Mad Marriage Meticulous Mamet at Portland Performing Arts BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	BOSTON MARRIAGE By David Mamet | Directed by Andrew Sokoloff | With Lisa Muller-Jones, Christine Louise Marshall, and Elizabeth Chambers | Produced by the Mad Horse Theatre Company, at the Portland Performing Arts-Studio Theatre | through Oct 30 | 207.443.4171

Anna’s room of her own has come at the cost of her coming into patrimony, her longtime lover Claire pronounces. A monthly stipend and the occasional jewel are certainly the only uses Anna has for a man, but as a single, middle-aged woman of fashion in Victorian New England, she’ll take whatever independence she can get. And so in anticipation of now supporting both herself and Claire, Anna has taken the step of redecorating the parlor in chintz. But to her distress, Claire has her own news: She is entrenched in new love/lust, and has even had the audacity to invite the young girl in question into Anna’s home for an assignation. The delicious scheming and verbal combat that follow make David Mamet’s Boston Marriage a sensationally clever, addictively scathing comedy, and it is an excellent choice to open Mad Horse Theatre Company’s 19th season.

In an excellent, cunning production by Artistic Director Andrew Sokoloff, Boston Marriage features veteran company members Christine Louise Marshall as Anna and Lisa Muller-Jones as Claire, with visiting artist Elizabeth Chambers in the role of Anna’s hardy Scottish maid. Marshall and Muller-Jones have worked together for years, and effortlessly inhabit the droll rancor of Anna and Claire’s secret intimacy. Mamet’s witty and intricate script is brilliant but definitely no walk in the park, and these actors’ delivery is rigorously paced, elegantly restrained, and expertly broken down when emotion occasionally overtakes decorum.

And oh, their eyebrows! Raised with practiced carelessness, such acute savagery! Amongst all the prim correctness of their Victorian garb and ornaments (stylishly designed by Christine Louise Marshall), the archness of their brows, like their perfectly enunciated speech, is positively devastating.

As Anna and Claire upbraid each other, the maid marches in and out of the parlor on errands, so becoming an alternate target for their keen malice. Alternately appalled and knowing, hysterical and sarcastic, she is an exquisite peach of a role, and Chambers’s luminous portrayal of her is alone worth the price of admission. Chambers is one of a select Portland few with a subtle comic gift akin to Chaplin’s or Keaton’s. As her character deflects the ladies’ assaults, glows in recounting her carnal discoveries, and corrects them about the properties of Scottish mud, Chambers’s ever-changing face is impossible to look away from. In the roll of her eyes, her astonished gape, her exasperated blink, the resigned pressing-together of her lips, she manages to convey not just first-rate comedy, but a sense of the maid’s underlying sympathy (despite herself) for all the weakness she observes. Her exceptionally human — and breathtakingly funny — performance radiates a matter-of-fact wit, vigor, and understanding, in contrast to the affected badinage and corseted limitations of the ladies. She convinces us that this ill-used domestic is actually the wisest, warmest, strongest woman of household.

Boston Marriage was produced this past spring down at Players’ Ring, in Portsmouth, and the distinctions of Sokoloff’s equally fine production are worth mentioning. Most significant are the emotional dimensions of his adversarial lady lovers. This Claire and Anna — and particularly Anna — are more prone to acknowledging emotion in their expression and tone than the steelier duo recently on stage in Portsmouth. Mad Horse’s Anna is more apt to waver, to quiver in the chin; Claire is more likely to lose the edge of her crisp delivery to borderline blubbering. This has the effect of making the two at once more human, by nature of their more apparent weaknesses, and more despicable, because the callousness to which they nevertheless subject each other and the maid has a greater contrast in their own susceptibility to being hurt.

Another distinguishing feature of Sokoloff’s production is in his greater distinction between Anna and Claire. The script gives them each an equally witty grip on the English language, but Sokoloff makes a point of emphasizing Anna’s just slightly greater age — by a sneaking wistfulness in her gaze, by a harder swing between righteousness and resignation — and thereby makes more distinct characters of the two ladies.

Sokoloff’s Claire and Anna move from static pose to pose over a set of modest Victorian finery, writing desk and sofa. Like the gilded picture frames of Anna’s parlor, hanging empty against a black backdrop, the stop-and-start stasis of their blocking is a smart visual reinforcement of the insularity of their lives, an isolation that’s at once social, economic, and romantic. Instead of sinking their eyeteeth into the jugular of what oppresses them, they go at each other’s throats with a viciousness that knows its own pathos. And can love withstand those bites? Well, sometimes, for better or worse, it even savors them.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com