HotReview.org Editor's
Picks
Shows Worth Seeing:
A Life in the Theatre
By David Mamet
Gerald Schoenfeld Theater
236 W. 45th St.
Box office: (212) 279-4200
The two-hander A Life
in the Theatre is one of David Mamet’s slighter dramas.
A series of loosely connected vignettes describing the “frenemy”
relationship between an older and a younger actor, the play does
have some subtleties but it’s repetitious, a bit insular
in its dependence on backstage humor, and it ends up feeling inconsequential.
The key to maximizing its subtlety is to cast actors who can make
its variety of flagrantly histrionic behaviors (onstage and off)
seem like interesting social strategy, a form of sincere yet biting
communication between professionals who understand each other
all too well when they’re exaggerating, pontificating, and
otherwise expressing the exact opposite of what they mean. The
drama of this work—such as it is—has primarily to
do with the shifting power relations between the actors as one’s
career flourishes and the other starts feeling the decline of
age. Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight are terrific at this dance
of intentional and unintentional undermining, conscious and unconscious
envy. Stewart’s cool command in the older role comes as
no surprise, but that a TV darling like Knight actually possesses
the chops to hold his own beside him is a palpable relief. The
pith of Mamet’s tale is in tiny ambiguities concerning intention,
which both the characters and the audience have fun noticing and
decoding, and all those hinges work marvelously in this production
directed by Neil Pepe. It is a puzzle why anyone thought such
thin material merited a lavish Broadway production, but the show
is smart, muscular and perceptive and does much credit to the
performers.
