Entertainment

David Mamet’s ‘comedy’ about Harvey Weinstein is a huge disaster

LONDON — David Mamet has done it again! By which I mean that the out-of-his-mind playwright has appalled, offended and perplexed a packed house of hundreds of people — this time with his comedy about Harvey Weinstein.

You read that right. Mamet wants you to have a laugh about one of the most infamous workplace monsters of our time.

His new play, called “Bitter Wheat,” started previews Friday night at the Garrick Theatre, and it’s even worse than you would expect. It turns a fat-suited John Malkovich into, wait for it, “Barney Fein,” a ruthless, ravenous Hollywood mogul.

Fein is disgusting but charismatic, and Mamet plays his antics for laughs. It’s a tone-deaf treatment of Weinstein, whose alleged sexual misconduct against innumerable women instigated the #MeToo movement.





Nobody — nobody! — was looking for a Harvey-har-har. The irresponsible show contains zero insight into a deeply troubling situation and is propped up by staid humor and an overlong run time.

“Bitter Wheat” begins in a nondescript, poorly designed office when a young screenwriter pitches his script to Fein. “Your script is a piece of s–t,” he says. If only someone had told Mamet the same.

The entire first act then becomes a series of hackneyed Hollywood jabs — “The Writers Guild would drink a beaker of my mucus if I asked them to,” etc. — until a young Korean actress, Yung Kim Li (Ioanna Kimbook), walks through Wein … um, Fein’s door.

The pair end up at a restaurant — a Tribeca Grill copycat — and discuss her films, her dreams and her day. Yung dozes off and awakens to something unpleasant. “I loosened your belt,” Fein says. “And now I’m gonna take off my pants.” The British audience politely laughed. The Broadway audience — God forbid there is one — won’t.





Perhaps Mamet thinks he’s mocking Weinstein with black satire. The closest he gets: “I don’t think you understand how much money I’ve given to the Democratic Party,” Fein yells at Yung before she agrees to watch him shower.

But mostly the play is the writer of “Oleanna” trivializing abhorrent behavior in a boring way.

Some of the “zingers”: An organization is creating an award in his honor and Fein wants it to be “a well-built Caucasian man raising up an emaciated third-world child.”

To an actress: “Take off your top or I’ll throw us both out of the window.” And: “I have the greatest respect for women. But women are freakin’ people — which means they’re stupid.”

In Act 2, Fein’s misdeeds catch up to him. His Oscars are sent back, he’s removed from the boards of museums, his in-the-works projects are canceled. “Yes, I’ve molested various actresses,” he says. “As who else has not?!”





Malkovich, who should not have signed onto this project, isn’t bad. The actor does very little English-language stage work these days, so you’ll better recognize his tics and quirks from movies.

Fein continuously blames his massive weight for why he needs to lure in women.

The last Mamet show to play Broadway was the disastrous “China Doll” starring Al Pacino, who relied on teleprompters to regurgitate Mamet’s abysmal text. Let’s hope the dreadful “Bitter Wheat” doesn’t make a compulsory leap across the pond.





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