David Mamet’s Romance is a farce. And, as farce is the most heartless of theatrical forms, any romance is unlikely to be of the boy-meets-girl kind. In fact, there are no girls to meet. The cast assembled by the Atlantic Theatre Company is all-male—judges, lawyers, defendants, this being a courtroom farce. The star performance is Larry Bryggman’s as the presiding justice, a demented comic turn nothing in this solid working actor’s curriculum vitae has prepared us for. Farce is physical, at least in the hands of Feydeau or the West End trouser-droppers—slamming doors, protagonists interrupted in flagrante—and Mamet is the least physical of playwrights. So the joy of Bryggman’s performance is that, without much actual movement, it’s full of comic energy, a rollicking cavalcade of slumps and glares and vacant stares. His sneeze prompts the following responses:
“Gesundheit,” says the defense attorney.
“Your honor,” begins the oleaginous prosecutor, “I do not wish to descend to the ‘picayune,’ but as my colleague has wished you gesundheit, I feel that I must wish you gesundheit—in fairness to the state.”
The audience loved that line, though by the end of the ninety minutes seemed aggrieved there weren’t more like it. Insofar as Mamet had any game plan in mind, it seems to have been Ionesco filtered through an hommage auxMarx Brothers. The trial—of a Jew defendant with an anti-Semitic lawyer—takes place in a New York courtroom while a peace conference is being held elsewhere in the city.
