Sexual Perversity in Chicago and the Duck Variations: Two Plays

Rating:
Summary: Mamet at his weirdest if nothing else.
Review: "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" and "The Duck Variations" are two very strange plays and unlike anything else I've seen or read by the great David Mamet. Where as the rest of his material, Oleanna, Glengary Glenn Ross etc. tends to be comprised of long, metered scenes, usually no less than five or six pages, these two very short plays are quite the opposite. In SPIC each scene lasts for usually a page and a half at most, sometimes being as short as a paragraph. The scene's are relavent to one another but Mr. Mamet leaves much of what happens outside the scene up to the reader's/viewer's imagination. Simply put it is a pessimistic portrait of the relationship between men and women, drawing specifically on how our similarities as flawed sexual beings keeps us from ever truly achieving a lasting happiness. This is a simplified interpretation and just one of many to be had, but for now it will do. On a side note if any of you are thinking of reading this as a reaction to having seen "About Last Night," don't expect them to be too similar. There are some lines lifted out of the play and the story line is essentially the same however the film version added on a happy ending that Mamet simply isn't interested in here.

The Duck Variations consist of 14 short conversations between two old men on a bench, every single one of them revolving around ducks in some way. This is an incredibly strange piece that reads more a poem than a play. There are a number of different themes going on in here and David Mamet leaves it to you to decide what they are, as every seemingly poignant or insiteful line is quickly followed by a quick example of the character's human shallowness.

As most would expect the dialogue is very Mamet-y and to an unfamiliar reader would sound stilted and just downright bizzare. And in a way it is. He is constantly praised for his uncanny ear for dialogue, however I for one would be interested to see who he is listening to. That is of course not to say that it is bad - just very strange and often unnatural sounding. His characters repeat themselves often, dwell on fragment sentences, add strange interjections and curse quite a lot. The key to all of this is the actors and how they present it. I.e. the film version of Glengary Glenn Ross couldn't have sounded more natural and at the same time succeeded in creating a world of individuals so unusual and so unique that you can't doubt that they're real. This is where Mamet succeeds above and beyond all else and these two short plays display that admirably.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Wordsmith
Review: David Mamet proves time and time again that he has mastered the language of men and women alike. Sexual Perversity is an abrasive but honest look at the state of sex in the minds of adults during the post-collegiate and early career building years. Mamet, as in all of his plays, shows honest humanity in tangible, easily-believed characters. The language is obscene & perverse but horrificly true-to-life and natural. Working with nothing more thant stereotypes, he chisels out characters so real and so vivid as to leave the audience thirsting for more. David Mamet has proven himself time and time again that he is a not only the definitive analysis of pop culture and modern trends, but also a brilliant wordsmith as well.

Rating:
Summary: Whoroscope and the Fowl Permutations
Review: Forget *Swingers*, forget *High Fidelity*, forget Tarantino's trash-talking hoods, David Mamet got there way before these belated young Turks. *Sexual Perversity in Chicago* is a brilliant, in-your-face series of vignettes sloshing through the muck of modern relationships. Two men and two women lock horns in a lewd scrimmage of blackly funny narcissistic power-plays, a despairing search for flitting, short-lived solace and pleasure, blasted by cruelty, impatience, tooth-and-claw feral soliloquy on why the opposite gender is one-part vampire, one-part Machiavel, can't live with them, can't sell them for parts (tee-hee).

Metropolitan swingers circling the drain of mean-streets cynicism and tough-talking bachelorhood, trawling the muddy waters of singles bars and yuppie night spots, searching for that ephemeral ounce of pleasure in a world of subterfuge and delay, mind-games and cruel deception, an odium of broken expectations and buried dreams.... Funny as the play is, it's distressing to have our noses rubbed in this point-blank opprobrium of our own basest impulses, the Spirit of Revenge which contaminates many of our frantic attempts to love and be loved.

Refreshingly, the women in Mamet's play seem much more interesting than the men, if only because their cynicism is more richly varied, more intellectually pungent. As shellshocked veterans of the gender war, it remains difficult to decide whether Mamet's scenarios are A: exaggerated worst-case aberrations, or B: (gulp) true-to-life tableaux on how perversely we are prone to behave toward one another, a vicious circle of paranoid self-hatred razing the purlieus of conventional "happiness" (or post-coital afterglow, once the bar is dropped).

Mamet suggests that at the outer limits of cynical self-abasement, human beings will "experiment" with cruelty the same way an S&M enthusiast would assay with handcuffs and bullwhip, the minds and hearts of anonymous lovers beaten like a Teletubbie pinata with the broomstick of our own wounded narcissism.

*The Duck Variations* is a classic low-budget scenario about two post-Beckettian bumps on a log pontificating on life, death, and the migratory patterns of Midwestern fowl. In the mind's eye theater I was forced to cast Jack Lemmon and the late Walter Mathau as Emil and George, two grumpy old men shadow-boxing in the dusklands of existential twilight. Mamet seemed still unable (or unwilling) at this point to write a full-length, tightly plotted drama, but the fragmentary dialogue presented here is brilliantly caustic, evocative, piercing and droll. Emil's and George's sedentary anxiety over the park wildlife that play out and exemplify the human condition, their ability to sublimate the necrophobic terrors of old-fogeyhood with caustic wit and good-natured foreboding, is presented with dashing brilliance and aplomb, a wonderfully true friendship between two men skirting the edges of karmic inquiry. Written in Mamet's early twenties, *The Duck Variations* exemplifies the brash virtuoso cunning that would go on to contribute *Glengarry Glen Ross* and *Speed-the-Plow*, amongst other masterworks, and is still worth reading a quarter-century later. (Also recommended for young actors as an exercise in brevity, timing, precision, and economy of affect.)

