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Title: Sexual Perversity in Chicago and the Duck Variations: Two Plays by David Mamet ISBN: 0-8021-5011-X Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.17 (6 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: SO BAD I HAD TO WRITE A REVIEW
Comment: 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: 4
Summary: Whoroscope and the Fowl Permutations
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: Brilliant Wordsmith
Comment: 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.
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Title: Oleanna : A Play by DAVID MAMET ISBN: 067974536X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 04 May, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: American Buffalo: A Play by David Mamet, Gregory Mosher ISBN: 0802150578 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: October, 1977 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Speed-The-Plow by David Mamet ISBN: 0802130461 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: September, 1988 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Cryptogram by David Mamet ISBN: 0679746536 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 18 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Glengarry Glen Ross (An Evergreen Book) by David Mamet ISBN: 0802130917 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: September, 1992 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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