Word: mamet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ambiguity is the name of the game in a David Mamet play. And this time around, The Old Neighborhood is no different. The disjointed, sometimes confusing, dialogue is a staple that at once holds the audience's attention and drives it away with its intangibility. Mamet's lines dance around an unspecified issue of human nature with references to characters in the play to anchor the conversation. But mostly it seems the characters are just spouting their philosophy of life even when their own lives are obviously in disarray...
...open in the middle of conversations that are never fully explained. Then they close without resolving the issues raised in the scene. There's an urge to suddenly jump out of one's seat and yell, "What is going on? I don't understand what you're talking about!" Mamet also seems to expect prior knowledge and intelligence from his audience. The first act involves the history of the Jews that I would not have understood unless I had luckily taken Foreign Cultures 56: "Jewish Life in Eastern Europe Before 1914" this semester. After all, would any Joe Schmoe know...
...turns the tables, though, to be as imbalanced in her favor as Act One is in his, and in this respect, Mamet's writing seems forced. Why can Carol suddenly attack John through the words of his own book which, in the previous act, she said she couldn't understand...
Davidson had trouble locating his character within the dialogue. He knew what John said, but he did not always know why, leaving the character without an arc. The concertina of pride and panic that Mamet composes for John was stripped of its subtleties. Instead, in each line, he strummed the same self-satisfied note...
Truth be told, either actor would be good in a less psychological, less subtle production than Oleanna, which needs all the extra subtlety it can get. The play fails at being, in Carol's terms, "not [about] my feelings, but the feelings of women, and men." Mamet himself stacks the deck too unevenly and too erratically for that. This play can only work when focused around the feelings of this one woman and this one man, but amidst all the yelling, the pushing and the politics, Oleanna lost even its human emotional core...