(L-R): Christopher Denham and Al Pacino in David Mamet's China Doll.
Damn you, Al Pacino. You really had me going there for a minute.
I walked into China Doll, the new David Mamet play at the Schoenfeld, with a deep feeling of foreboding. The signs were not encouraging. The opening of the show had been delayed by weeks, with reports that Pacino hadn’t been able to remember his lines during previews. Ben Brantley compared his performance to nails on a chalkboard. The Post headlined an article about the production: “Tantrums, Terror, B12 Shots: Inside Al Pacino’s Broadway Bomb.” Though the house was packed, it was beginning to look like one of those much-heralded, much-anticipated Broadway productions that wilt on impact.
The naysayers were right about a couple of things. There’s only one set, two scenes, and two characters in this play, and one of them, a corporate underling called Carson (Christopher Denham) hardly speaks at all. Mickey Ross (Pacino), a former political organizer and current multi-billionaire/ultra-wise demigod, spends most of the production on the phone, alternately wheedling, cajoling, and bellowing at his lawyer, his former crony, and his years-younger girlfriend. And they’re right that for the first time in his career, Pacino acts his age -- Mickey Ross is more Willy Loman than Michael Corleone. What they’re wrong about, oh so very wrong, is how immediate, real, and electrifying Pacino’s performance is, and what tightly written, thrilling, perfect Pacino showcase Mamet has written for him. In my years of theatergoing I have rarely been so pleasantly surprised.
Not that this hasn’t happened before. 2012’s revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, another great Mamet play about basically innocent wheeler-dealers laid low by the hands of fate, also starred Pacino, and advance notices were equally dire. That production’s opening, too, was delayed, ostensibly (or so said the hordes) to keep the critics from discovering its fatal flaws. Unfortunately for those hardened cynics, that production had no fatal flaws -- it was simple, not particularly daring, true, but I was captivated all the same. This show, if anything, is better than that one -- it’s one of the most naturalistic performances of Pacino’s career. When he’s on stage -- which is the entire show -- you can’t look away; he strips the artifice away from Mamet’s language (the beautiful stop-and-start overlapping of which, by the way, is as thrilling as ever) and takes you by force out of your reality and into his. Denham, whose performance is delicate and expert, serves as a great audience surrogate here -- Carson watches Ross with deep-seated admiration, following his every move as if storing it for use later, and can barely restrain an ear-to-ear smile for most of the running time. He and me both.
I’ve seen every Broadway production directed by Pam McKinnon, who won the Tony -- very much deservedly -- for her 2012 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. This could be her strongest outing as a director since that storied production. The sinewy symbiotic relationship she’s formed with Mamet’s fascinating text is incredibly evident as the suspense, at first a mild undertone at most, ratchets up. She gets a performance out of Pacino that’s nearly unique in his career aside from Frank Serpico -- a genuinely benevolent man, driven to the brink by circumstances beyond his control. Mickey Ross has no fatal flaw that brings him to his ultimate doom -- the powers that be run roughshod over a man who, in the end, is driven by love. Love is not an emotion that usually comes through in Pacino’s acting, as he usually plays men who believe in nothing but themselves, but he nails this role. Why wouldn’t he? Despite what the critics would have you believe, he’s still Pacino, goddamnit, and Mamet’s still Mamet. After all these years, it's still an offer you can’t refuse.
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