Word: mamet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Pacino is almost a commuter between Hollywood and Broadway; he's played in Richard III, Mamet's American Buffalo and Wilde's Salome. Now, in a revival of the 1941 Hughie, he tackles O'Neill. Or better, wrestles with him--for this 55-min. one-acter, which Pacino also directed, is virtually a one-man show. A conversation a lonely man has with himself, it requires that the actor bring theatrical variety to monologue monotony...
...American dream and the working class are still an affecting source of drama; Sam Shepard and David Mamet are proof. But Death of a Salesman, with its focus on idealism, fails to address the core concerns of an increasingly skeptical world that has already learned from Willy's lesson. Idealism is not a universal frailty like Othello's jealousy or Hamlet's indecision, but a transient societal attitude, and one that is not pervasive today. Those who do not agree will probably enjoy the show...
...could read Sabbath's Theater as Roth's backlash, a Mamet-like refutation of P.C. feminism. But that would be missing the point. Roth never comes close to defending Sabbath. He only hopes to render the man--his "primal emotions and indecent language and careful, complex sentences"--in such high relief that, try as we might, we cannot despise him. When Sabbath is booted out of his puppetry professorship at a local college, Roth sees fit to include, as a foot-note, a lengthy transcript of the offending teacher-student phone sex episode. This is only Roth the provacateur, daring...
...David Mamet's cryptic, Kafkaesque An Interview takes place between the Attorney (Paul Guilfoyle) and the Attendant (Gerry Becker). Theirs is an encounter between a terrier and a sphinx: lots of barking on one side, stony silence on the other. The Attorney has apparently been summoned to defend his life, and as his exasperation rises, Guilfoyle displays a wonderfully mobile range of faces: puzzlement, gloating self-assertion, crumpled resignation. If An Interview finally seems like a one-joke drama, it's dexterous enough to dispense a little wallop of spooky uneasiness...
...work, but also something of a disappointment. The ricocheting dialogue verges on self-parody, and it doesn't have the realistic underpinnings (or the humor) of American Buffalo or Glengarry Glen Ross. No one can blame the fine cast-Ed Begley Jr., Felicity Huffman and young Shelton Dane-whom Mamet has directed. They help locate the fierce humanity inside this cryptic game...