Edmond by David Mamet

I did not love this play, in fact I hated it, but I think that was probably Mamet’s intention. It’s about a man’s descent into the underbelly of NYC after he leaves his wife, and he just does a series of terrible things. Lessons on next page...

1. Brevity: It doesn’t take a lot for Mamet to show us how Edmond unravels. In each scene, Mamet very quickly shows Edmond wanting something (usually sex) and being frustrated in his efforts to meet that goal. So by the time Edmond murders a woman in her apartment, we’re in a place where we’ve watched him be frustrated and rejected and tricked and trampled so often that we get it. We accept that he kills someone out of the sheer need to be understood. His communication difficulties could easily have veered into comic farce (I would’ve preferred that) or absurdism, but Mamet weaves scenes just tight enough to reach a boiling point. Then he moves on. In this way, he kind of has us rooting for Edmond, even though Edmond is stingy, stupid, thoughtless, selfish and eventually murderous.
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2. Violence: Mamet uses it a lot in his plays, but here he uses it to great effect. Edmond is obviously dealing with a lot of inner turmoil early in the play, so it does feel inevitable that he’ll in some way externalize those emotions. And he does, when violence is unleashed on him, it’s like he starts to see violence as a real possibility, as something almost mundane, which leads him to a senseless beating and a senseless murder. In that way, Mamet is kind of commenting on the inherent violence of man “There are just too many people, that’s why we murder each other.” It’s a really ugly theme to suggest, that we’re violent animals, but Mamet’s Edmond has seemingly been stripped of the pride and ambition and sense of human connection that would make him a man, so he really is reduced to unthinking actions. Anyway, I wasn’t brief here, but the point it, Mamet uses violence as a way to show an escalating decay.
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3. Sex: Edmond just wants to feel connected, but he keeps feeling like people are trying to take too much from him for sex. A review I read said this was an example of people trying to abuse or steal from Edmond, but to me it felt like Edmond just wanted something and he wasn’t willing to pay the price to get it. I kept thinking, Edmond wants sex to be a gift but it’s an exchange, and that’s part of what has made him empty. He wants connection and communication and touch to come easily, but he has to be able to give part of himself up in return. I’m not sure what Mamet’s intent was, but to me Edmond’s relationship to sex was distorted and wrong, and that’s what was making him so unhappy. I thought it was an effective technique, always having Edmond say, “It’s too much,” because it’s almost like no matter what, Edmond would not be happy with the cost (either literal or figurative) of intimacy. He felt it was too much and that’s what drove him to violence.