prior’s choice of life on earth would have been more astonishing, the dice would not have been loaded, and this fantastic drama would have looked into the vision of light.

It is, if you will, the legitimacy of the spiritual that I feel is missing. And God knows how Mr. Kushner might have achieved that. But when in the quiet, peaceful, almost wistful end, we are left with the near-blind Prior and his friends by the stone angel of Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, it is his courageous spirit that speaks of longed-for change. In this messy, scintillating, turbulent drama of loss and betrayal, of an entire era of American life and death, his spirit asks for change in all of us, for understanding, commitment, and love. In its entirety, Angels in America has been an unforgettable journey.

Janet McTeer-Up-the-Stage

The great actor and the poor actor share this in common: they both chew the scenery. But the great actor does it gloriously and the poor actor poorly, and Janet McTeer does it very badly indeed.

I’m astonished by her Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s Doll’s House at the Belasco Theater, but for the wrong reasons. She not only chews the scenery, she beats up the furniture. It’s said by her admirers on both sides of the Atlantic that you cannot take your eyes off her. But that could also be said by her detractors. She is, if you will, rivetingly over the top.

The famously starched, repressed heroine of A Doll’s House—a Victorian woman in a patronizing man’s world—is played by Ms. McTeer as a wired, modern neurotic who seems to be on the showy edge of a nervous breakdown. The wish to humanize Ibsen’s heroine and feminist prototype is understandable. But the star actress proceeds at a manic coquettish frenzy in a performance of extraordinary vanity. There’s no nuance in her. For two of the three acts, there’s a strident, awfully blatant theatricality.

She’s a busy, externalized actress. She mugs, she fidgets, she flutters, she squeals, grimaces, giggles, chirps, and upstages. Described by Torvald as “a little squirrel,” Ms. McTeer therefore chirps in a cute approximation of one, with little squirrel hand movements to match. At other times, she flaps her wrists, or tosses her hair constantly like an aerobics chick, or—for some reason—hits herself in histrionic thigh-slapping. She leaves no gesture unturned.

She uses a near baby voice, or tries out what seem to be deliberately silly voices, in order, I assume, to make Nora jokily appealing and “child-like.” But there’s a difference between naïveté and twittering. For two acts, it seems, Ms. McTeer punctuates every other line with irritating nervous giggles. One wants to clonk her over the head, and shout: “Stop it! Stop it, dear!”

Yet her Nora has received many awards and raves, and she has been compared in London to the young Vanessa Redgrave. They are both tall. Ms. McTeer, who isn’t petite, is in fact so tall that when she embraces Torvald, she performs the equivalent of the Bunny Dip. There’s no period atmosphere in her Nora. The act 3 confrontation with the broken Torvald—and the heroine’s fabled emancipation—is thankfully uncluttered, but her vulnerability is artificial. Ms. McTeer’s voice of protest is too strong. She is a Nora who would eat Torvald for breakfast, and does.

Anthony Page’s production, which comes to Broadway via acclaim in the West End, is right to see A Doll’s House as the drama of a wrecked marriage rather than a manifesto of women’s rights. It’s a great play, not a good one. That is, there are more creaky plot devices and coincidences than the dropped handkerchief in Othello. Yet in the problem play’s ultimate showdown, Ibsen achieves greatness. He anticipates feminism; without reading Freud, he anticipated modern psychology.

Nora isn’t a blueprint for women’s liberation, however (and Ms. McTeer, obviously, doesn’t play her that way). But the claims that this is a new approach to A Doll’s House are exaggerated. Almost fifty years ago, Eric Bentley wrote that in its theme of the tyranny of one human being over another, “the play would be just as valid were Torvald the wife and Nora the husband.” Fifteen years ago, in a celebrated Adrian Noble production of A Doll’s House for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the play wasn’t seen narrowly as a pioneering feminist tract but as a tragedy of public and private role-playing.

Nora is the doll in the house: the admired object of desire. But in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Empire of the Stage
• Lunch with Gielgud and Richardson
• Noël Coward at Seventy
• Tranquil in Connecticut with Arthur Miller
• England’s Great Clown
• His Name Escapes Him
• In Memoriam Michael Bennett
• Peter Brook, Barbra Streisand, and Me
• Angels in America Parts 1 and 2
• Janet McTeer-Up-the-Stage
• Hurry Up Please It’s Time
• The Great Gambon
• Mr. Brantley’s Torsos
• The Ralph Fiennes Hamlet
• We Like It a Lot
• The Mayfair Medea
• Who Was the Jew Shakespeare Knew?
• Anything Goes with the Professor
• Art Is Good for You
• A Helluva Musical
• It’s Big! It’s Safe! It’s Full of Generic Symbolism!
• Whatever Happened to Class?
• Farewell, Carousel
• My Blood Brother and Me
• Sleeping at the Theater
• The Killing of Wonderful Tennessee
• How to Murder Your Mother
• Brave New World
• Safe Pedophilia
• The Sad Tale of Jack the Cat
• Brilliant Blues
• Holocaust Denial
• The Amazing Vanessa Redgrave
• The Still Subversive Joe Orton
• Theater Thingie of the Year
• Slumming with Sam Shepard
• No Tony for Julie
• What Is the Sound of One Hand Acting?
• Country Matters
• Oscar Wilde’s Brilliant Lunatics
• A-Plotz for David Ives
• No. 1 Dance Hall Chicken Inna New York City
• Lost in Suburbia
• Voltaire-Shmoltaire
• The Asterisk Problem: Sho**ing and Fucking
• Et In Arcadia Ego
• The America Play
• How America Was Lost
• These Gentle Artists
• The Jerry Stiller Three Sisters
• Needles and Opium
• The Three Ages of Woman
• The God of Lies
• Mametspeak
• How Good is David Mamet, Anyway?
• Beckettscape
• Robert Brustein’s Unfortunate Dance Lesson
• Everything Is Beautiful
• Pimp Fop Flop
• Hakuna Matata!
• Don’t Shoot the Composer
• A Great Electra
• Nicole Kidman, Live Naked Movie Star
• Judi! Judi! Judi!
• Harv the Marv
• Amazing Grace
• The Anglophile New York Times
• Iceman Cometh
• Act of Love
• Arthur Miller Comes Home
• Index