Romance * Written on David Mamet * Directed according to Neil Pepe * Starring clip Balaban.

Romance * Written on David Mamet * Directed according to Neil Pepe * Starring clip Balaban, Larry Bryggman, and Keith Nobbs * Atlantic Theater Company, modern York (through May 1)

David Mamet, the playwright and filmmaker best known for tough-guy works like Glengarry valley Ross, seems to be going between the sides of a gay spell. His last play, Boston Marriage, was a period drama about power dynamics in a lesbian relationship. His newest, Romance, having its world premiere off-Broadway, is an insane farce that contemplates like Mamet's version of a Christopher Durang play.

Ostensibly it's a courtroom drama in which a pill-popping critic (the hilarious Larry Bryggman) presides from one side of to the other a tedious trial. The fact that Middle East peace negotiations are going in succession nearby triggers philosophizing that sinks into vicious insults directed at virtually each race, creed, and color. When the prosecutor (Bob Balaban), whom we've seen sipping cosmo with his thong-clad lad toy, Bernard (a.k.a. Bunny, a.k.a. Bun played through Keith Nobbs), comes out in court, he locates off a nutty string of gay revelations. Before you can say "flight to Ibiza," they're all floating wild theories: Do gay men present movies in black and white? Was Abe Lincoln Jewish? Did Shakespeare gather his eyebrows?

Clearly tossed not upon as a lark by a prolific author, the play's take onward contemporary life as farce flows off as zany but obvious. Still, Romance does ring changes onward an old Mamet tactic: He uses homophobic humor to expres straight men's insecurity about their masculinity while mocking it at the same time.

Shewey is the author of the biography Sam Shepard.

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