David Mamet's Early Plays: Language, Alienation, and Postmodernism

Sexual Perversity in Chicago: Plot and Fractured Narrative

From the perspective of pure plot, David Mamet's 1974 play Sexual Perversity in Chicago is not exactly easy to summarize — though this difficulty is formally built into the play itself, which quite consciously rejects a standard narrative flow from one event to another in favor of a cut-up, collagistic style that rapidly jumps between scenes and events. This sort of experimentation is hardly new in creative works and was, in fact, a mainstay of modernist literature in the early part of the twentieth century, but it can still be jarring in the realm of theater, where audiences often expect an emphasis on plot and narrative vision. Mamet's play, by contrast, prefers to eschew these things in order to suggest something like the fractured nature of our own existences. Rather than letting plot hold the interest of viewers, he relies on witty, exciting dialogue and on making each episode in the play motivating and entertaining in and of itself. This approach does place a great deal of responsibility upon the viewer, who must piece together the play's jumbled plotline independently, but the basic elements are fairly clear.

The main characters are Danny (the protagonist), Deborah, and Bernie. The story largely revolves around the meeting between Danny and Deborah and the subsequent development of their interaction into a romantic relationship of sorts. The plot follows one of the most basic clichés in storytelling — the "boy meets girl" storyline — yet it does not follow the typical arc of the romantic comedy in which the boy loses the girl only to win her back. Danny and Deborah's relationship does develop; they even move in together. But they break up and never reconcile. In a sense, the story is a fractured bildungsroman about Danny losing his romantic innocence; from another vantage point, it is a powerful story about our basic alienation from other people.

The cut-up style of the play, with its wild jumps made without any real orientation, mimics this alienation. The play's fractured narrative also mirrors the fractures that occur constantly between characters — such as in Danny's difficult interactions with Joan and, more obviously, his final break with Deborah. Much as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman attacked the myth of the so-called American Dream, Mamet's play attacks the romantic ideal, especially in the wake of the sexual revolution, in which people often live together and break up instead of marrying and remaining monogamous.

Alienation, Romantic Idealism, and Biographical Context

This focus on alienation and the dissolution of a love relationship may stem partly from Mamet's own experience as a youngster, when his parents went through an acrimonious divorce. One could easily imagine how this primal trauma might reverberate through his dramatic work and lead him toward an ultimately pessimistic view of love relationships. Given his background, it is difficult to imagine how Mamet could have reacted otherwise to traditional romantic narratives, since the negative examples he witnessed in his parents proved that not all dramatic tales have a happy ending. Moreover, this experience likely sensitized him to the increasing trend toward the easy dissolution of love relationships that, only a generation earlier, would have been considered necessarily lifelong.

Mamet's play was one of the first to gain him notoriety. Although he wrote it in 1974, it was not performed more widely until 1976. It is quite commonly paired in performance with another of his early plays, The Duck Variations. More recently, a new version of the play opened on May 13, 2003, at the Comedy Theatre in London, starring Matthew Perry of Friends ("Sexual Perversity in Chicago"). The play opened to fairly good reviews, and several sources praised Perry's performance as surprisingly subtle.

The other well-known version of Sexual Perversity in Chicago is the adapted film version starring Demi Moore, produced in the mid-1980s. The movie essentially stripped the Mamet play of everything that made it vibrant and interesting artistically, retaining almost solely the plot and some of the anecdotes. Since plot was never the strong element of this play, the movie became a turgid romantic drama that was neither particularly interesting nor powerful. The film does at least retain the final moment of the play in an "open-ended climactic scene [that] suggests that this state of affairs may change" ("About Last Night").

The Duck Variations: Absurdism and the Limits of Language

The Duck Variations is a play more obviously indebted to Samuel Beckett. It involves two aged characters sitting on a bench and pontificating about the behavior of various ducks. The action is more obviously philosophical and figurative at heart, but it is similar to Sexual Perversity in Chicago in that it is powered not by narrative but by dialogue. Much of the sadness in The Duck Variations is also mitigated by the absurdity of the characters, the absurdity of the premise itself, and the wildness and ridiculousness of both their ideas and the dialogue. In many ways, the dialogue itself is the obvious main character in this particular work.

The play considers many themes similar to those in Sexual Perversity in Chicago, most specifically the theme of alienation from other people. The behavior of the waterfowl is a fairly obvious metaphor for the study of humanity and, in such absurd relief, does not speak particularly optimistically of human behavior. Beyond this, however, the play reveals a deeper meaning: an alienation both from truth and from ourselves. As the characters demonstrate, the fact that we can only express ourselves in inherently imperfect language cuts us off from true knowledge. We can never fully know the depth of our own subconscious selves and are therefore alienated from ourselves as well as from others.

The Duck Variations also opened in 1976. Perhaps because of its more obvious debt to earlier dramatic works — such as Edward Albee's Zoo Story and Beckett's plays — and because it does not deal with controversial or literally "sexy" material, it has never enjoyed quite the same success as Sexual Perversity in Chicago. It nonetheless helped to establish Mamet and retains a great deal of critical respect. As noted above, the play has often been performed alongside Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and the two are frequently regarded as companion pieces, perhaps because both ultimately depict the interactions of alienated men who end up alone. One could almost imagine that, whereas Sexual Perversity in Chicago depicts two such alienated and lonely men when they are young, The Duck Variations is simply a play about those same two characters once they have grown old.

References

"About Last Night." MSN.com. Retrieved November 5, 2003.

Frey, Hans-Jost. "On Presentation in Benjamin." Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions. Ed. David S. Harris. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996.

Greimas, A.J. "The Love-Life of the Hippopotamus: A Seminar with A.J. Greimas." On Signs. Ed. Marshall Blonsky. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1985.

Harland, Richard. Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes: An Introductory History. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Honderich, Ted. Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

"Sexual Perversity in Chicago." Retrieved November 5, 2003.