ALL MEN ARE WHORES
But still I marvel at the feeble, pretentious stuff he occasionally puts on the market. It makes me wonder if he isn’t, in fact, an unscrupulous capitalist himself.
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I’m thinking of plays like The Spanish Prisoner, staged in Chicago in 1985. In this brief dialogue, two men sit in overstuffed chairs and talk about a Spanish galleon that disappeared in a hurricane more than 300 years ago, laden with treasure taken from exploited people. The language is turgid and impenetrable, and the central anecdote seems utterly pointless. One critic called it Mamet’s attempt to pass off a few pages from his journal as a play. Mamet’s essays can be equally awful. His recently published collection, Writing in Restaurants, contains sentences like this: “It is not the theme of the play to which we respond, but the action–the through-action of the protagonist, and the attendant support of the secondary characters, this support lent through their congruent actions.”
Some of the scenes function as fairly full dramatic units. Others are as brief and isolated in their effect as haiku poetry. Scene three, for example, consists of two lines: “If we could reproduce like paramecia, do you think that we would not? When the secrets of the age were clear to him, he took it like a man, which is to say as one who has no choice.”
The Posse production benefits from three fine performances. Amelia Bornstein gives Sam sophistication and a touch of sass–a combination perfectly calculated to incorporate the masculine overtones of her lines into the distinctly feminine way she delivers them. Karrin Sachs plays Patti as vulnerable and slightly confused by the demands made of her in sexual relationships. And Thom Vernon uses his high energy and sincerity to create male characters who range from wide-eyed sexual neophyte to veteran of the war between the sexes.
