Boston Marriage
Sex, revenge, love, cruelty and wit
By John Fisher

I chose the queer comedy BOSTON MARRIAGE because I thought it was beautifully written and I was happy to see, finally, that three women weren't treated like trash or sex tools or castrating bitches in a David Mamet play. I think David wrote the play as a response to all the accusations of misogyny leveled against him. This play shows another side of him. And he gave himself the added challenge of not only writing a play about lesbians but writing the play in a lesbian style.

The dialogue is arch, highly stylized, it sounds like Oscar Wilde, another writer who was one thing (queer) and chose to write as another thing (straight) just as Mamet here is one thing (straight) and choosing to write as something else (queer.) And, bottom line, it's a fun play - it has sex, revenge, love, cruelty and great wit and it's just plane laugh out loud funny, so that's a good thing.

Much has been made of Mamet's gaze - his gaze towards women. In BOSTON MARRIAGE the gaze has been reversed. (One should point out the obvious joke here: Mamet's gaze has become Mamet's gays.) The men are reduced to absent objects in this play, off-stage ideas to be ridiculed, exploited or ignored. Mamet sees human relationships as a battle between the sexes and it's nice to see him fighting from the other side for a change, like when Aeschylus wrote the Persian war from the enemy's perspective in THE PERSIANS. I think we show our greatest humanity when we enter the other side's psyche, realize finally that they are not the enemy. I've tried to do this in my own work, which has grown from a suspicion of the straight hegemony to recognition that there is no heterosexual conspiracy, but a multi-valenced non-queer community that has many agendae, many of them overlapping or even informing the queer perspective. therhino.org