Customer Reviews

Life in the Theatre

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I saw this play Off-Broadway in the 1970's and was mesmerized. This is Mamet in a very tender mood. It rings with authenticity and has one of the funniest onstage scenes ever written. It is a beautiful elegy to actors working at what they love.

O.K., I know that many Mamet fans were disapointed with this one but I, for one, wasn't. This was actually the first Mamet play that I was introduced to (Before then I didn't even know that David Mamet existed) and I absolutly loved it, after reading it a few times. Yes, at first the dialouge (SP?) seems rather bland but, as my title says, you need to read between the lines! Use your imagination! There is something powerful about this piece because of all the underlaying tension. So read it! If you're patient, that is.

A comedy of sadness. And that phenomenal back and forth which jumps off the page.

I've been reading and viewing David Mamet plays and movies for 25 years, but I had not seen this until recently on Broadway with Patrick Stewart and TR Knight. A Life in the Theatre is a delightful and whimsical inside-the-theatre wink-at-the-audience homage to actors' pomposities and insecurities.

Having seen the recent staging, I can understand how examining the script and stage instructions alone could be a challenge to the imagination. Without the execution of the sight gags and the dagger-like quips between the actors the dialogue could indeed be a bit dry. But, having seen the play performed, I was eager to read it to revisit the dialogue with Stewart's and Knight's performances fresh in my mind.

My favorite sight gag (spoiler alert): the scene opens with the actors onstage performing to the fictional audience, with the actual audience viewing the scene from the back of the staged theater. In the actual background (imaginary foreground) are plywood waves elevating up and down to stimulate a rolling ocean. In the actual foreground (imaginary background behind the plywood waves) are the actors in a single-masted lifeboat, rigged on a teeter-totter operated by the actors legs which poke out of the bottomless lifeboat hull. But the actors start their boat rocking out of sequence with the stagehands' operation of the waves, such that when the right side waves go up, the left side of the lifeboat teeters up, which the actual audience grasps will hide one actor below the waves and leave the other actor's legs exposed as sticking out of the bottom of the boat to the imagined audience. That's the joke -- and the scene goes on for several minutes of overacting and tortured dialogue, and all the while the actors never get the boat in synch with the waves. I'm cracking up now, but seeing it and reading/imagining it are two different experiences.

For a Mamet play, this one sure was a let-down. The play deals with the relationship between two actors - one older and one younger. Occasionally the dialogue between the two is mildly interesting, but more often than not it is tedious and boring. The scenes are short and virtually interchangable with no real depth of character. If you've read one exchange between the characters, you've basically read them all. Only a Mamet fanatic would truly enjoy this work.

this is a slight and unimpressive play, especially when one takes into account mamet's impressive body of work. This play focuses on the huge gap between an older, waning actor and a young promising one. The interaction between the two is often fascinating, and the scenes in which they perform from the play they are acting in are very telling of their 'real life' characters. Overall this was a disapointment, and should probably only interest completist mamet fans.