All in all, this book represents Mamet-in-embryo, the birth of a playwright, another fine anthology of one-liners and intellectual jousts to make the reader's anxieties seem a little less peerless and unparalleled, a little less alone in the world.

Rating:
Summary: Whoroscope and the Fowl Permutations
Review: Forget *Swingers*, forget *High Fidelity*, forget Tarantino's trash-talking hoods, David Mamet got there way before these belated young Turks. *Sexual Perversity in Chicago* is a brilliant, in-your-face series of vignettes sloshing through the muck of modern relationships. Two men and two women lock horns in a lewd scrimmage of blackly funny narcissistic power-plays, a despairing search for flitting, short-lived solace and pleasure, blasted by cruelty, impatience, tooth-and-claw feral soliloquy on why the opposite gender is one-part vampire, one-part Machiavel, can't live with them, can't sell them for parts (tee-hee).

Metropolitan swingers circling the drain of mean-streets cynicism and tough-talking bachelorhood, trawling the muddy waters of singles bars and yuppie night spots, searching for that ephemeral ounce of pleasure in a world of subterfuge and delay, mind-games and cruel deception, an odium of broken expectations and buried dreams.... Funny as the play is, it's distressing to have our noses rubbed in this point-blank opprobrium of our own basest impulses, the Spirit of Revenge which contaminates many of our frantic attempts to love and be loved.

Refreshingly, the women in Mamet's play seem much more interesting than the men, if only because their cynicism is more richly varied, more intellectually pungent. As shellshocked veterans of the gender war, it remains difficult to decide whether Mamet's scenarios are A: exaggerated worst-case aberrations, or B: (gulp) true-to-life tableaux on how perversely we are prone to behave toward one another, a vicious circle of paranoid self-hatred razing the purlieus of conventional "happiness" (or post-coital afterglow, once the bar is dropped).

Mamet suggests that at the outer limits of cynical self-abasement, human beings will "experiment" with cruelty the same way an S&M enthusiast would assay with handcuffs and bullwhip, the minds and hearts of anonymous lovers beaten like a Teletubbie pinata with the broomstick of our own wounded narcissism.

*The Duck Variations* is a classic low-budget scenario about two post-Beckettian bumps on a log pontificating on life, death, and the migratory patterns of Midwestern fowl. In the mind's eye theater I was forced to cast Jack Lemmon and the late Walter Mathau as Emil and George, two grumpy old men shadow-boxing in the dusklands of existential twilight. Mamet seemed still unable (or unwilling) at this point to write a full-length, tightly plotted drama, but the fragmentary dialogue presented here is brilliantly caustic, evocative, piercing and droll. Emil's and George's sedentary anxiety over the park wildlife that play out and exemplify the human condition, their ability to sublimate the necrophobic terrors of old-fogeyhood with caustic wit and good-natured foreboding, is presented with dashing brilliance and aplomb, a wonderfully true friendship between two men skirting the edges of karmic inquiry. Written in Mamet's early twenties, *The Duck Variations* exemplifies the brash virtuoso cunning that would go on to contribute *Glengarry Glen Ross* and *Speed-the-Plow*, amongst other masterworks, and is still worth reading a quarter-century later. (Also recommended for young actors as an exercise in brevity, timing, precision, and economy of affect.)

All in all, this book represents Mamet-in-embryo, the birth of a playwright, another fine anthology of one-liners and intellectual jousts to make the reader's anxieties seem a little less peerless and unparalleled, a little less alone in the world.

Rating:
Summary: sexually perverse
Review: I find Mamet's plays sexist, racist, homophobic and aurally irriating. Sexual Perveristy in Chicago is no better. I don't know how he keeps getting the glowing reviews that his plays garner. I could list many plays that never got the glowing reviews Mamet's plays get - that are a thousand times more deserving. I keep reading his plays with an open mind, trying to find in it the reason for the hype, and i've never once found it. gather your own opinion, but I to this day I have not found one redeeming quality in his work, and I think this play is probably the worst as far as sexism and close-mindedness goes.

Rating:
Summary: Sexaul Perversity-A play for the public
Review: I found Mamet's plays to be different to the norm, they are not for the Shakespearian lover who expects the usaul 'neatness' of a play. Mamet practised the art of realism and this definately is portrayed during the book. This is a MUST for the modern day theatre lover who requires something a bit different from the 'norm'.

Rating:
Summary: SO BAD I HAD TO WRITE A REVIEW
Review: I wish i could give this no stars because I was very dissapointed. I got "Sexual Perversity" thinking it would be as good as the movie "About Last Night". Wow, was I wrong. The dialogue is disheveled and the only character worth any praise was Bernie. I read it and if I never saw the movie I would never know what it was about. There is no plot and the scenes are so short and abrupt you never know what you just read.

Take my advice and do not purchase this book. I am in acting and I would not even pay a dollar for this book. There is no material to work from.

Don't buy - you will be deeply dissapointed like me. Too bad because I really like David Mamet, but I don't even want to read "Duck Variations" or anything else he wrote. I read "Oleanna" and I thought it was original. NO MORE MAMET for me, until he can pull a 180 and twist my opinion of him around!

Rating:
Summary: Nature, the Duck, and Death
Review: Nature, the Duck, and Death...is it all morbid useless talk? Not to David Mamet. In his play, The Duck Variations, the true ways of this fowl creature are discussed humorously, leaving the audience or the reader in stitches. I personally used an excerpt of this piece this past year for duo interpretation for my speech and debate team, and I promise that these ducks never let us down. A great play for those who like different approaches to theatre.