Broadway’s newest drama, The Anarchist, proves that David Mamet has not just become a conservative; he’s become a poet. Taking as his inspiration the 1981 Brinks incident where subversives from the Weatherman Underground were convicted for killing a Nyack, N.J., policeman, Mamet examines the motives of political radicals and the principles of social guardians. His antagonists are Cathy (Patti Lupone), who is awaiting parole after serving 20 years, and Ann (Debra Winger), the parole officer charged to adjudicate the parole. Their dialogue personalizes formal academic debate.

Poetics occur when Cathy, with her cagey dismissals of the system, ardently opposes Ann’s dedication to upholding the law. The contrast between beliefs and morals is defined by the personalities of these two women: one’s cunning versus the other’s sincerity; one’s passion versus the other’s wisdom. These women also argue those same positions subliminally, within themselves. Mamet’s language is almost chaste; the profane background of a heinous political act (“called protest though it was crime”) is enough. The women’s wrenching internal argument requires plain, though fervent, discussion.

The Anarchist’s dual character study recalls the tension of Strindberg’s seminal two-person drama The Stronger. This similar battle of psychological strength becomes relevant to contemporary political polarization. Mamet’s concerned with the way American citizens—ever more divided since the turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s and the 2000 presidential election—reveal passions that fuse them. Mamet provides dialectics about politics, but above all Cathy and Ann talk about personal morality. An interesting—and probably the most sincere—aspect of Mamet’s conservatism shows in his leanings toward religious reasoning, which he often expresses with biblical and Talmudic references. It is anarchist Cathy who expresses newfound religious fervor (“the soul is the spirit of God; it unites us”), a sign of Mamet absolving a straw man to argue with himself through the depths of our polarization.

Mamet himself directs this dry drama with severe simplicity, even as the discussion circles through Judeo-Christian tenets and Marxist/democratic principles, briefly toying with intellectual and sexual seduction. He needs powerhouse actresses to hold attention, and both Lupone and Winger do. The stage veteran provides aggressive energy, and the movie star supplies reflective subtlety. This contest of acting styles is itself Strindbergian. The result can be fine and moving, as in this exchange:

Ann: I want to save you because you have a soul.
Cathy: How do you know?
Ann: Because I have a soul.

In The Anarchist, Mamet uses his art to resolve the social tensions inherited from our political history. The play shrewdly avoids polemics (the failure of playwright Tony Kushner’s Lincoln) and goes deeper. As said in Mamet’s best film, the 1999 adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s Winslow Boy, “Justice is easy. Doing right is hard.”

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Photo by Scott Landis

Pity poor Shelley Levene, the has-been real estate salesman central to Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the corrosive nature of capitalism. Not only is pathetic Shelley, brought down to his knees from desperation, not too proud to beg his boss John Williamson for some more promising clients. But as portrayed by, improbably enough, Al Pacino, this shrinking violet Shelley isn’t even granted the dignity of a performer who can completely sell Mamet’s purple prose.

You’ll be forgiven for thinking the above is a misprint. Pacino has already appeared once, onscreen, in James Foley’s hyper-kinetic film adaptation of the Mamet play, released exactly two decades ago, in the powder keg part of slick salesman Ricky Roma. It’s one of the legend’s main mid-career film triumphs. Now, in a game of Broadway musical chairs (a game that can also be called “Hey! I Want A Tony!”), Bobby Cannavale has stepped into the Roma role that already earned Joe Mantegna and Liev Schreiber Tonys for their Main Stem at-bats, while Pacino moves into the Leven roles (previously played on Broadway by Robert Prosky and Alan Alda and in the Foley film by Jack Lemmon), re-teaming with director Daniel Sullivan after their awesome revival of The Merchant of Venice.

And yet despite more than six weeks of rehearsal prior to Saturday night’s opening, Pacino doesn’t seem to have found his groove as Levene, and Sullivan’s production loses its balance. Mamet’s play, awkwardly bisected into a first act that finds each of these 1983 Chicago salesmen at a local Chinese restaurant plotting for their survival in their own way and a second act in which the gang arrives at their North Side office following a burglary, offers a layered look at Levene, who must deceive himself, Willy Loman-style, into thinking he has momentarily lost his mojo only to eventually face his dire straits. From the outset in Sullivan’s production, looking convincingly dilapidated and of its period thanks to Eugene Lee, Pacino’s conciliatory delivery admits defeat. There’s no tragic fall in store for a character if we meet him at rock bottom.

