Mamet, Cornered in the Oval Office
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: January 18, 2008
You may have been wondering just how all those gagmeisters who make their livings contributing jokes to television talk show monologues and sketch reviews have been occupying their time during the long-lived writers’ strike. Well, one possibility would be that they have been funneling their one-liners — and not always their best ones — directly to David Mamet.
This is probably not really the case, since Mr. Mamet is a writer famous for doing things his way, or sneering in quotable contempt when forced to do otherwise. But in “November,” his glib and jaunty new play about a sitting president, which opened on Thursday night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, darned if his way doesn’t sound an awful lot like Jay Leno’s way.
President to his lawyer, regarding his rock-bottom poll numbers: “What is it about me that people don’t like?” Lawyer: “That you’re still here.”
President on possibility of being exposed for illegal acts: “I can resign tomorrow and my vice president — what’s his name? — will pardon me for crimes yet uninvented.”
Lawyer to president: “We can’t build the fence to keep out the illegal immigrants.”
President: “Why not?”
Lawyer: “You need the illegal immigrants to build the fence.”
Heard these before? So, I imagine, had most of the folks with whom I saw the show, which stars Nathan Lane (as the cheerfully corrupt, torture-happy president) and Laurie Metcalf (as his loyal, lesbian speechwriter). But that didn’t stop the audience from providing a wall-to-wall laugh track.
I suspect that people who tittered uneasily during the recent Broadway revival of the Mamet masterwork “Glengarry Glen Ross” are guffawing with side-slapping gusto during this production, which also stars Dylan Baker (as the president’s lawyer) and is directed by Joe Mantello. Maybe it’s because there’s a dearth of new scripted television comedy.
But even more, I think, “November” allows mainstream theatergoers to feel comfortable with Mr. Mamet in a way they haven’t before. After all, with George W. Bush’s own poll status bidding fair to rival “Gandhi’s cholesterol numbers” (as the play puts it), and headlines regularly promising new accounts of bad behavior in high places, much of America is on the same cynical page when it comes to national politics. The first glimpse of the Oval Office (rendered for the stage by Scott Pask) is enough to set off giggles.
“November,” which portrays Mr. Lane’s character, Charles Smith, as an unpopular president up for re-election, might have been an act of daring four years ago, when Mr. Bush was running for a second term. But in the twilight of his executive tenure, the American presidency has become a fish in a barrel for everybody’s target practice.
Despite the thick swarm of obscenities that are de rigueur in a Mamet play, there’s nothing remotely shocking about “November.” If the play had been acted in the old Mamet tradition of louts stewing broodingly in homicidal rage and exasperation, it would probably be more unsettling when the president disgorges racist, sexist and xenophobic diatribes.
But, hey, it’s Nathan Lane playing the president. Everybody loves Nathan, with his leprechaun smile, semaphore eyebrows and “how-sweet-it-is” inflections. People wind up rooting for Charles Smith even at his nastiest, the same way they once rooted for Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker or W. C. Fields as W. C. Fields.
Mr. Mantello, who directed the superb revival of “Glengarry Glenn Ross” three years ago, also directed Mr. Lane in the most recent revival of Neil Simon’s “Odd Couple.” And it’s the Neil Simon mode that prevails here. The production has the air of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch retro-styled to resemble a Sid Caesar comedy revue of the 1950s.
In other words, “November” is a David Mamet play for people who don’t like David Mamet. Being a long-time Mamet devotee, I cannot say I see this as a cause for rejoicing. Finding the singular Mamet voice (I mean, other than in its “#@$+*!” verbal punctuation) requires hard listening.
If you keep your ears peeled, you’ll be rewarded by passages that confirm Mr. Mamet’s enduring fascination with language as a shield and weapon. The speeches that Clarice Bernstein, Ms. Metcalf’s character, comes up with impromptu for her boss are smooth, canny embodiments of the seductive spiels that Americans can’t help falling for during campaign season. The president respects Bernstein (as he calls her), despite her “loathsome and abominable” sexual practices, because she’s a pro. You sense that Mr. Mamet feels the same way about her verbal facility.
Mostly, though, “November” — which also features Michael Nichols as one mad Indian chieftain and a winningly understated Ethan Phillips as a representative of turkey by-products manufacturers — is played as an easy laugh machine, with lines thrown buoyantly into the audience like brightly striped beach balls.
Mr. Lane, it goes without saying, knows exactly how to pitch such lines, with a time-honed style that allows him to put the maximum spin on poisonous zingers and still keep the audience on his side. He doesn’t create a real character here. (And he’s certainly capable of complex portraiture, as he demonstrated in plays like “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” and “Mizlansky/Zilinsky.”) But character, in any sense, isn’t called for in “November.”
Ms. Metcalf, a fine actress, does a variation on the doormat character she played for years on “Roseanne,” and does it well. Mr. Baker — who appeared earlier this season in a Mamet-play manqué, Theresa Rebeck’s “Mauritius” — keeps the requisite straight man’s straight face, even as the farce climbs into stratospheric absurdity.
For “November” features subplots — involving the rights of Thanksgiving turkeys, the Indians’ claims on Nantucket and a pork industry-sponsored “piggy plane” for the exportation of dissidents — of a surreal silliness that brings to mind another political satire, and I don’t mean “Wag the Dog,” the enjoyable 1997 film on which Mr. Mamet worked as a screenwriter.
No, I’m thinking of a show about a presidential candidate whose party is in trouble because it sold Rhode Island and decides to base its platform on love, something “that everybody’s interested in and that doesn’t matter a damn.” That’s the 1931 Pulitzer Prize-winning Gershwin musical “Of Thee I Sing,” which featured a book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind that reflected the country’s dissatisfaction with its leaders, including poor old Herbert Hoover, in the midst of the Great Depression.
Hmmm. Timing is everything, isn’t it? As for me, I might warm more to “November” if it were a musical. After all, Mr. Mamet’s favorite obscenities, with their simple Anglo-Saxon kick, are easily rhymed and thus far underused in the Broadway musical.
NOVEMBER
By David Mamet; directed by Joe Mantello; sets by Scott Pask; costumes by Laura Bauer; lighting by Paul Gallo; production stage manager, Jill Cordle; technical supervisers, Hudson Theatrical Associates; general manager, Richards/Climan Inc.; company manager, Bruce Klinger. Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Jam Theatricals, Bat-Barry Productions, Michael Cohl, Ergo Entertainment, Michael Filerman, Ronald Frankel, Barbara and Buddy Freitag, James Fuld Jr., Roy Furman, JK Productions, Harold A. Thau, Jamie deRoy/Ted Snowdon and Wendy Federman. At the Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
WITH: Nathan Lane (Charles Smith), Laurie Metcalf (Clarice Bernstein), Dylan Baker (Archer Brown), Michael Nichols (Dwight Grackle) and Ethan Phillips (a representative).
