About the Play:

Boston Marriage has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Female Scenes.

Boston Marriage is a full-length comedy by David Mamet. The play the examines the ambiguous relationship between two women, and the title itself refers to a 19th Century New England term for a close, steady relationship between two respectable women who live in the same household. One of America's most revered and provocative dramatists, David Mamet conquers new territory with this droll comedy of errors set in a Victorian drawing room.

Boston Marriage is a drawing room comedy with a twist: The phrase is a Victorian euphemism for a long-term relationship between two upper-class unmarried women. Anna and Claire are two outrageously arrogant, scheming "women of fashion" who have long lived together on the fringes of upper-class society. United against the tyranny of men in a Boston Marriage, Anna has just become the mistress of a wealthy male patron, from whom she has received a fabulous emerald heirloom to wear around her neck and an income to match. Claire, meanwhile, attempts the seduction of a younger woman with Anna as her accomplice. As the two women exchange barbs and take turns taunting Anna's hapless Scottish parlour maid, Claire's young lady friend suddenly appears, setting off a crisis that puts both the valuable emerald and the women's futures at risk. Lashings of irony, sarcasm, ribaldry and levity abound, endemic of any long surviving unity of two.

Boston Marriage premiered in 1999 at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It received its British premiere in 2001 at the Donmar Warehouse in London and transferred to the West End at the New Ambassadors Theatre.

Cast: 3 female

What people say:

"In David Mamet's hands, there's nothing bitchier or funnier than a pair of former lovers, one of whom wants to make up and the other who has an itch for the taste of younger flesh. Boston Marriage, an old-fashioned term for two females who live together, is a Mamet rarity: a play for three female characters that has the same zingy dialogue as his more testosterone-fuelled scripts. Here, though, it's often expressed in the formal rhythms and arch vocabulary reminiscent of a writer like Oscar Wilde." — Now Toronto

"Brilliant…One of Mamet's most satisfying and accomplished plays and one of the funniest American comedies in years." — New York Post

"Devastatingly funny… exceptionally clever… demonstrates anew [Mamet's] technical virtuosity and flexibility." — New York Times

"Wickedly, wittily entertaining…What makes the play…such brilliant fun is its marriage of glinting period artifice and contemporary frankness." — Boston Phoenix

"[Mamet's characters] are at each other's throats with a wit akin to characters out of Wilde and a vengeance not unlike those from Pinter, Edward Albee, or Mamet himself." — Boston Globe

About the Playwright:

David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter as well as a director, novelist, poet, and essayist. He has written the screenplays for more than twenty films, including the Oscar-nominated The Verdict. His more than twenty plays include the Pulitzer Prizewinning Glengarry Glen Ross. His other awards include a Tony Award, an Academy Award, two OBIE Awards, two NYDCC Awards, and Outer Circle, Society of West End Theatre, and Dramatists Guild Hall-Warriner Awards.