Pay and Play.('Mauritius')(Theater review)

Theresa Rebeck is a slick playwright; in fact, she's so slick that Gucci wears her shoes. Her scenes have a crisp shape, her dialogue pops, her characters swagger through an array of showy emotion, and she knows how to give a plot a cunning twist. Rebeck's latest play, "Mauritius" (directed by Doug Hughes, at the Biltmore), brings together two sensational forms of combat: the psychological battle between rivalrous siblings for property after a parent's death, which most of the audience understands, and the compulsive battle for ownership in the world of philately, which most of the audience doesn't. (The title of the play refers to "the holy grail of philately," a couple of uncancelled, misprinted African stamps.) When the play opens, Jackie (the excellent Alison Pill) is in possession of a stamp collection that her late mother gave her as a reward for her loyal care during a long struggle with cancer. Jackie is ignorant about stamps, but she's smart enough to know that life has dealt her a low hand and she wants to sell the stamps in order to better her own existence. All that stands between Jackie and a very big payday, we soon learn, is the question of whether or not the stamps are real. But what eventually becomes clear, in the course of this crowd-pleasing evening, is that the only fake here is the play.

"Mauritius" is, in essence, David Mamet for girls. In Mamet's "American Buffalo," a group of bumblers contrive to steal a rare nickel from a man who paid ninety dollars for it at a junk shop. With their idiom--a combination of ignorance and extravagance that emulates the badinage of big business--the lowlifes become a satire on the spiritual attrition of capitalism. "You know what is free enterprise," one of them says. "The freedom . . . of the Individual . . . to Embark on any Fucking Course that he sees fit . . . in order to secure his honest chance to make a profit." In "Mauritius," Rebeck channels Mamet's rhythms and his comic tropes of linguistic self-inflation. Dennis (Bobby Cannavale), the amateur collector who first spots the stamps in Jackie's collection, tries to leverage his discovery with a wealthy collector, the tritely named Sterling (F. Murray Abraham). "Fuck you, you little piece of shit," the barbarous Sterling replies to Dennis, who contends that a valise of Sterling's cash will be sufficient to bilk Jackie out of her stamps, which have an estimated value of six million dollars. "You bring me this fucking preposterous story about some girl with a-- Fuck you. Fuck you. Life is short, my friend, and it's getting shorter, you bring stories like this to the table." He goes on, "You ask yourself what do you want out of life? I advise you. At moments like this, you are stepping out over the abyss, for what?" When Sterling appears later, lugging an aluminum case bursting with spondulics, he weaves another web of Mamet-like flimflammery: "It is cash, it is under the table, there's no overhead, there's no lawyers, there's no fucking accountants here, to drive you and me fucking crazy with their nonsense. That's added value."

Rebeck mines a lot of amusement out of the permutations of the business deal. When Dennis finally gets all the parties around the table, the pragmatic Jackie demands cash just to show Sterling the stamps. Sterling balks. Dennis prevails upon him to ante up. "When the river stops flowing, all the fish die," he says. But, where Mamet's play was an act of penetration, Rebeck's is an act of prestidigitation, a confidence trick. In this ersatz but entertaining sleight of hand, it's the audience that gets robbed--of the revelations of character and of feeling that a play should provide.

From its first beat, "Mauritius" seems to me psychologically bogus. Clutching the album, Jackie stands just inside the threshold of a stamp shop, trying and failing to get the attention of the persnickety owner, Philip (the deft Dylan Baker), who sits reading a book about twenty feet away. She launches into an expository monologue that lasts more than a minute. Reader, when was the last time you spoke to someone at length across an empty room without making eye contact? Jackie may ...