Sentimental satire ... Nathan Lane and Dylan Baker in a scene from David Mamet's November. Photograph: Scott Landis/AP
Make 'em laugh. That would seem to be the motto on Broadway right now, especially if you're an American play wanting to peddle the odd home truth to American audiences. So you think the American government is in a mess? On the evidence of his new play, November, so does David Mamet, who has unexpectedly chosen Broadway as the place to premiere his show. It's the first time he has taken so mainstream a route since Speed-the-Plow, starring Madonna, 20 years ago.
Time was when Mamet was considered too risky for Broadway. It's no surprise that his harrowing The Cryptogram has twice played London but never once braved Broadway. Its 1995 New York premiere was in a small off-Broadway playhouse. But that was before Mamet teamed up with two-time Tony award-winner Nathan Lane, here playing a collectively loathed president who has run out of both kudos and cash: "You fucked up everything you touch," remarks Dylan Baker, playing the chief's right-hand man. Cue cheers from the stalls.
At the matinee I caught, a full house equally applauded Lane's passing physical resemblance to George W Bush and sight gags including a large-scale globe of the world that hides within it a presidential-friendly bottle of beer.
The play has its say on America and American politics, though it's not without its sentimental side. Much of this is reserved for co-star Laurie Metcalf, playing the president's lesbian speechwriter, who's newly returned from China with a cold but not, they're all hoping, bird flu. If all this sounds improbably Mamet-lite, the play functions like an extended version of Jon Stewart's Daily Show; those wanting the more scabrous Mamet of Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo will have to wait until this writer moves on from a comic/satiric phase that has included his notably unfunny 2005 play, Romance.
Off-Broadway, the stakes are lower and it's possible to be a lot more serious. Arguably too serious, perhaps, in the case of Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, the English writer's 40-minute anti-American screed now receiving its New York debut at the Public Theater, its cast of two including Samuel West in terrific form. This is the play in which the UK is seen in sexual and political thrall to big bad America, embodied by Guy and Sam respectively. (In London, the British half of the equation was called Jack; not any more.)
So it's somewhat bracing to report that the New York version was more warmly received than the same show (with a different cast) at the Royal Court late in 2006. However didactic Churchill's point-scoring, there's no disputing a formal adventurousness that in this case finds the characters speaking in half-sentences to make Mamet's usually laconic lot sound positively loquacious. Still, between Churchill's catalogue of US-perpetrated torture and Mamet's breezy Oval Office gags, only one of the two shows got a standing ovation. Can you guess which?
