“We Must Be Careful in the Woods”

I will begin by confessing that for the past year I’ve been having coffee at Starbuck’s on East Bloulvard with David Watkins every Saturday to read and re-read, over and over, David Mamet’s 1972 tour-de-force, The Duck Variations—his second play (after Lakeboat). Initially, the goal was to stage it, but David couldn’t remember the lines. (He’s an octogenarian engineer who hasn’t been on stage since college). Ultimately we read it at Julia’s Cafe & Books for an audience of two: my wife and daughter. A passerby stopped and watched for a while . . .

We didn’t care. The joy and satisfaction came from finding more and more nuance (a whole year’s worth) until what started out as fourteen opaque sketches with no rational connection turned into a complex and compelling relationship with a secret subplot.

I also allow that the last few months of the old Cold Reads was devoted to eleven plays by Mamet (counting two we’d read before), more than anyone but O’Neill; which shows my predilections, since I picked the plays. Only Scott objected—to the foul language. All the rest were thoroughly engaged in the intricate workings of his and his characters’ minds.

Lastly, I’ve been obsessed with Mamet’s plays since, in ’79, at Peter Frisch’s home in Charlestowne, I leafed through his copy of The Woods as he told me about this then-young playwright, that both he and our good friend Tom Bloom were directing American Buffalo (Tom), and The Water Engine (Peter) in the fall. I’d never heard of either, or their author.

The Woods was his latest work, and I thought it might be fun to make a threesome. I could do it at SUNY, Brockport: I’d be teaching there that fall. The only problem was, I hated the play. It had no point. Nick and Ruth alone in a cabin on lake Michigan, afternoon, night, and morning; she sentimental, dreamy, open, babbling on about simple pleasures while he sulks, indifferent, sullen and resentful, coping with his disaffection until night, sudden violence, and attempted rape in the morning, an out-of-nowhere rant at the climax, an ambiguous denouement . . .

The only thing that grabbed me was Ruth’s syntax; specifically, her tendency to avoid contractions: “I could not,” “You would have . . .”  It’s silly, but it gave me a place to start.  By the time we went up in November, I knew not only why she  she did that; I’d discovered that Nick’s father’s life was saved in a foxhole by the garter belt of a man who later visited the cabin, which one night caught fire and the man came naked from Nick’s father’s room to save him, huge and hairy, like a bear, the suppressed memory of which distorts all his relationships and, when recalled, provokes his primal scream (it was the ‘seventies).

It was a Eureka moment, late in rehearsal, that brought in to light, when Nick says “He thought is head was a radio,” and the actor noted that “radiohead,” in his home town (years before the rock band), was “a homo in high heels.” I knew then we had discovered something most directors surely overlooked, and started to write the essay that’s still waiting to be finished: “We Must All Be Careful . . .”

What I’ve discovered since is that most of Mamet’s plays hide dark secret mysteries, many (early ones) with primal screams.  George killed a duck when he was a child and relives that trauma in the penultimate Duck Variation; Art, in Squirrels, is Ed’s father by the Cleaning Lady, once his underaged inspiration.

Read Faustus and track the poem that winds up in the treatise. Magic.

. . . to be continued.