Trickle

By T.E.K.

THE WATER ENGINE by David Mamet

One juvenile mythette seems to have a hold over the American imagination: the story of an idealistic man of science who invents a fabulously elemental machine only to have it stolen by evil megacapitalist interests. That is the propelling notion of The Water Engine and, as drama, the play is a trickle.

The think pump of Engine is Charles Lang (Dwight Schultz), who has devised a method for producing energy by splitting the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water. That amorphous villain, Big Biz, sends two oily agents (David Sabin and Bill Moor) to intimidate Lang out of his invention. When he resists, they murder him and his sister (Patti LuPone).

No one would dare tell that story with a straight face, so Mamet has told it with a borrowed voice. The time is 1934, the place a radio station. The play is being acted out before microphones, which means that all of its virtues are peripheral and nostalgic. A spectral voice pushes the Depression chain-letter craze; a rabble-rouser denounces capitalistic society.

This is fitfully atmospheric but basically false. Mamet, 30, who was unborn at the time he writes about, does not realize that resilience, fortitude and fellow feeling were the sustaining forces of the Depression years. It was the teen-agers of the '30s who forged, fought and won the U.S. victory of World War II. For the flabby, self-centered, alienated lot that Mamet has assembled in his radio studio, that formidable deed would have been a manifest impossibility. -- T.E.K.

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