Kinder, Gentler Mamet--With His Wife’s Assist

He calls her Becks and she calls him Dave. He rises politely when she comes to the table and, during a lull in the conversation, looks over and remarks, “You look lovely this morning, dear.” She smiles at him demurely. “Thank you,” she replies.

Their conversation is often in that kind of code married people develop. At one point he comments on one of her observations by saying, “Golly gumdrops.”

“David Mamet says, ‘Golly gumdrops,’ ” the playwright’s wife, actress Rebecca Pidgeon, chortles as she eyes the interviewer scribbling the words down on a yellow pad: It’s too good an opportunity to pass up.

Yes, that David Mamet, the playwright-screenwriter-director whose hard-edged work, from “Glengarry Glen Ross” to “Oleanna” to “American Buffalo,” has very few gollies and no gumdrops. Intriguingly, both words start with G, which is the rating on Mamet’s new movie, “The Winslow Boy,” and that’s something else you don’t usually find in a Mamet work.

The 51-year-old-Pulitzer Prize winner and his 35-year-old wife are having breakfast at the Bel Air Hotel. They’re in town to promote the film, an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1946 play; Mamet wrote and directed it, and Pidgeon co-stars with Jeremy Northam and Nigel Hawthorne. It opens Friday in Los Angeles.

Neither Mamet nor Pidgeon gives much credence to the belief that working with one’s spouse is inherently a bad idea. “People talk a lot about frictions and challenges,” Mamet remarks. “My experience is just the opposite. When you’re working with people you love, it’s like playing dollhouse. It’s nothing but fun.”

And a comfortable place to be, Pidgeon adds. “Like the family business. We talk about several generations of a family in the theater, in the circus. Repertory companies are like extended families. A bunch of oddballs working together on things they love.”

In the eight years they’ve been married, the two have worked together regularly, both on stage and in four of the six movies he’s directed, including “Oleanna” (in which she appeared in the original stage version) and last year’s stylish, minor-key hit “The Spanish Prisoner.” Most of the projects have reflected Mamet’s themes of deception and betrayals of trust that characterize his most celebrated plays.

“Spanish Prisoner,” like his earlier film “House of Games,” was an elaborate con game in which Mamet moved the characters around like chess pieces. “Winslow Boy” is also about trust--and this time, honor. In Rattigan’s famous drama, based on a true incident, an Edwardian-era family bonds together and endures hardship in order to clear its youngest member of a false accusation.

Mamet had seen an off-Broadway production of “Winslow Boy” in the early ‘80s as well as Anthony Asquith’s original 1948 film adaptation, and for a long time harbored a desire to stage it.

“I once asked Jack Nicholson how he chooses which project to make next, and he relayed to me the old Hollywood wisdom: If it’s got five great scenes, you do it,” Mamet explains. “That’s how I feel about ‘The Winslow Boy.’ ”

He had originally hoped to produce it on Broadway but could not assemble the right cast for an extended run. It proved easier to make into a movie. He presented the idea to Sony Pictures Classics, which produced “Spanish Prisoner.” “And they wrote me a check,” he says.

Rattigan’s wordy, drawing-room dramas have long been out of favor, usurped by the work of a generation of realistic British dramatists like John Osborne, and in the U.S. by gritty writers like Mamet and Sam Shepard. But Rattigan’s portrayals of stiff-upper-lip, middle-class English families are in favor again, revived on stage and on screen. There was a recent film remake of “The Browning Version,” starring Albert Finney, and a television adaptation of “Separate Tables” with Julie Christie and Alan Bates.

“The Winslow Boy” even made it into the newspaper headlines not long ago when House impeachment committee Chairman Henry Hyde quoted the play’s most famous line in his closing argument urging Congress to vote for impeachment: “Let right be done.”

Mamet’s reworking of the original material was light-handed, he says. “It is a great play. The changes I made were slight. . . . It was like rearranging the furniture in an Eero Saarinen home. The home’s the star. So I put the chiffonier against the other wall, big deal.”

He also tacked on a coda that was not in the play but added by Rattigan in the 1948 film adaptation. In the scene there is a hint of a potential romance between Catherine Winslow (Pidgeon) and the attorney Sir Robert Morton (Northam) who is hired to defend her young brother. The coda adds a sexual tension to the drama that is only suggested in the original play.

The flirtation between political opposites (Catherine is a suffragist and Sir Robert a conservative) highlights the sexual repression that permeates much of Rattigan’s work. And that’s a good thing. For Mamet, the term “repressed sexuality” has taken on an undeserved and unfortunate connotation.

“If you look at that period in literature, repressed sexuality was provocative,” he argues. “Watching people flirting is to be bold. It’s much more provocative than watching people [having sex]. The play doesn’t repress sex, but it clothes sex.”

That tension lies just beneath the surface of her performance, Pidgeon says. “I don’t know that we [her and Northam’s characters] were consciously trying to flirt. We were standing up for ourselves, and the confrontations between the characters make people think, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’

“It’s like Billy Wilder said to a filmmaker who told him he was about to make a love story: ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘and what keeps them apart?’ In this case Sir Robert stands for everything Catherine hates. It was great to play a woman who was so brave.”

The period drama may seem to have little to say about contemporary culture--Mamet’s usual milieu--but he says it makes a subtle commentary nonetheless.

“The wonderful thing about the Edwardian era was that it was the opposite of the culture of the victim,” Mamet says. “As Shakespeare said, they wear their sorrow lightly as clothing. They never refer them to their own hearts.”

Mamet and Pidgeon have spent the last few years steeping themselves in Victorian-era literature. He recently directed his wife in an off-Broadway revival of J.B. Priestley’s 1930s drama “Dangerous Corner,” also set in the Edwardian era, and in the coming months she will star with Felicity Huffman and Mary McCann in a new Mamet comedy that he describes as “another Victorian piece, set in turn-of-the-century Boston, about these two gay ladies of fashion, who have a little difficulty in their relationship with their maid. It’s very much a drawing-room comedy.”

“A cross between Oscar Wilde and Beckett,” Pidgeon promises.

Beyond that, Mamet’s planning to write and direct a film comedy in the vein of Preston Sturges--”Sturges just loved people,” Mamet says. “He saw good in everyone. As I get older, I’m constantly amazed every year that people are much worse than I thought possible, and much better than I thought possible.”

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