Failure to Launch
The playwright, David Mamet, has on numerous occasions boiled down overarching thematic schematic of his entire body of work as being about people trying to connect with each other and failing to launch. That career-long thematic obsession essentially originated with this early play which ignited that long career. While the theme of trying and failing connect may be impressed deeper within the storyline of later workers, it froths on the surface of every scene, every conversation and every interaction here.
The Perversity of Stasis
People try to connect. They fail. They try again. Fail again. Move on. Try to connect with someone in the same way and fail in the same way. It is the perverse nature of humanity that evolution takes place all around, but people still behave in essentially the same way. Mamet and Shakespeare both wrote of romantic couplings that simply were not meant to be. Four centuries of progress changed every aspect of daily life, but playwrights today can still write of romance with only the words changed, not the actions. The primary difference is that when Shakespeare wrote about failed romance, it was within the mode of tragedy. Today it is called Annie Hall-esque.
Acquired Misogyny
This relational stasis is due in no small part to generational infection. When Mamet talks about a failure to connect, he is referring to romance and love and all that jazz. On the level of friendship, it is too easy for incompatibility to blossom into a connection. Too often that connection winds up contaminating the field of available romantic partners which just feeds into the inability to connect. The failure to launch is the result of vicious circle which the play explicitly expresses through the influence that the older Bernie exerts on the younger Danny. The nature of this relation strongly implies that misogyny and chauvinism are not natural emotional reactions in men toward women and that nature is all too easily and way too early trumped by nurture, resulting in an inexorable and unending cycle.
