Word: mamet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tossing the rest back into the pile to rot. These few scraps, rare moments when people step out of their well-worn, meaningless grooves and follow instincts and impulses represent the minimalist thesis that most lives reduce to a few short intense moments. Gripping the production of David Mamet's Reunion tightly as a pack of howling canines chasing an axe murderer, director Sam Samuels and actors Alice Brown and Ralph Zito prove, with their restraint, the minimalist theory...
Including Mamet's Dark Pony, sandwiched around Reunion, seems, on the other hand, antithetical to the minimalist premise. Nearly identical versions of a single scene, one before and one after Reunion, comprise the play, although the first version is listed, enigmatically, as a "Prologue." Alone, Dark Pony works as a stark portrait of two people without really succeeding, as Reunion does...
...frightening how much David Mamet knows about this perverse mating dance, this conflict between the it and the ego. What, has he spent his life in sticky piano bars that draw only lost stewardesses, old mailmen and dead celebrities? His ear for dialogue, for real speech by people with sore kneecaps, cannot be matched. Likewise he has a delightful knack for truisms, the pithy revelations of small minds obsessed with sexual communication--intercourse, as it were...
Freedom from convention is the negligee to Mamet's play, slipped on under a suit of comedy but never fully revealed. Instead Bernie and Danny, Deborah and Joan remain caught in a sexual charade that is hopelessly--and hilariously--perverse...