When David Mamet and Sam Shepard made their presence felt in the 1970s, it seemed as if they had lifted American theater out of an ennui as deep as Jimmy Carter's. Shepard, with a James Dean swagger and rock 'n' roll sense of danger, and Mamet, with expletives floating musically and comically from the mouths of his Chicago wiseguys and crooks, were the freshest arrivals on the American theatrical map since Edward Albee a decade earlier.
By the 1980s they seemed the artistic answer to the politics of the day. For Ronald Reagan it was morning in America; for Shepard and Mamet, mourning in America. Shepard's radically dysfunctional families made the Republicans' family values look like a lie of the mind. As the country embraced marketplace values, Mamet's cut-throat capitalists seemed to be saying that Americans had been buffaloed.Although Democrats now try to sound like Republicans when it comes to family values and New Deal spending, Bob Dole's unsuccessful attempt to rekindle Reagan's flame shows that most Americans know that the feel-good '80s weren't all they were cracked up to be.
The excellent Wellfleet production of Shepard's latest play, "Simpatico," and the less impressive movie version of Mamet's 1976 play, "American Buffalo," leave the impression that anti-bourgeois values of the two playwrights might not be aging any better than establishment sentiments.
"Simpatico" is actually a kissing cousin of "American Buffalo." In both, a couple of off-kilter scam artists give the audience their darkly comic perspective on the American dream. In "Buffalo," the down-and-just-about-out characters played with intelligence and finesse by Dustin Hoffman and Dennis Franz, debate a scam, constantly referring to what would be good, hard-headed business practice. In "Simpatico," the scam has taken place prior to the action with one character realizing the American dream and the other running away from it to a life of quiet desperation in Cucamonga, Calif. You won't be surprised to read that the emptiness of the pursuit of money, sex and power will be apparent to all by the end of the play.
It's unfair to reduce playwrights like Mamet and Shepard to mere politics, but the quarrel here isn't as much with their content as with how the freshness of their form has turned stale. And as that has happened, there's a creeping as well as a creepy suspicion that perhaps they never had that much to say in the first place.
Both playwrights are descendants of Samuel Beckett in the sense that Don and Teach in "Buffalo" and Vinnie and Carter in "Simpatico" are variations on Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot," a pair of characters searching for deliverance in a world that is, to one degree or another, absurd. Like Beckett, both playwrights have sought to capture that absurdity by creating a language and texture that are instantly identifiable as their own.
The problem is that without Beckett's genius, the result can be mannerism that grows as faded as the "American Buffalo" antiques in Don's store. When I first saw the play almost 20 years ago I was as exhilarated as anyone by Mamet's use of language. Now it just makes me want to take a nap:
Bob: I'll see you later, huh, Teach?
Teach: I'll see you later, Bobby.
Bob: I'll see you, Donny.
Don: I'll see you later, Bob.
Bob: I'll come back later.
Don: OK.
Teach: See you.
Pause. Bob is gone.
Teach: You're only doing the right thing by him, Don.
Pause.
Teach: Believe me.
Pause.
Teach: It's best for everybody.
Pause.
Teach: What's done is done.
Pause.
Teach: So let's get started. On the thing. Tell me everything.
Shake me if I start to snore.
Once you get tired of the language, the metaphor with business ceases to resonate.
"Simpatico" and Shepard's other plays are as rife with similar riffs. And Shepard and Mamet are getting increasingly bad at finding anything new to say within the narrow worlds they have created, if Shepard's latest, or Mamet's last play, "The Cryptogram," are any indication.
The two of them have provided so many enjoyable hours of theater that I'm reluctant to write them off, particularly since Mamet still has the ability to grab the audience by the throat - witness "Oleanna." But when you compare "Simpatico" and "American Buffalo" with the richness of Tom Stoppard's more traditional "Arcadia," even in its less than spectacular current incarnation at the Huntington, it's becoming increasingly clear which of the three playwrights is the real thing.