Word: mamet
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...David Mamet has created some compelling fictions in his time--about small-time crooks (American Buffalo), real-estate hustlers (Glengarry Glen Ross), conniving Hollywood producers (Speed-the-Plow). In The Old Neighborhood, which just opened on Broadway, he has turned inward. In three brief, tenuously related sketches, we watch as Bobby (Peter Riegert), on a visit to his hometown, has a series of encounters with friends and family: an old pal from the neighborhood; his sister Jolly and her taciturn husband; an ex-girlfriend. It's not hard to recognize Bobby as a stand-in for Mamet, the town...
...Mamet's clipped, macho, Ping-Pong dialogue still has a good deal of satiric punch. ("How's Laurie?" "Fine." "Yeah, but how is she, though?") Scott Zigler has directed with haunting spareness. And the acting is top-notch, particularly Patti LuPone, feisty and funny as Jolly. But raiding the memory bank has made Mamet lazy. His plays have never been much concerned with plot, but The Old Neighborhood has no forward propulsion at all. Bobby spends most of the time staring off into the distance, head cocked slightly, as if groping for memories, meaning, connection. So are we. Because...
...except that the gags are too lame even for Simon in a nostalgic haze. One character is a boorish Italian stud with a penchant for malapropisms (he calls Roman gladiators "gladiolas"), and the play's comic piece de resistance is, so help me, a bird's funeral. Simon, like Mamet, is content to trot out his characters two at a time for a series of unfulfilling, barely connected dialogues...
Critics have been indulgent with Simon's play, enthusiastic about Mamet's. That's understandable: these two are among the last serious American dramatists able to get their work produced on Broadway, and it's nice to have them back. But to be satisfied with these half-baked efforts is nostalgia of the worst kind...
...PHRASE] Hollywood and D.C., David Mamet-style...