Word: mamet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
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...
...decades ago, between acting jobs, David Mamet worked in a real estate & office. There, the playwright later recalled, salesmen peddled "tracts of undeveloped land in Arizona and Florida to gullible Chicagoans." It was a chance to observe up close these dinosaurs of capitalism ("An idea," Mamet said, "whose time has come and gone") working their cold-blooded performance art on people too nice to say no. Mamet dramatized the experience in the 1983 play Glengarry Glen Ross, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and has now brought it, intact and enhanced, to the screen...
...Mamet's men talk for a living, and they talk to keep from telling the truth. In their four-letter world, lying comes with the territory. As the Old Man says in Strindberg's Ghost Sonata: "Silence hides nothing. Words conceal." Two of the salesmen, Moss (Ed Harris) and Aaronow (Alan Arkin), sit in a bar, grousing about the real estate company. It is as much a part of their job as sounding stardusted with sweet reason while on a pitch. Moss sketches an idea for a theft of the office, and later tells Aaronow he is implicated...