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Review of “November”

The most astonishing thing about David Mamet’s new, manic Broadway play, the political satire November, is this: There is a lesbian hero.

She’s an unlikely hero, to be sure. Awkwardly dressed – more 1970s granola than 2008 L Word – with a Whole Foods bag slung over her arm, speechwriter Clarice Bernstein (played with goofy stalwartness by Laurie Metcalf) is a lesbian revolutionary working for a president who is a racist, misogynist, homophobic extortionist.

And yet before the play is over, Clarice will endanger her life, stick to her ideals, and work hard to convince the incumbent President that he should officiate at her and her partner’s wedding on national television, thus setting a precedent for gay and lesbian couples throughout the United States.

It’s not clear why a woman with her principles would support a starkly unprincipled man like President Charles Smith. This is not to say that Smith isn’t a likable guy. After all, he’s played by the affable Nathan Lane, who uses precise comic timing and a sort of squinting disbelief to turn the failed Smith into a kind of Red State anti-hero. Picture a behind-closed-doors Richard Nixon played by The Producers‘ genial con man Max Bialystock (also played by Lane), and you get the idea. He makes the unpalatable strangely funny.

When Smith says, “Me and my wife don’t count for anything. We aren’t homosexual or black or Palestinian or deaf or something. All we are is normal,” we are to understand that regular, straight white guys like him are besieged by the tumult of “others” in America.

It is Clarice who changes his mind. Sort of. Well, OK, it’s not ever clear that she changes his mind, but she at least writes a speech that he is desperate to give, and in that speech she talks about how it is exactly this play of difference upon difference that makes America strong, especially when it is tempered by the liberal idea that despite these very differences, we should respect (and maybe even have affection for) each other anyway.

“America is not divided,” she says, “it’s a democracy. We hold different opinions, but laugh at the same jokes. We clap each other’s backs at the end of the day after someone’s made quota. I’m not sure that we don’t love each other.”

Mamet could have made more of this idea than he does. Instead, it’s buried inside an absurd and mildly comic plot that includes the presidential pardoning of turkeys, a Native American threatening to take over Nantucket, the re-covering of a couch, and bird flu.

The plot is so outlandish that it seems to run away from Mamet, and he loses the story and the satire. Instead of the play being a sharp stick poked in the eye of our politicians, like his 1997 film Wag the Dog, it is one of those kid’s punching bags – every sitcom joke pushes politics back down, but then it just comes back up, smiling foolishly. The humor is rubbery, instead of barbed.

There’s also not enough at stake. Set in the Oval Office a few days before the November presidential election, President Smith either wants to extort enough money to fund a Presidential Library or he wants to win re-election, despite polls showing he hasn’t a chance, but we’re never quite sure which. And either way, we don’t really care.

We don’t want Smith to do well. Mamet has ensured that Smith is the politician we fear all politicians might be – nasty, manipulative, spiteful, power-mad, small-minded and incompetent – but we don’t wish him ill, either. His character is so broadly defined that Lane plays Lane, which means Smith is charming, which means we like him.

What we do want is for Clarice to get married.

Laurie Metcalf, who is best remembered for her complex, quirky role as Jackie in Roseanne, plays Clarice with a similar eccentric intelligence. Her Clarice is resigned to her fate as Smith’s abused speechwriter – but when she gets on the subject of her new daughter, whom she and her partner just adopted from China as the play opens, or on her possible wedding, she is a tight coil of passionate strength.

When she says, “I want to marry my partner,” it is filled with such a mixture of hope, anguish and certainty that we believe her.

The short second act is more fun than the first, and it’s funnier, with last-minute revelations and unexpected entrances giving it more of a sense of farce. On the whole, it’s an enjoyable play, in the way well-written sitcoms are enjoyable. The rim-shot jokes usually land. There’s a little to think about, but not too much; sacred cows are skewered, but not so violently that you’re reminded of the bloody carcass before you eat dinner; the actors are pleasing to watch without making the audience experience uncomfortable emotions.

But mostly, November feels like a wasted opportunity.

Broadway is a national stage, so to speak; Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf are actors who get big media attention; and we are about three rounds in to the prize fight we call election season. Yet David Mamet isn’t taking this chance to tell Americans hard truths (greased with humor or not) about themselves or about their leaders.

He has the ability to do this – we’ve seen it particularly in Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow, but it was also apparent in Wag the Dog – but instead, he has written something pretty inoffensive (even shockingly inoffensive, considering who Mamet is, and what reactions to his work have been) that almost congratulates us on our ability to be tolerant of others.

Yet the one bright spot – and it is a brilliant and shining one – is this lesbian hero, Clarice. We don’t have many lesbian heroes, and certainly not many who are likable and who stand up for ideas much greater than themselves. One wishes the rest of the play was worthy of her character, but even so, she gives us a glimpse of what can happen when someone in politics takes a stand.

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