Pacino bounces back a bit better in Glengarry’s second act, despite a few line stumbles, but Sullivan’s staging drains the show of its dog-eat-dog danger. If the first act feels slim, the tenser second act is robbed of nuance. Additionally, neither Pacino nor Cannavale mine Mamet’s staccato dialogue for their full dramatic effect. There is more cackle than crackle to their delivery. Impressively, Cannavale instills a consistent sense of respect in Roma for the veteran but floundering Levene, yet he is too transparently sly to be truly seductive; anyone, even duped client James Lingk (an outstanding Jeremy Shamos, as usual) could see his sleaze a mile away.

The rest of Sullivan’s cast acquits themselves far more convincingly. John C. McGinley, as gruff Dave Moss, digs into Mamet’s dialogue with the cutting delivery of a rap artist, and Richard Schiff delivers a thoughtfully tuned Broadway debut as the nebbish George Aaronow; Murphy Guyer is convincing in the minor role of investigative detective Baylen. It is David Harbour, though, who proves to be the MVP of this team as the exasperated Williamson, face flushed with the frustration of middle management. But these parts don’t all add up to a convincing enough whole. What should be a riveting look at sly foxes dancing as fast as they can only amounts to a lazy foxtrot.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Schoenfeld Theater, 236 West 45th Street. www.glengarrybroadway.com Through Jan. 20.

Photo by Joan Marcus

One can only assume that actresses with as much clout and freedom of choice as Patti LuPone and Debra Winger signed into The Anarchist, the new play written and directed by David Mamet that opened last night at the John Golden Theatre, sight unseen. How else to explain why two such notably discerning talents ended up committed to such a slight, unworthy show?

LuPone is Cathy, a radical who has been convicted of and imprisoned for a murkily described bank robbery as part of a Weather Underground-style group (she is modeled after Kathy Boudin and Judith Clark). Two police officers were murdered in the act. After having served 35 years, she pleads her case for parole to prison official Ann (Winger, in her Broadway debut). Her father is on her deathbed, and she would like to see him. We know little about Cathy – including whether she is to be trusted and has really found reformation through worship of Christ, but her plea is worth careful consideration. After all, had her crime not been committed under political motivations, she most likely would have already been paroled. Ann, meanwhile, distrusts Cathy, assuming she has been in touch with her unseen lover and accomplice, Althea. Cathy insists she has not. Which is true? Is Cathy still a threat? Is Ann being unfair, ruled by either an emotional or a political agenda?

Mamet’s production reveals this set-up to be far less enthralling than the description. Both characters remain ciphers; it is impossible to ever know with whom to side in Anarchist. We never learn if Cathy truly cares for her father or is just using his imminent death as an excuse – all we know is that the Jewish-born Cathy has rejected the religion and independent wealth into which she was born. Additionally, a work such as this cries out for institutional commentary on the prison system, on the notion of rehabilitation. There is none.  And it isn’t as though there wasn’t room left in the play to add such clarification. Mamet’s two-hander – barely an hour long – does little more than meander, both on the page and on the stage. He has directed his leads so that Ann and Cathy merely talk and walk around in circles, repeating themselves. And the playwright’s dialogue lacks credibly human voice — their recitative doesn’t remotely resemble the way people talk. Furthermore, all of the characters’ interruptions feel anticipated; they stop right before it is time for the other character to interject.

In addition to the Broadway diva’s landmark musical roles, LuPone has also proven to be a strong interpreter of Mamet’s work; her performance in The Old Neighborhood remains a major career triumph for the actress. And she has a sturdier grip on Mamet’s prosaic prose than Winger, who (distractingly clad in a lop-sided curlicue hairdo not seen since Marlee Matlin picked up her Oscar in 1987) sleepwalks through the role as though they were still in a table read. But they are caught in a net. There’s no way around it: this is an embarrassment of a show, and it is hard to fathom the hubris of a playwright who would allow innocent audience members to pay upwards of $125 each for a ticket to this claptrap. I pity all the talented but unknown writers deserving of a real estate on the Great White Way, people for whom a Broadway berth could prove a game changer for their careers and livelihoods, denied such a spot to make room for something like Anarchist. Cathy’s criminal guilt may remain unclear in the play, but there’s no doubt that Mamet should be convicted of the crime of theatrical squatting.

The Anarchist

John Golden Theater, 252 West 45th Street. www.theanarchistbroadway.com. Through Feb. 17.

Larry seeks answers about his life from three rabbis and these sessions give A Serious Man the structure of a vaudeville routine or a legendary ethnic joke. That’s also the Coens’ well of tradition—unsentimentalized.

