Word: mamet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Directed by Bob Rafelson; Screenplay by David Mamet...
Each play involves only two characters: a father and daughter. In Reunion,a married daughter meet with her middle-aged father for the first time in about 25 years. Without the poignant sensitivity Brown and Zito bring to their roles, even Mamet's extraordinary script and Samuel's tight directing would have no effect on an audience. From the first moment Brown walks on stage, she fills the room with tension and suppressed hatred, anger and deeply buried love. The utter awkwardness of her character's situation increases and emerges more clearly as the dialogue continues. Compulsively smoking, fidgeting with...
...content to reduce these tangled relationships to one conversation, Mamet has chopped out parts of the afternoon by periodically fading out the stage lights. Mamet meagerly doles out the snips of dialogue between fadeouts, but the impact of each line becomes tremendous. The characters do not merely bounce lines off each other, they rip savagely but subtly at each other's hearts, rending them with tense words and rebuilding cautiously and slowly at the same time. "I never had a father...it's my right, isn't it. Isn't it?" the daughter demands, unassailable in her emotion, inconsolable...
Samuels has not turned to visual minimalism for this production; a bare stage and black costumes suggest themselves to such austere lines, but they would only denigrate Mamet's subtler minimalism. While set and costumes are uncluttered, they afford details that allow the lines their bareness, filling in little gaps that the dialogue leaves ambiguous...
...chopping away the meat with the fat. Syrie Maugham, the great minimalist interior designer, discarded her earliest works, stark unpainted rooms devoid of furniture and even windows, for what later became her classic minimalist style, rooms done completely in white in which enormous windows played a crucial role. Likewise, Mamet progresses in Reunion to achieve the depth that got lost in Dark Pony, and expands his message to the maximum...