Sound and Fury

David Mamet’s Harvey Weinstein Play Signifies Nothing

Bitter Wheat, which just opened in London, wants to provoke—but it doesn’t really want to engage with the #MeToo movement.

By Ben Croll

June 19, 2019

John Malkovich and Ioanna Kimbrook in Bitter Wheat by David Mamet in London United Kingdom.

The facts are incontestable, your honor, and the photos do not lie: Harvey Weinstein is fat, mean, and Jewish. During his rise and reign and throughout his well-earned fall, no one ever put those attributes in question. But no one really considered them to be Weinstein’s most salient qualities either—no one, it seems, except for David Mamet.

That has to be the only explanation for the playwright’s latest theatrical outing, the bizarre and misguided Bitter Wheat. Written and directed by Mamet, anchored by John Malkovich in a fat suit, and opening June 19 at London’s Garrick Theatre, the satirical new play takes aim at the fallen mogul and the society that produced him, working them into a warmed-over farce that brazenly misses the mark.

On paper, the piece operates as a calculated provocation—reframing the #MeToo narrative from the abuser’s own perspective, and doing so with a jagged comic tone. In practice, however, such a conceit can only fall flat when, as becomes clear over the course of the show, its author doesn’t fully understand the story he’s trying to tell, or the discourse he’s trying to inflame. Bitter Wheat thus comes across as an impudent shrug of a play, a work designed to court scandal whose most shocking quality is its laziness.

John Malkovich stars as producer Barney Fein, a brash wheeler-dealer with an upstate accent and vulgar streak that leaves no doubt as to whom the actor is imitating. (Maybe the actor picked up that cadence on the set of Rounders, filmed at the peak of Miramax glory?) The name change speaks to Mamet’s larger strategy, which is to prod and riff on the broad strokes of the Weinstein scandal without ever tying the play to any one person or moment.

Indeed, the character’s downward spiral is tied to a single hotel-room assault, one more reminiscent of the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn than the flurry of exposés that brought down Weinstein (who has denied all charges of nonconsensual sex).

The precipitating moment—Fein gropes a young actress while she sleeps, then she awakes to call the police—arrives at the tail end of act one, which consists of three scenes that take the producer from his office to a swanky lounge to a hotel suite. Playing out more or less in real-time, the first act doesn’t recreate any specific event—but it does hew along an all-too-recognizable path. We follow Fein and his coterie (played by actors Doon Mackichan and Alexander Arnold) beat for beat as they gaslight and bamboozle the actress (Ioanna Kimbrook) into letting down her guard. The procedural-like progression breaks little new ground, and is unambiguous in implicating the producer and his enablers in a queasy pickup-artist routine.

You get the feeling that this whole operation is a well-oiled machine. Perhaps appropriately, every character but Barney is a mere cog. While Bitter Wheat isn’t exactly sympathetic to Fein/Weinstein, the lead does apparently claim the playwright’s lone interest; Mamet seems captivated by his protagonist’s macho bluster, staging the first act as a volley of insults and rascally vulgarities that certainly play into his strengths as a dramaturge and dialogue stylist. But this leaves the other characters—victim included—as total ciphers, there simply to enable the lecherous producer or suffer his wrath.

When Fein pops a Viagra halfway through act one, the play’s very structure merges with its protagonist. As the action continues in real-time, now we’ve got our ticking bomb—our Chekhov’s gun primed to go off in 30 minutes, shaping the action while adding a sense of urgency. It is an effective dramatic device—this isn’t the Pulitzer Prize–winning Mamet’s first rodeo—but to what end? What larger idea is the playwright building toward, what point is he trying to make?

The answer arrives with a thud in act two. When the curtain rises, Fein has emerged from a night in the slammer and must now watch his whole house of cards come crashing down. And here is where the play takes baffling turn, because instead of engaging with fallout or consequence, Mamet opts for…well, shtick. Play-to-the-nosebleeds-style shtick—a series of fat jokes and plot swings that yank the play from any place of contemporary relevance and cast it back toward the Borscht Belt of 1958.

If you thought this play would make good on its promise to seriously examine power and influence—even in tongue-in-cheek manner—turns out the joke’s on you. In this second half, Mamet de-emphasizes any sense of reckoning, introducing a non sequitur side plot about a religiously motivated terrorist who kills a member of Fein’s family. “How did he know she was a Jew?” he sputters. “Because she was shopping at Bergdorf’s,” comes the punch line. It isn’t bad shtick; even in London, the line drew a response. Once again, Mamet is a seasoned pro who has honed craft over four decades. He knows how to land a cheap laugh.

If I were being charitable, I could say that Bitter Wheat uses that pivot to Neil Simon–esque farce as a way to cast a wider net. This isn’t really a dramatization of the Weinstein story, it would argue; instead it’s a topical pastiche that weaves contemporary political anxieties and reflections on media hypocrisy into a risqué fantasia on national themes, to borrow a line from a wholly different play. Only the playwright seems to have little grasp of the national themes he so wants to skewer. Honestly, this play feels less connected to contemporary culture than your average late-night monologue or middling episode of South Park.

Of course Mamet should feel free to explore the Weinstein case from a skewed perspective; nobody here is telling him how to construct his play. But at the same time, Mamet can’t exactly separate the scandal from its aftermath and then claim his work to be a gauge of the here and now.

Yet Bitter Wheat is being positioned and marketed as a surefire controversy starter. (The play, according to its own official description, “rips the pashmina off the suppurating wound which is show business, and leaves us better human beings.”) Unlike a work such as Mamet’s own Oleanna, though, the controversy here is entirely peripheral to the work itself. Those inclined to be pissed off at a Weinstein play that completely ignores the reality of #MeToo will be plenty offended without ever buying a ticket; those who argue that an author should follow their own muse can make that point as well. And if both sides have a point, neither of them needs this forgettable farce in order to make it.

Those who do pony up for a ticket will find nothing but a tired play on autopilot, courting scandal by inertia and grabbing whatever low-hanging fruit it can. More than anything else, Bitter Wheat just feels out of touch—with the culture it wants to skewer and with its very subject. Mamet is absolutely right that Harvey Weinstein is nothing but a bully with a belly and a bris. What the playwright never cracks is that Weinstein may be the least interesting figure in his own story.