Sexual Perversity in Chicago and The Duck Variations: Two Plays
Author:
Genre: Literature & Fiction
Book Type: Paperback
Author:
Genre: Literature & Fiction
Book Type: Paperback
Barbara R. (Crop4Fun) reviewed on + 1217 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
From Amazon:
*Sexual Perversity in Chicago* is a brilliant, in-your-face series of vignettes sloshing through the muck of modern relationships. Two men and two women lock horns in a lewd scrimmage of blackly funny narcissistic power-plays, a despairing search for flitting, short-lived solace and pleasure, blasted by cruelty, impatience, tooth-and-claw feral soliloquy on why the opposite gender is one-part vampire, one-part Machiavelli, can't live with them, can't sell them for parts (tee-hee).
Metropolitan swingers circling the drain of mean-streets cynicism and tough-talking bachelorhood, trawling the muddy waters of singles bars and yuppie night spots, searching for that ephemeral ounce of pleasure in a world of subterfuge and delay, mind-games and cruel deception, an odium of broken expectations and buried dreams.... Funny as the play is, it's distressing to have our noses rubbed in this point-blank opprobrium of our own basest impulses, the Spirit of Revenge which contaminates many of our frantic attempts to love and be loved.
Refreshingly, the women in Mamet's play seem much more interesting than the men, if only because their cynicism is more richly varied, more intellectually pungent. As shell shocked veterans of the gender war, it remains difficult to decide whether Mamet's scenarios are A: exaggerated worst-case aberrations, or B: (gulp) true-to-life tableaux on how perversely we are prone to behave toward one another, a vicious circle of paranoid self-hatred razing the purlieus of conventional "happiness" (or post-coital afterglow, once the bar is dropped).
Mamet suggests that at the outer limits of cynical self-abasement, human beings will "experiment" with cruelty the same way an S&M enthusiast would assay with handcuffs and bullwhip, the minds and hearts of anonymous lovers beaten like a Teletubbie pinata with the broomstick of our own wounded narcissism.
The Duck Variations is a dialogue between two old men sitting on a park bench. The conversation turns to the mating habits of ducks, but soon begins to reveal their feelings about natural law, friendship, and death. New York magazine has called The Duck Variations a gorgeously written, wonderfully observant piece whose timing and atmosphere are close to flawless.
*Sexual Perversity in Chicago* is a brilliant, in-your-face series of vignettes sloshing through the muck of modern relationships. Two men and two women lock horns in a lewd scrimmage of blackly funny narcissistic power-plays, a despairing search for flitting, short-lived solace and pleasure, blasted by cruelty, impatience, tooth-and-claw feral soliloquy on why the opposite gender is one-part vampire, one-part Machiavelli, can't live with them, can't sell them for parts (tee-hee).
Metropolitan swingers circling the drain of mean-streets cynicism and tough-talking bachelorhood, trawling the muddy waters of singles bars and yuppie night spots, searching for that ephemeral ounce of pleasure in a world of subterfuge and delay, mind-games and cruel deception, an odium of broken expectations and buried dreams.... Funny as the play is, it's distressing to have our noses rubbed in this point-blank opprobrium of our own basest impulses, the Spirit of Revenge which contaminates many of our frantic attempts to love and be loved.
Refreshingly, the women in Mamet's play seem much more interesting than the men, if only because their cynicism is more richly varied, more intellectually pungent. As shell shocked veterans of the gender war, it remains difficult to decide whether Mamet's scenarios are A: exaggerated worst-case aberrations, or B: (gulp) true-to-life tableaux on how perversely we are prone to behave toward one another, a vicious circle of paranoid self-hatred razing the purlieus of conventional "happiness" (or post-coital afterglow, once the bar is dropped).
Mamet suggests that at the outer limits of cynical self-abasement, human beings will "experiment" with cruelty the same way an S&M enthusiast would assay with handcuffs and bullwhip, the minds and hearts of anonymous lovers beaten like a Teletubbie pinata with the broomstick of our own wounded narcissism.
The Duck Variations is a dialogue between two old men sitting on a park bench. The conversation turns to the mating habits of ducks, but soon begins to reveal their feelings about natural law, friendship, and death. New York magazine has called The Duck Variations a gorgeously written, wonderfully observant piece whose timing and atmosphere are close to flawless.
