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Who Killed David Mamet? It Was You and Me.
Critics are having a blast beating David Mamet’s newest play, The Anarchist, to a pulp, but something about this strikes me as culturally self-mutilating. Of course, we have a history of snubbing our...
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Death of a Fucking Salesman
2012 has been a year of great Broadway revivals—first Death of a Salesman, followed by Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—and now David Mamet’s masterpiece Glengarry Glen Ross, likely the best American...
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Lord, Don’t They Help Themselves?
A night of drunken revelries on the eve of midterms finds Leigh (Zosia Mamet) in bed with Davis (Matt Lauria) while her boyfriend, Jimmy (Evan Jonigkeit), is out of town. Leigh cries rape—and Davis,...
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Et cetera
Neil LaBute has always struck me as occasionally nastily observant but mostly just plain nasty, though his play Some Girl(s), currently running at the Chain Theatre, suffers more from endless tedium...
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Under His Thumb
People who are a little smart and a lot insecure love to associate with lesser minds. They will make allusions with the sole intention of being asked to explain them and they will quietly correct...
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Clash of Civilizations Over a Chai in the Upper West Side
Being a Jew is exhausting. There’s the self-loathing, the guilt, the language (which doesn’t even use Roman letters), and—for those of us born after 1948—the inescapable identification of Jewishness...
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Voicing Ghosts
Ghosts hover in the wings of two short plays by David Mamet, “Prairie du Chien” and “The Shawl,” currently paired on Atlantic Stage 2. In “Prairie du Chien,” a raconteur (Jordan Lage) passes the time...
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Ink by the Carload
I tend to shy away from biographical readings of texts. But consider: David Mamet’s new play, The Penitent, is about a psychologist, Charles (Chris Bauer), who treats a patient who goes on to murder...
View ArticleWhat Makes You Free?
It is 1942 and in Poland, Jews are marching into the gas chambers. But in Yonkers, they are ostensibly dealing with family problems. When Eddie (Dominic Comperatore) finds himself terribly in debt...
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