Playwright and Reviewer Gap
For most plays there’s a gap between what the playwright intends and what the reviewer receives. For CHINA DOLL the gap between intent and reception has been unusually wide. Even though some reviewers cried “obvious,” they didn’t glean the less than obvious contributions toward the theme of Mamet’s play.
It seemed to many that CHINA DOLL is just a one-sided parlor drama in which David Mamet forgot to include other characters and wouldn’t let Al Pacino’s character get off the phone. They missed the machine-gun dialogue they’d come to expect from Mamet. They wished for the things ordinary Broadway plays have.
Maybe someone can answer this. Do reviewers really not understand the plays they don’t like? Or is it aggressive helplessness? Faux-floundering that condemns in the safest possible means? “I just didn’t get it.” Rather than debate a sociological theme or psychological insight that a play like CHINA DOLL has put forward, reviewer haplessness puts the blame squarely on the playwright.
If this is true, why? Maybe it’s because dismissing a play as horrible is easier, less dangerous and dirty, than debating. Attacking a play for its look and feel risk nothing. Posing an argument is dangerous for some, beneath the dignity of others. An argument reveals too much and no one in good taste reveals too much. Better to attack the surface, the “touchy feely” aspects, of the production. Many reviewers seem furious that CHINA DOLL isn’t pretty. Trouble with opinions is that when they appear in print they masquerade as facts. The reviews say CHINA DOLL is horrible, therefore it must be a fact. Jonathan Mandell of the DC Theatre Scene comments:
David Mamet’s CHINA DOLL involves two dramas. There’s the one on stage starring Al Pacino as an old billionaire in the something of a cynical primer on wealth and political ambition. Then there’s the pile-on against the show: The reviews have been the worst anything on Broadway has gotten this whole year. [. . .] With only a few exceptions, the reviewers have sounded hostile, one calling the play “garbage.”
The Character Is Not the Playwright
Reviewers who venture guesses about playwright intent run the risk of exposing their tomfoolery. For example, the overly literal David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter at least took a chance when he found “fatal weaknesses” in David Mamet’s writing.
But the fatal weaknesses are in the writing, not the performance. Mamet talks down to his audience, clubbing us over the head with our colossal stupidity for resenting the obscenely wealthy when the play suggests it’s the hypocritical politicos whose Machiavellian shenanigans truly deserve our contempt.
I credit Rooney for honestly stating what he thinks the gist of CHINA DOLL is. But it’s as wrong-headed an assessment of the play as I’ve seen. It’s dangerous to assume that any character speaks for the playwright or the play. Especially a clear anti-hero like Mickey Ross. The playwright doesn’t invite us to identify with this heinous rich old man, but to observe money bags for who he is as he scorns and bullies through the drama. The clearest example that Ross is a parasite to our nation is that he tries dodging a five million dollar sales tax on his jet even though he has more money than he knows what to do with. He doesn’t want to pay the sales tax because it is somehow insulting, beneath him, to pay taxes. It’s what common people do.
When any of Shakespeare’s villain-protagonists like Richard III spew venom toward humanity, we don’t assume he speaks for the Swan of Avon. The tough sensibility in David Mamet’s work doesn’t mean the playwright sides with a dead-soul tycoon. Far from talking down to the audience, Mamet through the play invites us to reconsider this age of billionaires.
Playwright Intent: Al Pacino as Mickey Ross, seeming god-like for his monstrous ego in CHINA DOLL on Broadway at the Schoenfeld Theatre. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.
Observation Over Identification
Ben Brantley of the New York Times comes closer to the mark with his observation about Al Pacino’s character.
Besides, he’s wearing a tuxedo, so he must have just come from some fancy gala. Yet Mickey wears black tie as if it were the rags of a bag man. His clothes, his hair, his posture all seem to be in a state of not just disarray but deliquescence. He’s melting before our eyes. And he talks with the distracted, potholed speech of someone who doesn’t know where his next word is coming from.
Here Brantley’s use of the word “deliquescence” is on the money. [link to NY Times Review] I wish he would have trusted his own observations and used them to deduce an insight into the play’s theme. Instead he seems to find the derelict behavior of the filthy rich protagonist as a head-scratching inconsistency. How could the leisure class and the delinquent class resemble one another?
That Mickey Ross is as spiritually derelict and parasitic to society as the burglars in American Buffalo is not an inconsistency. It is exactly what the playwright is attempting to demonstrate. The behavior of the ultra wealthy and delinquent class are identical. [For more on this see CHINA DOLL Part 1.]
Set Design is Part of the Play Production
Linda Winer of Newsday was put off by the less than warm and fuzzy set without suspecting a motive for the play’s look.
With his unsettling gray bouffant, his lizard eyes and his wrinkled black power suit, he cuts a scary yet baleful figure in a penthouse as big and cold as an airplane hangar (designed by Derek McLane).
A set design is not just random giftwrapping designed to lift the spirits of the audience. Playwright, actor, director, and set designer are not a hodgepodge of artists each carrying out their own ideas. They work together, or try to with varying degrees of success. Reviewers, who thumbs-down a play, often employ a divide and conquer strategy. They argue that the parts of the production don’t complement one another without ever showing that they’ve considered the intent of the playwright.
The set contributes toward the theme of the play. In CHINA DOLL reviewers who condemned the coldness of Ross’s Manhattan apartment did not seem to understand that his living space is an extension of his personality. If it seemed as empty as an airplane hangar or a VIP lounge at the airport, that’s what set designer Derek McLane and the production team intended. Cold and empty as an airplane hangar is the perfect metaphor for the interior life of Mickey Ross (King Lear Jet).
Final Word
Of the reviews I read the most sensible came from Terry Teachout, author, playwright (Satchmo at the Waldorf), and theatre critic of the Wall Street Journal. Teachout’s review offers more than a surface reaction to the production.
But what makes CHINA DOLL so interesting is that Mr. Mamet, who in his previous plays has taken what I think could fairly be called a suspicious view of women, paints Mickey not as a victim of their wiles but as a Lear-like titan whose problems spring from within himself.
This will be my last post on CHINA DOLL, for now anyway. I think the reception of this play has shocked me for the unthinking contempt. Minor playwrights know the feeling of having their work misunderstood and reviled. Trust me, I know. But it seems peculiar that a good play by an American playwright who has been put on the same platform as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller would be so reviled. Just as the later work of Williams and Miller has only recently begun to be appreciated, time will tell with CHINA DOLL as well. My hunch is that the future of the play will be far better.
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