Word: mamet
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...taken equal care animating all of these (and other) characters, regardless of their time on stage. She places Angels in America where it belongs: in a complete moral universe of heroic risks, mutable ethics and terrible punishments. Altman's most recent directing project, last spring's revival of Mamet's Oleanna, was a wobbly production that tried to let its controversial subject matter speak for itself; it didn't. Here, however, she shows a sureness of perspective that recalls that other Altman, Robert, the filmmaker behind the human panoramas of Short Cuts and Nashville, and whose name has, in fact...
...Edge, from a screenplay by David Mamet... Oh, excuse us while we ask, "Huh?" The Ubermensch of Urban Menace with a wilderness script? Mr. American Buffalo out where the, well, elk roam? Yes, and this is genuine Mametiana: a two-character piece with threats crowding in from the elements (vast space, cold weather, an angry bear) and from a man's bitter, murky soul. It doesn't have much of the Mamet dialogue tang; that is on dazzling display in his forthcoming thriller, The Spanish Prisoner. Still, The Edge, directed by Lee Tamahori, offers enough of what a melodrama demands...
...obviously the hype works." In that spirit, ABC asked Halmi, the chairman of Hallmark Entertainment, to come up with something about "what the year 2000 means." A tough question, so Halmi has passed the buck to 10 of America's leading playwrights--John Guare, Larry Gelbart, David Mamet, Steve Martin, Elaine May, Terrence McNally, Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Wendy Wasserstein and August Wilson--each of whom will contribute a teleplay about the millennium that will be broadcast during a single week of the November 1999 sweeps...
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...