Word: mamet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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AUTHORS: LARRY KRAMER, DAVID MAMET, WENDY WASSERSTEIN...
...would have been an exceptional week that brought the openings of fiercely funny and trenchantly topical plays by three of the nation's leading dramatists. But if the theater seemed reborn with relevance last week -- thanks to Larry Kramer's poignant gay Bildungsroman, The Destiny of Me, David Mamet's lapel-grabbing vision of political correctness cum intellectual terrorism in Oleanna and Wendy Wasserstein's drawing-room comedy with claws, The Sisters Rosensweig -- Broadway was not part of the buzz. For reasons ranging from finances to the tyranny of reviews, the producers of all three chose to open off-Broadway...
...Mamet's Oleanna sets up an innocent-looking encounter between a baffled and seemingly despondent college student (played by Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon) and a haughty and fashionably iconoclastic professor (William H. Macy). His office remarks to her, lashed to a Procrustean bed of rhetorical propriety, wildly and perhaps willfully misinterpreted, become her basis for bringing formal disciplinary charges. He is accused of everything from sexual harassment to disrespect for the learning process. But his worst crime in her eyes is the "elitism" of daring to think that having something to impart makes him more important than those...
...comply with anything just to end the humiliation and pain. His ugly spiral downward is at once outlandish and entirely plausible, and it had this audience member virtually leaping out of his chair in fury at the injustice and unreason. Whatever the bumps -- and there are a few in Mamet's staging of his text -- the power to incense, like that to sadden or amuse, is reason enough to cheer for the future of the theater...
What those watching and listening to Pacino's devilish sound-bites had been overpowered by was his believability. Pacino was not Pacino; he was Scarface. By that token, though, he never is. In "Glengarry Glen Ross," the new movie based on the play by David Mamet, Pacino is a salesman, Ricky Roma...