The Old Neighborhood
In his program notes for Northlight Theatre’s beautifully acted production of David Mamet’s The Old Neighborhood, director Mike Nussbaum recalls starring in the Chicago-bred playwright’s The Shawl at the Briar Street Theatre opposite Lindsay Crouse, Mamet’s wife at the time. “We were having the usual difficulty of actors doing Mamet,” Nussbaum writes. “What do the words really mean? David never gives such mundane information in the script. [So] Lindsay and I …came up with some wonderful changes in the blocking…long meditative looks out the window, sharp diagonal crosses of the stage.” Mamet’s response, Nussbaum says, was to shout: “What the fuck are you doing? This is a play about two people sitting at a table!”
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The story’s point, Nussbaum concludes, is that “all plays are really about two people sitting at a table.” Other directors, actors, and playwrights may differ, thinking this a rule made to be broken. But Nussbaum is right on the money when it comes to Mamet’s plays. A spate of earlier Mamet works–recently revived by the off-Loop movement Mamet helped create, in what amounts to a minifest building up to this production, the local premiere of Mamet’s latest Broadway play–proves the point. For all their intricate plots and twist endings, outbursts of brutal violence and torrents of raunchy rage, these plays are about pairs of human beings trying (and usually failing) to make a connection through conversation. How people talk to one another is at the core of each play’s action: the breakup of two young lovers in the 1974 Sexual Perversity in Chicago (closing this weekend at the Wing & Groove Theatre), a murder spree in the 1982 Edmond (presented last month by the Hypocrites), the ruin of a college teacher’s career by accusations of sexual harassment in the 1992 Oleanna (seen earlier this month at Bog Theatre), and the burglary of a real estate office in the 1984 Glengarry Glen Ross (just extended at Raven Theatre).
These are the people who stayed home while Bobby Gould–previously seen as a self-absorbed wheeler-dealer in Mamet’s movie-industry satire Speed-the-Plow–went off to find fame and fortune. Bobby is a Jew trying to come to terms with what it means to be Jewish, a son and brother trying to understand his estrangement from his family, and a heterosexual grappling with his own misogyny and fear of intimacy. Now he’s home, reeling from the breakup of his marriage and distressed by the death of his mother–and by his stepfather’s hostile dealings with his sister, Jolly, whose own marriage seems destined to fail. (“What a good man,” says Jolly of her resolutely supportive husband, with a barely perceptible edge of contempt that signals an ocean of dissatisfaction.) Bobby–played with an oddly bland charm and a sexy yet superficial sensitivity by David Pasquesi–says little of his own troubles. Instead he’s an affable but passive sounding board for several characters: old friend Joey (Matt DeCaro), an overweight loudmouth who pines for his footloose youth; ex-girlfriend Deeny (Kelley Hazen), a glamorous, goyish ice princess clutching a green Marshall Field’s bag when she meets Bobby for a final farewell; Jolly (Linda Kimbrough), a woman dog-paddling in a psychic sea of self-hatred and festering grief over her loveless childhood; and Jolly’s husband Carl (Keith Kupferer).
