Fever Pitch.(The Shawl)(Theater review)

Among the many terrible realities to which David Mamet exposes us in his exceptional, calculated work, one theme stands out: suckers will never get a break in this wretched world. In the sixty-year-old playwright's fictional universe, the humane are too soft and dim-witted to survive; their tormentors chew them up with dry relish. Mamet treats the stage as a kind of bloody forum; the gladiators one finds there are skinny con artists, callow film producers, real-estate agents in cheap suits, and ghastly lovers who spar, using the author's hyper-stylized language as both spear and shield. Even to refer to some of Mamet's characters as "lovers" feels wrong--like calling a thief a victim. Mamet's protagonists do not love; they size each other up and assess what they can extract from each other--and the answer is usually money. If they show any physical tenderness at all, it's brief; they kiss, then withdraw, constantly reminding themselves of the primary rule of survival: Get or be gotten.

In Mamet's 1985 play "The Shawl," Miss A, a single woman, goes to a psychic for advice. It's unclear what she wants to hear from the medium, a con man named John, but that scarcely matters; what interests John is how Miss A thinks. "I'm not looking for a feeling--I'm looking for an equation," Mamet told John Lahr for a 1997 profile in this magazine. John the faux psychic, talking to his protege, Charles, echoes his creator's point of view:

JOHN: Look at her. (Pause.) She is unmarried. At her time in life. Why? She is bound. To what? An unresolved event. Her mother's death? Her question, she would ask the "spirit world," her mother left a fortune to her stepfather. Should she contest this will in the courts. Is this a question for the mystic? No. It hides a deeper one: this: how can I face my betrayal. How can I obtain revenge. Against the dead. Or: why did my mother not love me more? And so we help her. To answer that last question. , CHARLES: And how is it we do that?, JOHN: By telling her what she wants to know., CHARLES: And what is that?, JOHN: We don't know. We'll listen and she'll tell us . . . tomorrow.

It turns out that, as far as Miss A is concerned, John's "equation" is a bit off. When she hands him a copy of a photograph, he identifies it as an image of her mother--erroneously. Miss A busts him, exclaiming, "THAT'S NOT HER PHOTOGRAPH. I TOOK IT FROM A BOOK. . . . How can you prey on me? Is there no mercy in the world?" But Miss A's cry against injustice is also a kind of con. She's no victim. She needs John's lies, so long as she can control which lies he tells her. In a 1997 Paris Review interview, Mamet admitted to being attracted to con men and tricksters as characters, because he'd "always been fascinated by the picaresque." And, of course, making theatre is a kind of con as well. "The process of magic and the process of confidence games, and to a certain extent the process of drama, are all processes of autosuggestion," Mamet said. "They cause the audience to autosuggest themselves in a way which seems perfectly logical, but is actually false." But are feelings--the emotional lives of the audience, let alone of the characters--always something to be manipulated, in Mamet's world?

The alienation we feel at the end of "The Shawl" is taken one step further in Mamet's 1988 three-character study, "Speed-the-Plow" (in revival at the Ethel Barrymore, under the direction of Neil Pepe). "Speed-the-Plow"--like "The Shawl"--is a play about belief, this time in the realm of golden idols and smashed dreams: Hollywood. When we first meet Bobby Gould (Jeremy Piven, making his Broadway debut), he is sitting in an office that seems empty, despite the boxes and scripts littering the space. The emptiness is spiritual. Gould is a craven young studio executive who's just been given the power to green-light any movie, so long as its budget is under ten million dollars. Anything higher and he'd have to go to Ross, his boss, for approval.

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