Romance

Invaluable vulgarian Mel Brooks once remarked that he wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d offended every ethnic group on the planet. To say it’s served him and his career well would be a colossal understatement. Playwright David Mamet, another invaluable assailant on propriety who up until now has made his bullish reputation by offending the morals of discriminating theatergoers, has taken a page from Brooks’s playbook with his latest courtroom farce, Romance. If there exists somewhere an ethnic slur that didn’t make it into Mamet’s 90-minute, unusually florid, howl-against-your-better-judgment comedy (here in its buffed and polished, perfectly cast Chicago debut), he’ll probably consider it for a rewrite. Mamet would surely lose sleep knowing that he’d left any stone unturned, or unthrown.

Romance’s next-to-nothing plot involves the trial of a wealthy Jewish businessman caught red-handed (doing what, we’re never told), whose attorney tries to convince the loopy, elderly judge that his client’s release is vital to the Middle East peace process. The cheapest laughs come from the gay romantic subplot involving the domestic life of the hopelessly square prosecutor and his mincing young partner (John LaGuardia miraculously breathes fresh and funny life into a series of lavender clichés), but the playwright experiments with featherweight absurdity here in a way he’s never done before, often to milk-through-the-nostrils effect. While the deeply stupid humor sometimes veers strangely toward the middlebrow (is another lost contact lens bit necessary?), the social satire doesn’t really work (any comment on sexuality in macho bureaucracies was lost on us) and the text descends into undisciplined, un–Mamet-like chaos, it’s still a ball. Being offended shouldn’t be this entertaining.—Christopher Piatt