Word: reuniones
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...rest back into the pile to rot. These few scraps, rare moments when people step out of their well-worn, meaningless grooves and follow instincts and impulses represent the minimalist thesis that most lives reduce to a few short intense moments. Gripping the production of David Mamet's Reunion tightly as a pack of howling canines chasing an axe murderer, director Sam Samuels and actors Alice Brown and Ralph Zito prove, with their restraint, the minimalist theory...
Including Mamet's Dark Pony, sandwiched around Reunion, seems, on the other hand, antithetical to the minimalist premise. Nearly identical versions of a single scene, one before and one after Reunion, comprise the play, although the first version is listed, enigmatically, as a "Prologue." Alone, Dark Pony works as a stark portrait of two people without really succeeding, as Reunion does...
Each play involves only two characters: a father and daughter. In Reunion,a married daughter meet with her middle-aged father for the first time in about 25 years. Without the poignant sensitivity Brown and Zito bring to their roles, even Mamet's extraordinary script and Samuel's tight directing would have no effect on an audience. From the first moment Brown walks on stage, she fills the room with tension and suppressed hatred, anger and deeply buried love. The utter awkwardness of her character's situation increases and emerges more clearly as the dialogue continues. Compulsively smoking, fidgeting with...
...single automobile seat of Dark Pony, the gaps of ambiguity widen. A father recites a familiar fairytale to his young daughter as they drive home in the car. Brown and Zito are convincing enough, but the point of the play is muddy. When they repeat the same scene after Reunion, the tale is again unclear, and a little annoying. A juxtaposition of two stages of a relationship, maybe, but they are not even the same relationship. Perhaps Samuels thought Reunion too short and heavy in its transcendant minimalism, and so included the other; otherwise, there seems little reason for this...
...stores got lost amid the Christmas lights that began winking as soon as the Halloween decorations came down. Its very lack of glitter, as Americans discovered anew last week, makes Thanksgiving the essence of what a holiday was originally supposed to be: a day primarily for family, for reunion, even for the offering of thanks...