I've had a lot to comment on about this play to friends in rather colourful language not entirely appropriate to the tone I've been trying to set for this blog (and at least mostly succeeding). I am increasingly of the opinion that David Mamet is mostly driven by the urge to give voice to the worst possible stereotype of the entitled white American man, in a variety of ages and social situations. The blatent misogyny in this particular play might be shrugged off in part as merely a sign of the era in which it was written, but I found much of the interaction between the men and women throughout to be almost painful when read as a female today. One woman is very nearly assaulted on stage by a man, and then her friend and his friend hook up into what turns out to be a pretty ugly and uncerain relationship. That eventually breaks up, and we're treated to the two lads basically letching to each other about every ass that walks past them by way of consoling the newly single guy. And, curtain. Nobody has really gained anything other than a new neurosis or two for the ladies, and another notch in the bedpost for Hookup Guy.
I wasn't allowed to watch soap operas as a kid, and perhaps that ingrained in me a deeper discomfort with stage and paper stories as well as television which deal with small, gossipy plots set in the real and present world happening to unremarkable characters. These are the situations I shied away from at school when they happened to me, my books and films and plays were an escape from that world and my tastes as I've grown up haven't changed much from that drive for escapism. My aversion to the genre, though I'm not sure that's even an apropriate term for it, does seem to come up short against a lot of recently-written drama. I've come to realise my taste in film has become narrower still, ruling out almost anything that isn't epic fantasy action, animated, 3D or all of the above. And nearly all of the "straight drama" I've seen in the last decade focussed on an author I loved growing up in some way. Partly that's a cycle - films advertise similar films, and I end up blinkered to at least half of the new releases simply because I don't know anything more about them than a name on the billboard. In a way, this project has started to address the blind spots, but actually appreciating and enjoying those stories that fall into a category I learned to look down my nose at when I was nine is something a bit harder to do.
It seems somewhat unfair to simply dismiss a story as pointless, but if there was a take-home message other than perhaps a warning to women about the evils of the sexually active male of the species, then I missed it entirely. Once again, Mamet has got me irritated that I've had to sit through reading something I didn't enjoy engaging with. Not in a challenging, thoughtful way, but as an observer to a particularly low-speed train wreck which turned out to be improper use of the emergency break rather than a derailed fireball. At least I'm getting practice writing eloquent vitriol in a careful bid not to resort to swearing.
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