Joel & Ethan Coen want you to remember this shot for a very long time.

The Coens admit their own Jewishness the way their best recent films (The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Ladykillers, The Big Lebowski) admit Americanness: with genuine feeling for the complexities, abundance and absurd conventions that give us our identity. More than social satirists, the Coens’ extraordinary film craft (cinematography by Roger Deakins, sound design by Skip Lievsay) gift wraps their genuine soulfulness. Once again, their heartfelt plot makes adventure of a character’s ethical struggle: Larry’s attempt to appease his troubled conscience.
Each rabbi session frustrates Larry (one tea-dunking sage drones, “Something like this, it’s never a good time.”), but he’s also brought deeper inside the tradition he inherited—which is the Coens’ way of clarifying both Jewishness and Americanness. Starting with a 10-minute Yiddish prologue set in fin de siècle Poland (it’s the most audacious movie prologue since Wes Anderson’s Hotel Chevalier intro to The Darjeeling Limited), the Coens saturate viewers in cultural memory. It’s like a parody of Fiddler on the Roof, embracing ethnic superstition and critiquing it simultaneously. The same double vision occurs when the film flashes forward to Larry’s 1967 setting where the Coens lay out the paradox of pop revolution (The Jefferson Airplane blaring through the earphone of a transistor radio) alongside Larry’s modest portion of the American dream (the straitened luxe of middle-class suburbia).

Contrasting Larry’s physics theorems with Hebrew letters on a blackboard and Larry’s medical exam with his son’s Hebrew lessons, condenses Jewish social transition more cleverly than the mysticism of Darren Aronofsky’s overbearing Pi. The first English dialogue heard characterizes this ethnic-immigrant progress in the language of professionalism—a detail as telling as any conceived by Bernard Malamud, Bruce Jay Friedman, Saul Bellow or Philip Roth. The major difference from those literary Jewish popular artists is that the Coens’ self-consciousness is guiltless. Even their Rashi quotation (“Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you”) contains such a sense of irony that it applies to the range of American experience. Consider that the film’s most symbolic image (Larry fixing the TV antenna on his roof) recalls Warren Beatty tending his rooftop weather vane in the Wasp conscience comedy Town and Country.

By situating Larry in a world of Jewish extremes (the needy brother, the solicitous head of his tenure committee, a rabbi decoding Jefferson Airplane as proverb or the overly intimate Sy Ableman whose self-righteousness gives the film its title), the Coens “accept the mystery.” They creditably ponder what’s left of faith in secular Jewish life. “How does God speak to us?” is Larry’s basic query. A rabbi’s regret—“I, too, have forgotten how to see Him in the world”—speaks to the absurdity Larry cannot comprehend. (It could also have been the moral of the Coens’ brilliant, cosmic Burn After Reading.)

A Serious Man opens concurrently with the Criterion DVD release of David Mamet’s 1991 film Homicide. It’s an instructive coincidence given the brazenness of the Coens producing what may be the most overtly Jewish movie ever made by a modern Hollywood studio and Mamet’s quasi-cop movie, which primarily examines the issue of Jewish guilt—it’s Mamet’s bid to be a serious man of Jewish cinema. Through Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna), a homicide detective who stumbles upon an American underground running guns to Israel, Mamet internalizes the Jewish persecution complex as a sense of masculine (existential) failure. It’s not a progressive view, plus it’s humorless. But when it premiered at the 1991 New York Film Festival, Homicide was taken very seriously even though Mamet’s plot had recklessly mishmashed contemporary urban tensions between Jews and Blacks. (Homicide is a pale variation on his excellent play Edmond.) Mamet’s key trope, “It never stops/Against the Jews,” typifies an essentially political paranoia that has recently been refined and complicated in Munich; paranoia that the Coens now transcend.

A Serious Man rejects the bland Jewishness of Judd Apatow films; it’s similar to the black filmmakers’ project in Next Day Air, in which social stereotypes get burlesqued, yet are used to reveal an essentially moral exercise.

Integrity shows in the clean, airy light the Coens cast on Larry’s confused world and the parochialism they chide at the end of a wild tangent about “the goy’s mouth.” The Coens’ inimitable ability to portray the delusions of modern sophisticates shows definitively when a sexy neighbor asks Larry, “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?” Their post-coital, marijuana high is accompanied by the sound of a phonograph needle stuck in a groove. It’s the Coens proving that the groove of identity politics can also be a rut—yet they remain unstuck.

–
A Serious Man
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
Runtime: 105 min.

Homicide (DVD)
Directed by David Mamet