HUDSON STAGE is doing a play. You know what that means: fast-talking, hard-driving, foulmouthed men like the real estate agents in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the small-time crooks in “American Buffalo” and the Hollywood types in “Speed-the-Plow.”
Or maybe not. If you go see Mr. Mamet’s “Boston Marriage” in Briarcliff Manor, you will hear the occasional Anglo-Saxon four-letter word, true, but just as often you’ll hear an interjection like “Bother your reticule!”
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“Boston Marriage,” which had its Broadway run in 2002 starring Kate Burton and Martha Plimpton, is not standard Mamet. It is, in fact, a three-woman play set in Victorian New England.
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“Setting it in the Victorian age allows him a whole other vocabulary, a whole other way of speaking,” Dan Foster, a founder of Hudson Stage who is directing the production, said, referring to Mr. Mamet.
Still, the dialogue is “very rat-a-tat-tat,” the way Mr. Mamet’s male characters typically talk, Mr. Foster said in a telephone interview from Birdland in Manhattan, where he was rehearsing a new show. “Which I think — I’m speaking for him — is part of his point. Perhaps men and women aren’t that different.”
Continue reading the main story“Boston Marriage” is a different proposition in a couple of ways. It is the first Mamet play that Mr. Foster has directed, although he considers his past experience with Shakespearean productions helpful, because they call for the same kind of “investigation of language.” And it is the first period production that Hudson Stage has done in its 12-year history. That called for a specific kind of casting.
“We were looking for people with classical training, who knew how to carry themselves, because it just helps you so much,” Mr. Foster said. You can go straight into the text, he said, without spending time “teaching style.”
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The three actresses who were cast are all making their Hudson Stage debuts. Andrea Cirie plays Anna, who has become involved with a wealthy married man, although her primary relationship is with Claire, with whom she has lived for years. Amanda Duffy plays Claire, who has recently taken up with a young woman.
Claire Neumann plays their Scottish maid, Catherine, whom the other women comically mistreat. For one thing, they can’t remember her name and repeatedly call her Bridie.
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“Boston Marriage” reminds audiences that while the Victorians may have been reluctant to discuss sexual matters openly, they did discuss them — in their own way.
“Certain things are innuendos,” Mr. Foster said. “You’re so used to Mamet being on the nose with an expletive or something. But very often here, it’s a turn of Victorian phrase.”
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So the audience may listen to a line, he said, and then think, “ ‘Is that a little dirty?’ ”
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In the play’s opening scene, for instance, the two women commiserate about their mutual exasperation with men. “What can one do with them?” Claire asks rhetorically. Anna answers, “Just the One Thing.” (The capitalization is Mr. Mamet’s.)