From the Artistic Director
The 2007-08 season has opened with new work being born in our Incubator, and will end with a new musical taking flight in the spring. For the meat in middle, we turn to Mamet and Miller, two old friends of this theater; twin pillars of the 20th century theatrical cannon who continued to make major contributions in this new century as well. Along with a passel of new plays from each, Mamet and Miller have made recent public waves as well; Miller posthumously, with the startling revelation that he was father to a son with Down's Syndrome whom he institutionalized a week after his birth in 1966 and never acknowledged nor visited. Two years after this birth, Miller would write The Price which would contain the potent themes of denial, filial neglect, abdications of responsibility, and self-appointed martyrdom. Our spring production featuring Robert Prosky and his sons offers the opportunity to gain a major new insight into the personal and public issues America's foremost Jewish playwright wrestled with in (what we now may come to realize was) a veiled, but no less compelling, manner. In fact, we may find in The Price even more complexity and humanity than before, and, in this way, the controversy surrounding Miller the man may shine new light on his work.
David Mamet, who, in his 1984 Pulitzer Prize winning play about business, Glengarry Glen Ross, picked up the mantel from Miller as the nation's foremost American-Jewish playwright, has been opening eyes with the recent publication of a book on Jewish identity called “The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews” (Nextbook/Schocken). It's something of a wicked book ridiculing American Jewish liberal guilt, presenting the reader with a fierce worldview that sees the Jews as a historically despised people who are being betrayed by self-hating assimilationists. The book is a shocker, with its unvarnished worldview of Us and Them, Black and White, Good and Evil, and has received its share of angry reactions (we'll be talking about it all much more on our blog and in our Sunday discussion series).
Much more illuminating than Mamet's recent forays into Jewish commentary have been his characterizations of Jews over the years who've been deftly overheard, captured in their milieu doing business, either in real estate (as with Shelly the dream Levine in Glengarry) or in Hollywood, in the riotous personalities of Charlie Fox and Bobby Gould, in Speed-the-Plow. We've met Bobby Gould before, of course, in The Old Neighborhood (which produced our first real success at Theater J in 1999) where Bobby and another Jewish buddy waxed nostalgic for the old days on the South Side of Chicago and the old ways of Europe from another century. Bobby Gould's character has appeared elsewhere, as a Jewish cop in the film Homicide, and as a deceased emissary to the underworld in Bobby Gould in Hell. But it's in Speed-the-Plow, the perfectly constructed comedy about Hollywood, where Mamet got the character of Bobby just right. He got a portrait of the Jew in motion, in business and in the bedroom; a portrait of power, envy, fear, and longing.
Mamet's a brilliant artist. In prose pronouncements, he sometimes becomes a character himself, issuing forth maxims he may have no business uttering and not entirely making the case that the Jew has a right to his vitriol, his anxiety, his sacred aspirations. But in the plays-and this play in particular-Mamet dramatizes middle-aged anxiety, anger, and the yearning for spiritual transformation with an artfully undulating language like nobody else. This play, more than any other, is a linguistic pas-de-deux between Mamet the Pugilist and Mamet the Rabbi, prone to existential musings that, at first blush-like the prose of the East Coast Sissy Writer-may seem abstract-but as imbibed and affirmed by Karen, the neophyte disciple with the super-charged agenda of her own, contain the emotional DNA, and truth, of our age. Yes, it's a wicked comedy about Hollywood and, by extension, our hunger for striking it rich and making it big. But more than that, Mamet has written a study of men and women in motion; of Jewish boys on the make with their backs up against the wall, praying for material and spiritual salvation.
With this major artist at the center of a literary controversy, we return to the dramatic work that makes this artist worth arguing about. Let's continue to shine new light on great work all season long.
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