Mamet’s ‘Marriage’ lacks a real ring

If you didn’t already know, you’d probably never guess who coined the fancy quips and epigrammatic fusillades unleashed by the two late-19th century lipstick lesbians stalking the Geffen Playhouse’s new production of “Boston Marriage.”

No, it’s not Ronald Firbank or Ivy Compton-Burnett, though the author seems to be strenuously imitating their class-conscious drollery. Nor is it some obscure, britches-wearing female contemporary of Henry James who sacrificed a budding literary career for the suffragette movement. Hard as it is to credit, the man responsible for those overdressed creatures with vocabularies as ridiculously decadent as their ostrich-nest wigs is David Mamet, the American playwright famous for putting language on a high-testosterone boil.

The play, which opened Wednesday with a trio of game actresses (Mary Steenburgen, Rebecca Pidgeon and Alicia Silverstone), finds Mamet at quite a remove from his usual profanity-ridden haunts of masculine losers. Gone are the brawling con artists, fugitive husbands, cutthroat Realtors and Hollywood hatchet men -- and with them, sad to say, much of the persuasive grit of his storytelling.

Narrative, let’s be honest, has never been Mamet’s strong suit. Skillful a dramatist as he is, he’s always been better at cranking out scenes than stringing them together successfully, no matter his evident delight in overly clever twists that prepare the way to bludgeoningly ironic endings. The reason this hasn’t impeded Mamet’s rise to the upper echelons of contemporary American playwriting is that his vision emerges not from plot but from verbal music. Meaning resides in the staccato sound of the dialogue he has reliably set down with an exacting poetic ear and subtle satiric touch.

If the talk in “Boston Marriage” lacks his usual ring of authenticity, the reason has less to do with the sex of the characters than with the conspicuous literary provenance of their chat. These are figures taken from books and plays rather than real life. And though there’s no arguing that Mamet’s a master mimic, the high-flown badinage grows tedious once you get over its initial sheen. What starts off as promising seems annoyingly ersatz long before the linguistic high jinks are through.

The pretext for all this filigreed nonsense is a love story of sorts. The term “Boston marriage” refers to a 19th century New England household set up by two women whose intimacy has a romantic, if not explicitly sexual, basis. But rest assured, you won’t need the gals from “The L Word” to clue you in here. (The onslaught of jokes about muffs and stove parts would be enough to tip off even my grandmother.)

Anna (Steenburgen) welcomes back her “friend” Claire (Pidgeon) with the news that she has won the heart of a man wealthy enough to keep them in the lavish lifestyle they have grown accustomed to. Around Anna’s neck hangs a jewel from her new admirer, proof of his adoration and large enough to keep them in the black for a while. Claire, slightly younger and more restive than Anna, has something to reveal herself: She has fallen in love with a younger woman (who never appears onstage) and wants Anna to host their assignations and be, in effect, her beard.

The plot thickens -- though to no real consequence -- when the women’s paramours turn out to be related, a point that’s delivered to us via reports from Anna’s Scottish maid, Catherine (Silverstone), who keeps having to remind her mistress that she’s not Irish. (One funny bit has Anna upbraiding Catherine for the Irish potato famine, ascribing the calamity not to English rule but to Irish farmers’ stupid “lack of rotation of crops!”)

But all of this convoluted activity (and thematic rehashing of the mercenary underpinnings of even our most cherished relationships) is merely an excuse for Mamet to write highfalutin rejoinders and often hilariously hostile barbs. “Have they repealed the calendar?” Claire asks when Anna tries to downplay their age differences. Not long after, Anna, ever ready to displace a little anger onto the servants, hollers to poor Catherine, “Say: are you deaf? From the incessant roaring of the surf upon your savage shore? Go away. You stink of peat smoke.”

Amusing as all this is for a time, you can’t help but extend a remark of Claire’s to “Boston Marriage” as a whole: “Every note you strike is false. I cannot assemble them into a rational composition.”

Mamet, who directed this Geffen production (as he did the 1999 world premiere at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.), still seems to have confidence in the piece despite the generally negative reviews it garnered in Boston, New York and London. His wife, the sonorously spoken Pidgeon, reprises her role as Claire, a part that was apparently tailor-maid for her. But since there’s not much character beyond the rhetorical curlicues and sense that lasting affection doesn’t come easy to her, it wouldn’t seem that Claire is a gift Pidgeon should go on treasuring.

Steenburgen, always a welcome presence, seems challenged by the vocal demands of playing Anna. No surprise: The woman is all haughty bluster covering up a horror of aging. Unfortunately, Steenburgen, who’s not exactly ideal casting, seems to be pushing beyond her physical limits.

That leaves Silverstone in the thankless one-note role as Catherine, the maid who eventually finds a heterosexual outlet, to Anna and Claire’s snarky dismay. A deft clown with saucer eyes and giddy charm, Silverstone will need more than what Mamet offers her here if she’s to cultivate her talent for the stage.

The production, though splendid to look at thanks to the elegant decor of Takeshi Kata and the flying-saucer hats and dandyish costumes of Debra McGuire, doesn’t make a case for the play as anything more than a fanciful dramatic doodle that was probably more fun for Mamet to write than it will be for his myriad fans to sit through.

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‘Boston Marriage’

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10866 Le Conte Ave., Westwood

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays, and 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: March 19

Price: $35 to $69

Contact: (310) 208-5454

Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Rebecca Pidgeon...Claire

Mary Steenburgen...Anna

Alicia Silverstone...Catherine

Written and directed by David Mamet. Sets by Takeshi Kata. Costumes by Debra McGuire. Lighting by Lap-Chi Chu. Production stage manager Mary Michele Miner.