The Cambridge stage is a bit of a dirty flirt when it comes to the unfettered, rhythmic coarseness of David Mamet’s plays. Angry, hilarious and aggressively poetic, we could all learn a thing or two from both his drama’s unabashed diminution of our so-called lives; and his theatrical antidote to over-cluttered sets, under-read texts and egotistical acting. 

The groundlings this week have devoured examples of both one of Mamet’s earliest, and one of his most recent offerings, performed within a few days of each other.  At the end of last week, Boston Marriage settled its refined and deviant rump in the Peterhouse Theatre.  This riot-in-a-tea-cup about Victorian lesbians (the title as slang thereof) is a comedy of manners about two women who have none.  Much of Mamet’s sparkle depends on actors hitting the sharp rhythm of his dialogue; at the beginning both leads struggled slightly.  As the hour progressed, however, Anna (Jessica Barker-Wren) shone, though at times Claire (Pilar Garrard) could not match her energy, and accent and delivery wavered.  Still, with dialogue as beautifully brazen as the flip from ornamentation to “You have fucked my life into a cocked hat!” the comedy bursts upon the audience whether they like it or not.  My first reaction to any Mamet performance is always “fuck, the script is amazing”; but Boston Marriage relished the teetering between crude and charming.

Fast forward a few days in the week, and back and few decades in Mamet’s career, and you arrive at Sexual Perversity in Chicago, running at the Corpus Playroom until tomorrow.  A hilarious and resolutely un-prettified look at love and sex in modern times, the intimate studio space of the Playroom thrust the four characters’ lives right into the audience; though it would have benefitted from more room to better divide the crowded settings all jostling for position.  Todd Bartel’s performance as Bernie Lithgow picked up the energy of the script and spat it in our faces.  His delivery and gesticulations captured the masculinity and directionless anger of the character; and, as an American, we never had to notice the discrepancies with accent, which was a problem elsewhere.  Olivia Potts as Joan was far more comfortable in the scenes on her own than those in exchanges with Deb (Amanda Pooler), where the balance between embittered/aloof and absent wasn’t always struck right, but the audience loved it, and, fuck, is the script amazing. Sexual Perversity electrified in the moments when the actors’ understanding fused together, matching the energy of this sublime playwright.