Word: ruth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...couple in love at the beginning, Ruth (Karen Todd) and Nick (Ian Lithgow) indulge in an idyllic weekend retreat. In classically structured form, Mamet moves to the moments of crisis in which the dissolution of their relationship is most pronounced. Then focuses on achieving resolution--structurally of the play, and literally of the relationship...
Mamet, like Philip Roth, justifies his oververbalization within the script. Ruth declares to Nick in the third act of the play: "You're so fucking corny." Writing off Nick and Ruth as corny characters may redeem many corny lines that are obviously unnatural. "We put on clothes, we can not make out what we look like...It's very lonely and we all get desperate to be warm. We have to find our lovers when it's warm...
Like Mamet's poetic dialogue, his characters are allegorical, pointedly representative. Nick and Ruth, a "Man" and a "Woman", divulge no specific information about their families, their jobs, or the earlier history of their relationship. Their stories do not contextualize their existence, instead they echo an earlier, mythically romantic, generation when people did love generously...
Nick talks about his father's friend who used to beat his wife up, and Ruth talks of people escaping and hiding them under petticoats and taking them to safety through the forest. These stories have a figurative purpose: Ruth and Nick are the babes in the wood, yet simultaneously mother and child and also the ones who have lost their way. Mamet deftly weaves these layers of imagery into the dialogue...
...play opens with Frederic's (remarkable tenor Joel Derfner) 21st birthday, marking the official end of his legal apprenticeship to a band of pirates. His nursemaid, Ruth, (a clear and comic Diana Graham) had mistaken his father's request of "pilot" for "pirate" training and, now that Frederic is free, he seeks to destroy piracy...