[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]
Tamar Cohn (left, as Cathy) confronts Velina Brown as Ann in “The Anarchist.” Photo by David Wilson.
I normally love playwright David Mamet’s rhythms.
And his caustic humor.
Nor am I put off by his usual torrent of f-bombs.
But “The Anarchist” is cerebral horseplay of a noticeably different color. It’s Mamet soberly executing mental calisthenics, taking both sides of an argument at the same time.
Using longer — and complete — sentences. Without vulgarities or drollness.
And with less of individuals talking over each other.
In a new Theatre Rhinoceros production, Mamet still does what he does best — poke beneath the veneer of characters to exhume the vagaries of human nature.
I see it as an 85-minute double diatribe.
Director John Fisher combines with Mamet to offer an intensely dramatic, philosophical feast that pinpoints a two-woman tug-of-war over rehabilitation, faith and sex.
But they present a dense repast not easily digested.
The storyline?
A lesbian anarchist on the day of a parole interview confronts a female “representative of the state” — perhaps her warden, maybe a prison psychologist, conceivably a parole officer — who will decide whether she should be freed.
The drama stars Tamar Cohn as bilingual, properly educated Cathy, an admitted terrorist killer of two guards in an echo of a real incident involving the Weather Underground in the 1970s.
She performs in tandem with Velina Brown as Ann, Cathy’s interrogator who may have been persecuting her —perpetually.
Both actors are splendid.
Flawless, in fact.
Each steeps her character with flesh and blood, with all the nuanced emotional back-and-forthness humans bring to challenging situations.
Each excels, too, at extracting the most from Mamet’s prose.
Such as Cathy’s pithy, “Neither God nor human worth can be proved.” Or, “The state does not have [the] power to put me on the cross.”
Fisher, meanwhile, magnifies the duo’s conflict by placing Brown, whose height is imposing and whose demeanor is appropriately unbending, next to Cohn, whose smaller, chameleon-like body can shift in an instant from servile to haughty.
Cohn, who lives in Marin County “with a terrific husband and a decrepit cat,” adroitly depicts an inmate who’s served 35 years and become a believer in Christ despite her Jewish upbringing.
Brown, co-artistic director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, deftly reproduces a bureaucrat plagued with a major decision just before her tenure ends but hell-bent on having the prisoner reveal where her former accomplice/lover is.
Fisher and Mamet are, in a sense, joined at the hip.
Mamet had encouraged Fisher as a young director. And Fisher directed his “Boston Marriage” at The Rhino, America’s longest running queer theater.
When I attended “The Anarchist,” news bulletins became a factor.
I found it chilling that a trio of terrorists murdered a dozen people in the Paris office of a satirical publication the same day.
An anachronistic chunk of recorded pre-show music — Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A’Changin’” — also bothered me. I understood its symbolic value but the tune was jarring because it pre-dates by years the founding of the Weather Underground, whose terrorism had begun at San Francisco’s Ferry Terminal.
I’ve enjoyed Mamet creations for decades — “Glengarry Glen Ross,” which earned the Pulitzer Prize in drama, “Speed the Plow,” “American Buffalo,” “Oleanna,” “Race.”
As I do with Picasso’s diverse periods, I revel in Mamet’s — from his earliest male-oriented works (that emphasize character and the way people really talk) to his middle years (in which plot grows more important) to his latter-day female-oriented plays and their accent on social and political issues.
But “The Anarchist” is by far his thickest, most intellectual, wordiest exercise — and arguably the least entertaining.
The playwright apparently insisted that I — and the young, mostly gay crowd at The Rhino — work harder than I’d wanted.
It was as if I were expected to hold my breath for the duration of the play lest I miss a crucial phrase or concept.
Ultimately, however, the drama merited my full attention — even though critics bashed the original 2012 Broadway offering with Patti LuPone and Deborah Winger.
Causing it to run only 17 performances.
“The Anarchist” plays at the Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson St. (at Front and Battery streets), San Francisco, through Jan. 17. Evening performances, Sundays, 7 p.m.; Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Matinees, Saturdays and Sundays, 3 p.m. Tickets: $15 to $30 (subject to change). Information: (800) 838-3006 or www.TheRhino.org
Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or check out his blog at www.vitalitypress.com/
