BOBBY GOULD IN HELL
at the Preston Bradley Community Center
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Mamet still has one of the most acute senses of rhythm and dialogue in 20th-century drama, but he has also become one of the sloppiest writers around. He is always clever and entertaining, but his plots are frequently contrived and require great leaps of faith. From the slip of the tongue that gives away Lindsay Crouse’s intentions in House of Games to the car key fortuitously discovered on the dashboard of a stolen car in Things Change to the many puzzling offstage decisions in Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet’s plots bend and scrunch their characters. He’s also given to long stretches of circumlocutory speech making, in which relatively simple ideas are muddled in term-paper language. At his best Mamet’s a modern Hemingway. At his worst he’s my senile Hebrew-school rabbi.
All we know is that Gould is in hell. It may be just a mental hell, or it may be the genuine article. We also know that Gould may or may not have shoved a toaster up the hindquarters of the woman he slept with after telling her he loved her. Like most of Mamet’s female characters, Glenna arrives and departs as required by the plot, offering a few glimpses of Gould’s character but nothing conclusive.
The stormy, incestuous relationship between Eddie, the tough cowboy, and May, the woman who’s run away from him, is played out against a background of surreal monologues and unexpected plot revelations. The couple feud, make up, and use May’s new boyfriend, the oafish Martin, as a pawn–recalling George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? All the while their actions are observed and commented on by a strange old man whittling in his rocking chair, who seems to know a lot more about the pair than he initially lets on.
