Mamet's Edmond Takes a Walk on the Wild Side

Ali el-Gasseir, Sam Hagen, and Ryan Fields in Balagan Theatre's production of David Mamet's Edmond (Photo: Andrea Huysing)

"An everyman descends into the maelstrom of big city degradation," says one synopsis of David Mamet's 1982 play Edmond, later turned into a 2006 movie starring William Macy.

The director of Balagan Theatre's production (Thursday-Saturdays, through February 6; tickets: $12-$15), Paul Budraitis, downplays the element of biography--it was Mamet's first big play after moving to New York from Chicago, which was apparently an unpleasant shock: "It's a society that's lost its flywheel, and it's spinning itself apart," Mamet said in a 1982 interview. "That's my vision of New York. It's a kind of vision of hell."

Instead, Budraitis focuses on how the pressures of change can separate us from each other. "Edmond walks his lonely path so we don't have to," he writes in his director's notes. Mamet himself called Edmond, "a myth about modern life," "a play about an unintegrated personality," and "a play about someone searching for the truth, for God, for release."

It's also simply flawed, a stressed-out explosion of misanthropy and rage that a youthful Mamet tried to repackage in context of life's bigger questions. It's grotesque, violent, and profane...and, at Balagan, purely theatrical. It's a beautifully formal achievement, an intricate villanelle on bigotry, lust, and madness.

There, that description should help you decide if Edmond is in your future.

Kelly Mak and Sam Hagen in Edmond at Balagan Theatre (Photo: Andrea Huysing)

The play begins with a fortune-teller telling bland businessman Edmond (Sam Hagen, who will go on to give you one hell of a performance) that he is not where he should be. In the next scene, Edmond decides to leave his wife (the demure but leather-lunged Colleen Carey). It's not believable, and you shift uncomfortably, wondering, like Frank Rich, if you have 80 intermissionless minutes of this to endure.

But Balagan gives you plenty of cues that strict representation is not their goal. The audience sits on risers on all sides of a single, long, wooden table, with eleven cast members seated with the audience at either end. (I can't detail everyone's performances, but Ali El-Gasseir also makes a terrific first impression.)

Lighting designer Tom Wiseley has arranged two tiny catwalks of track lighting across the space, and Leo Mayberry provides kinetic visual art on two flat panel TVs, accompanied by Rob Henson's mood-altering sound design. You're in a basement, surrounded by poured concrete--this story is not happening "elsewhere." It's happening--it's performed--right in front of your eyes.

Budraitis even has the cast read the scene descriptions, which is not strictly necessary for the story. It simply highlights that these are the stages of Edmond's via dolorosa. Mamet has a nameless bigot ("I tell you who's got it easy [...] the niggers") in a bar, played by Daniel Wood, spell it all out for you: "A man's got to get away from himself..." and detail the means: Pussy, power, money, adventure, self-destruction, religion, release, ratification. The problem is that Edmond doesn't know "how it works," and that will make him, over the course of his walk on the wild side, a real outlaw.

There's your evening in a nutshell, amplified and elaborated by Mamet's penchant for formally rigorous demotic speech. I don't want to say that it's always effective: Edmond "liberating" himself by screaming "COON!" and "NIGGER!" in a frenzied litany just feels like Mamet taking a dated poke in the eye of some '70s therapeutic process. And a scene where Edmond--manic from post-mugging PTSD--picks up a waitress (Carolyn Marie Monroe) and heads back to her place to fuck and discuss authenticity (she's an actor), feels lifted straight from an acting class.

However, it does lead to this exchange:

Glenna: You know who I hate?

Edmond: No, who is that?

Glenna: Faggots.

Edmond: Yes, I hate them too. Do you know why?

Glenna: Why?

Edmond: They suck cock. And that's the truest thing you will ever hear.

If you come back to "old" Mamet like this--who's been doing his best to impersonate one of his mouthy, ill-wind-blown characters recently--it's generally despite, rather than because of, what he's freighted the work with. The dorm-room existentialism I can scrub from my mind the minute I exit the theater. But a Mamet conversation is hard to beat--beat for beat--as a living, charged exchange. At it's best, it's so distilled it's explosive--and the audience feels either violated by the hustle, or has to laugh, against our sense of propriety. What you win is, you get to walk away in one piece.