David Mamet and Ben Jonson: City Comedy Past and Present

David Mamet and Ben Jonson: City Comedy Past and Present DOUGLAS BRUSTER American cntlcs often react chauvinistically to David Mamet's work, a response prompted, perhaps, by a perceived lack of a premier national playwright. More than one critic has revelled in Mamet's sense for Americana , echoing Jack Kroll's assessment of the dramatist as " a language playwright" whose " ear is tuned to an American frequency.'" And while the frequently guttural dialogue of plays like American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross has drawn its share of critical censure, more often than not Mamet has been lauded for situations, characters, and speech patterns that his champions are quick to label as quintessentially American. Praise of this kind, however, tends to institutionalize his work, removing the sting from Mamet's satire as it simultaneously promotes the cultural aspect of rus aesthetic achievement and disassociates itself from the brutal reality of rus dramatic world. An additional act of omission is made when we fail to recognize Mamet's connection with the long tradition of western drama satirizing urban venality, for the best of his work deals directly with capitalism and an ethical system perverted by greed. Although Mame!'s drama shares definite affinities with that of more contemporary playwrights - Chekhov, Beckett, Pinter, and Albee come immediately to mind - perhaps it possesses even stronger ideological, linguistic, and dramaturgical connections with the style and work of a more distant predecessor, to the city comedy and genius of Ben Jonson.' While a recent critic noted that Mamet's The Shawl comes in the tradition of The Alchemist and later dramatic satires, he went on to dub it "a significant postmodern attack on the place illusion occupies in our inner and external reality" (emphasis mine).' Certainly twentieth-century Chicago and Jacobean London are separated by an enormous gulf of distance: temporal, spatial, and cultural. To their respective dramatists, however, both represent the abstract City. Indeed, a comparison of the two playwrights' drama reveals significant similarities. By forgoing our insistence upon his national identity and waiving 334 DOUGLAS BRUSTER the extra-temporal status too often accorded contemporary dramatists, we may see more clearly David Mamet's place within the dramatic tradition. Further, we may comprehend as well the basic form of a genre arising in response to the relationship between money and sin - one which, Mamet suggests, currently dominates American culture. Certain typed characters, bearing different names and occupations, appear again and again throughout the whole of Mamet's dramatic works. One such character, the smoothly persuasive, sometimes belligerent charlatan figure materializing in American Buffalo as Teach, as three characters in Glengarry Glen Ross, and one in the slightly abbreviated The Shawl, seems to have captured Mamet's attention early on. We find him represented by several individuals in the 1970 play Lakeboat; two aging aspirants to the type in The Duck Variations (1972); and as Bernie Litko in his 1974 Sexual Perversity in Chicago.' In Mamet's recent film, House ofGames, the charlatan, Mike, is an actual con man. Yet only with one of his most recent and, perhaps not incidentally, most successful plays has Mamet specifically located his charlatan figure within the identifiable boundaries of capitalism. By dramatic definition no less than by financial necessity, every charlatan must have a gull. What was true for Renaissance city comedy remains valid for Mame!'s handling of comedy in a contemporary urban setting. In Sexual Perversity, Bernie's credulous other is an amazingly trusting Dan Shapiro, whom Mamet describes in the list of characters as "An urban male in his late twenties" (emphasis mine). As in Jonsonian city comedy, we find the archetypical myth of the ignorant country bumpkin reversed: it is because, and not in spite of, the fact that a character has spent all his life in the city that he is susceptible to the charlatan's incredible tales. In The Alchemist, Face and Subtle convince a host of credulous city dwellers of the possibility - rather, the certainty - of the philosopher's stone, the Queen of Fairies, and many other fantastic, supernatural exoticisms. Though their gUlls are greedy, it is mainly from the persuasiveness of their rhetoric that Jonson's two tricksters. are able to...