On Broadway, Mamet sees both sides of street
Playwright sees simultaneous hit and a big miss
NEW YORK — A stroll down West 45th Street in the theatre district is all it takes to understand the contradictory fortunes facing David Mamet, for years the heavyweight of bare-knuckled U.S. playwrights, as well as the producers who believe that loyalty to the writer makes good business sense.
At the Schoenfeld Theater is Mamet’s latest box-office hit: a revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, his Pulitzer Prizewinning crowd-pleaser from 1984 about an office of desperately scheming salesmen.
The producers are charging up to $377 a ticket simply on the drawing power of their star, Al Pacino, even before its official opening this weekend.
Two doors down at the Golden Theater is Mamet’s latest box-office flop: the première of The Anarchist, his 70-minute meditation on crime and punishment, which opened Sunday night to scathing reviews.
Just two days later, facing anemic ticket sales, the lead producers — the same ones mounting Glengarry — announced an imminent closing date.
The Anarchist is arguably the fastest failure of a major writer’s new play on Broadway since the early-1980s duds of the Pulitzer winners Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and especially Edward Albee, who was excoriated by critics for plays like The Man Who Had Three Arms that were less accessible than earlier works like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?
The demise of The Anarchist raises questions about the theatre business. Did the lead producers’ devotion to Mamet — and the hope of a lucrative Glengarry revival — mean staging a new work that wasn’t right, or ready, for Broadway? Should playwrights direct their own work, as Mamet did with The Anarchist and his last new drama on Broadway, Race?
And does Mamet, whose brawny, expletive-filled early plays remain stage mainstays decades after their debuts, still have something to say to a contemporary audience?
“A major headache behind the scenes on Broadway is the producer-playwright relationship, because sometimes you have to produce some things on Broadway that really aren’t good enough to be there, just to keep your writer happy,” said Elizabeth I. McCann, a producer who helped revive Albee’s career in New York in the 1990s, starting with Three Tall Women.
“Some playwrights call up their most reliable producers and say, ‘I want my play on Broadway,’ and it can end up there even if it’s going to be crucified,” she continued. “The loyalty to Mamet is a real risk because he’s not writing the hits that he once was.”
The collapse of The Anarchist has also revealed ill will inside the production, as can happen backstage when a show goes south.
Its stars, Tony Award-winner Patti LuPone and Oscar nominee Debra Winger, were stunned to learn Tuesday night that the show would close and believed that the producers were acting prematurely, according to two people familiar with their thinking, who did not wish to be named while describing private conversations. Winger was also frustrated with Mamet, these two people said, because she believed he had not given her enough guidance about her character’s intentions.
On Wednesday, Winger, in response to questions about Mamet, replied by email, “It’s a bigger story than you could ever fit in your daily column.”
She declined to comment further. Mamet did not reply to interview requests made to his assistant or agent.
LuPone delivered her own salvo, meanwhile, saying in a statement: “I’m so proud to have originated The Anarchist with David and I’m not happy that the producers pulled the plug on it, robbing potential audiences of David’s work.” She declined to elaborate.
At the centre of the crossfire Wednesday was Jeffrey Richards, a lead producer of both The Anarchist and Glengarry, who has made his name on Broadway during the past decade as the prime mover of many Mamet productions.
In an unusual move, Richards broke the bad news about The Anarchist just days before this Saturday’s official opening of Glengarry, overshadowing that other Mamet show. In an interview, Richards insisted that he could not delay the closing notice simply to spare Mamet’s feelings.
“We wanted to announce the news immediately so anyone interested in The Anarchist will buy tickets,” said Richards, who is closing that show Dec. 16.
The Anarchist is one of Mamet’s more abstract works, featuring a highminded debate between two characters whose backgrounds are revealed slowly — a Weather Underground-style prisoner (LuPone) and a seeming adversary (Winger) who has the power to release her.
Mamet’s other recent new plays were more grounded — the legal arguments over a rape case in Race, the machinations of a corrupt U.S. president in November — and yet none have approached the popularity of earlier works like Glengarry and another boys-behaving-badly masterpiece, Speed-the-Plow.
His track record lately on Broadway has been mixed: Commercial success with Race along with flops like the 2010 revival of A Life in the Theater (both produced by Richards) and the 2008 revival of American Buffalo, which closed even more quickly than Anarchist will.
While some playwrights criticized Mamet on Wednesday for ponderous plays — “they have become reactionary polemics,” said Jon Robin Baitz (Other Desert Cities) — others said he remained an important and original voice.
“He’s had a huge influence on American playwriting, including on my own work,” said Tony Kushner, a Pulitzer winner for Angels in America.
Asked if he had no choice but to bring The Anarchist to Broadway, given his long-term relationship with Mamet, Richards would only say, “I wanted to produce The Anarchist and so did my partners.”
The Anarchist stands to lose its $2.6-million capitalization from investors, but Richards hardly considers this a reason to reassess his relationship with Mamet: He has his own revival of American Buffalo in the works for Broadway.