Is the moral to David Mamet's modern parable, Edmond, "Don't walk out on your wife or the bogeyman will get you?" Indeed, this is what happens to Edmond (Rick Foucheux in a strong, anguished performance that doesn't quite succeed in eliciting our sympathy for one of Mamet's most unsympathetic characters). Declaring bluntly to his wife (Lucy Newman-Williams) that he stopped loving or desiring her years ago, he threatens to leave, only to have her evict him. Cut loose from propriety, he is promptly swallowed up by his own demons. Artistic director Joe Banno stages this show in the round in the recently renovated Source Theater.
This was my first view of the reconstructed space, which now boasts an actual lobby facing onto 14th Street, furnished with an imposing dinosaur skeleton that could have escaped from the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History but actually hearkens from last season's set of Nicky Silver's Pterodactyls. Edmond might as well have been out on the rough streets surrounding the theater, as on Tony Cisek's minimal set as he continues his downward spiral. Unaccountably too cheap to pay a "masseuse" for a lay (didn't he take his check book?), he finds solace with a waitress (Colleen Delaney) who dishes it out for free, then in a rage cuts the throat that fed him. His middle-class, white man's values intersect with a bigot's views gone way beyond Archie Bunker.
The life of the street is grittily portrayed in the claustrophobic set, Delaney as a Peepshow Girl, gyrating in the G-string furnished by costume Designers Anne Kennedy and Traci Holcombe, behind a large glass window in one corner of the 150- seat black box, and the pawn shop where Edmond invests in the knife that serves for a murder weapon in another. With the exception of Foucheux, each of the versatile cast plays at least 4 roles. KenYatta Rogers plays a sleazy pimp and intense police interrogator. Edward Baird Wilford plays a bar manager and one of the shills who tricks Edmond out of one of his last dollars.
David Lamont Wilson as the agreeable pawnshop owner reappears as Edmond's brutally demanding cellmate. Tom Quinn who early-on plays a customer in a bar with whom Edmond has a drink and apprises him that what really motivates a man is "pussy, power, money, adventure...self-destruction and religion," is imposing as a prison chaplain, assisting him in finding redemption.
Set in pre-Giuliani New York City, this early-1980s script is one of Mamet's most unrelenting plays, Edmond's anger spewing forth, and finding a match in the darkest side of civilization.
