By Bryan Boyhan
This show is wildly offensive. And wickedly funny.
“Romance,” David Mamet’s careening hour-and-twenty-minute courtroom comedy now onstage at the Bay Street Theatre, attacks just about every religious, racial and sexual stereotype, on way to reinforcing the notion that the road to world peace — or any peace for that matter — is littered with personal prejudices.
Set against the arrival of a pair of world leaders who have come from Palestine and Israel to sit down face to face in an effort to find an accord between them, a drama plays out in a tiny courtroom where animosity, suspicion, and prejudice reign in the halls of justice. The sounds of a parade heralding the arrival of the peace conference occasionally waft in from outside, while in front of the bench the defendant and the case’s attorneys struggle with their own agendas and issues which invariably get in the way of the truth.
On trial is a chiropractor (Joey Slotnick) who, as the play opens, the prosecuting attorney (Chris Bauer) is trying to prove had absconded to Hawaii for a romantic assignation. The arguments quickly give way in front of a pill-popping judge (Richard Kind) who highjacks the lawyers’ presentations with his own meandering observations about world peace and his allergies.
Here you have a chiropractor on trial, a judge who has taken too many of one or another pill — which alternately make him drowsy and dopey, or psychotic — and two attorneys who desperately try to do what attorneys do, struggling to be heard and understood by the judge — and behave like sycophants at every opportunity.
The second scene, arguably the most brazen, is also where the wheels of decorum truly fall off, and the dialogue between the defendant and his attorney (Reg Rogers) is so quick and funny that one can barely catch it all over the audience’s laughter.
And here is where we learn that true world peace is only a crick-of-the-neck away.
The defendant believes, and convinces his attorney, he has the answer for bringing the warring world leaders together: A simple spinal adjustment that ultimately stimulates the part of the brain which makes the subject think peaceful thoughts. The opportunity is there before them, the two leaders meeting a short taxi ride away from where the chiropractor is being grilled about his dalliance in Hawaii.
Yet for fully half the play, the chiropractor and his attorney cannot reach deep enough into the drug addled brain of the judge to convince him.
The play moves remarkably fast thanks to the actors’ great comic timing, Mamet’s staccato dialogue — deliver your line then get out of the way — and director Lisa Peterson’s fine hand, racing from court room to conference room to living room and back to the courtroom in Alexander Dodge’s serviceable set, each time revealing a layer or two of the flawed characters: a self-satisfied Christian defense attorney who is secretly anti-Semitic, a lying nebbish chiropractor, characters who are secretly gay, or perhaps secretly heterosexual. Or simply confused.
“Romance” finds its humor in its outrageous dialogue that insults just about every major religion and sexual choice. The language is brutally hilarious.
This may be one of the few occasions in theater where a WASP lawyer calling his Jewish client a “Christ killer” actually elicits peels of laughter.
“I hope the Arabs rise up in their robes and drive your people into the sea,” gets guffaws.
There is a dance of accusations and denials, assumptions and misunderstandings that affect not only the case in this tiny courtroom, but, we are expected to believe, in the negotiations for world peace as well.
We can say the play does not end well for world peace, and leave it at that.
Mamet is not really known for his comic work. That’s not to say there is not humor in his plays, but he has a great ability to help his characters rend themselves and those around them. And people often speak of Mamet’s language, repeating the staccato way we actually let words tumble out of our mouths, or force them out, in a kind of projectile utterance. F-bombs are tossed around here like shrapnel from an IED.
It’s a wonderful cast and when the show hums along — which it often does — there is this feeling of barely controlled madness.
Richard Kind is one of our favorite comic character actors and here he commands from atop his perch at the judge’s bench, his rubbery face communicating wildly.
SNL’s Darrell Hammond makes the most out of the taciturn bailiff, communicating less verbally than with his expressive face and body.
Joe Pallister enjoys a brief scene as the doctor who treats the judge, and Matt McGrath is a laugh as the mincing lover, Bernard, of prosecuting attorney Chris Bauer.
But the funniest pairing is the nebbishy Slotnick and the broad Rogers, who contorts, twists and spits in passion and anger like a snake poked with a stick.
“Romance” continues through September 5.
