The Devil and David Mamet: Sexual Perversity in Chicago as Homiletic Tragedy

The Devil and David Mamet: Sexual Perversity in Chicago as Homiletic Tragedy DAVID SKEELE It has frequently been noted that David Mamet is a moralist, a keen social critic who uses the groping inarticulations and dizzying verbal constructions of his characters to form a chorus of complaint against the spiritual emptiness at the core of America. What has less frequently been noted is that Maniet is sometimes very nearly a medieval moralist, using themes, structures, and characterizations that recall actual morality plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The influence of medieval drama is perhaps most overt in his Bobby Gould ill Hell, a play which features the Devil as a character and a plot lifted directly from the medieval morality formula. Some of his earlier works, however, foreshadow this appropriation of morality-play techniques, and in fact they express the debt in subtler, more interesting ways. Perhaps the most intriguing example of this medievalism in Marnet's early works exists in his Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Virtually every element of this play,'from its title down to its structure and characters, contains clear echoes of the medieval morality play, and more specifically, of the sixteenth-century subgenre known as the "homiletic tragedy.'" ". Before proceeding to make specific comparisons between Sexual Perversity in Chicago and the earlier dramatic forms, it might be useful to offer a general description of the qualities that define both the morality play and the homiletic tragedy. In the well-worn words of W. Roy Mackenzie: "A Morality is a play, allegorical in structure, which has for its main object the teaching of some lesson for the guidance of life, and in which the principal characters are personified abstractions or highly universalized types.'" Examining these elements one at a time, the moralities' "lesson for the guidance of life" tends to vary little from play to play. It usually consists of a warning about the dangerous temptations to sin which surround us, coupled with reassurances Modern Drama, 36 (1993) 512 The Devil and David Mamet that redemption is always possible, no matter how great the fall. The "personified abstractions" and "universalized types" are similarly formularized, tending to fall into three different categories. First, there are rhose representing specific virtues or forces of good - allegorical beings such as God, Good Angel, Mercy, Temperance, and Pax. Second, there are those from the other side of the fence, characters representing the forces of iniquity - Bad Angel, Mischief, Worldliness, etc. The actions ofthese forces are usually orchestrated by a leader - either the Devil himself or a particularly potent allegorical evil who is sometimes simply referred to as Vice. The third category is of course the protagonist, the "universalized type" representing all of humanity, known variously as Man, Mankind, Everyman, and Humanum Genus. The "allegorical structure" that Mackenzie speaks of is generally Psychomachean in nature,3 and the allegory it enacts is usually that of a "war" between vice and virtue for the soul of mankind. One might add that this structure is also essentially comic - the obstacles and complications resulting from the protagonist 's sins are eventually resolved by a kind and forgiving divinity who ends the play by welcoming him into heaven (in this regard, the morality play surpasses traditional comedy, not only implying "happily ever after," but actually assuring it). As its name suggests, the homiletic tragedy differs in structure from its comic prototype. Homiletic tragedy was a fairly late development, reflecting the sixteenth-century rise of Calvinism and its attendant emphasis on the solitude of the individual in dealing with his or her own spiritual fate. In plays of this type, far less stress is placed on redemption, far more on punishment . While these dramas still feature a protagonist who is guaranteed entry to heaven at play's end, they differ from their predecessors in that they also feature a second protagonist, whose fate is a tragic mirror of the first. An unrepentant sinner, he inevitably winds up being driven off, his Vice in tow, to.suffer the eternal torments of hell. This dark plot twist is important, for it is in this tragic form that the morality play has the most relevance to Sexual Pelliersity in Chicago...