I Hate New York

By T.E. Kalem

EDMOND by David Mamet

"You are not where you belong," a palmist cryptically tells the hero of David Mamet's latest play. Edmond Burke (Colin Stinton) is not a classic conservative who spells his first name differently but a conventional 34-year-old who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side in middle-class complacency. He takes the palmist literally. Informing his wife that she is no longer spiritually or sexually attractive to him, he abruptly leaves home. Thus begins an odyssey into the sordid inferno of an urban sub-world.

Combining a lacerating ferocity with a sometimes silly sententiousness, the play unfolds in a couple of dozen revue-style blackouts without intermission. A stranger in a bar steers Edmond to a nightspot with B-girls, but Edmond quibbles over the whore's price and departs in a rage. In swift succession, he is conned and savagely beaten up in a game of three-card monte, and thrown out of a fleabag hotel by a seedy clerk. He pawns his gold ring and buys a "survival knife." When a black pimp tries to mug him, Edmond rewards his assailant with a series of brutal kicks. After bedding a waitress pickup, he sinks the knife into her and kills her in a transfer of fury. Jailed, he is forced to perform fellatio by his black cellmate. Implausibly, the two become lovers.

There is a method in Mamet's modishness. Edmond harbors horrified inner fears of blacks, homosexuals and, possibly, women. Raised to consciousness, these fears are exorcised. It is a quest for identity based on Joseph Conrad's admonition: "In the destructive element immerse. That is the way." The way to what? Quite probably, the way to understand and absorb the dark tenor and temper of the age, the kind of visceral awareness of anarchy that William Butler Yeats had in mind when he wrote, "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned." Mamet's problem in Edmond is that his intuitional reach exceeds his dramatic grasp. He senses that the times are out of joint, that modern urban man is doing a slow dance on a killing ground, but he seems half in love with that gaudy, bawdy death. In the title role, Colin Stinton is stubbornly and sensitively convincing in his search for the decontaminated self--a journey to salvation through the precincts of Sodom and Gomorrah.

--By T.E. Kalem

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