Yeah, even with its very short running time (with intermission, just under 90 minutes- meaning the play itself is just over an hour, marked with a totally perfunctory act break), this one is a massive slog.
Mamet's trademark dialogue style, full of interruptions and half-thoughts, here comes off as nothing short of stilted. Sentences are cut off after a word by silence. Dialogue is more like a Meisner repetition exercise than a conversation. Sentences are constructed in a vaguely antiquated way, despite ostensibly being set in the present. Rebecca Pidgeon's inexplicable dialect does not help here; she seems to be attempting the Mid-Atlantic stage standard dialect but ends up landing in various ports on both sides of the pond.
The play itself is fairly inert.. It seems to be a half-hearted lash out at various topics- the press, the medical profession, the nature of law- but ends up just being an amorphous blob. It focuses on a psychiatrist whose patient ends up committing a massacre, and in a letter blames the psychiatrist for not helping him out of bigotry (the murderer is gay, you see). However, driving issue of the play is that the press has decided to brand the psychiatrist a homophobe by claiming he wrote a paper calling homosexuality an "aberration"- when in fact the paper said it was an "adaptation." This leads the psychiatrist, who is also a newly religious Jew, to take a moral stand against testifying for the defense and turning over his files, citing the Hippocratic oath.
It all becomes very muddled very quickly, but with surprisingly little action. The characters talk and talk, often winding up in conversational cul-de-sacs, before finally ending the scene with no sense of anyone having changed in any way. I know Mamet's theatre philosophy hinges on the idea of the dialogue as written providing everything necessary for a performance, but this ultimately just becomes a very surface-level exploration of thinly-drawn characters. The final scene, packed with unbelievable revelations, basically undermines everything we've seen before- before ending the play, like all of its other scenes, in a perfunctory way.
Late-career Mamet is coasting on fumes- and it really seems like even those fumes are dwindled down to nothing.
"...everyone finally shut up, and the audience could enjoy the beginning of the Anatevka Pogram in peace."
