A Life in the Theatre Goodman Theatre
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Especially in director Robert Falls’s funny and moving revival, David Mamet’s gentle, compact A Life in the Theatre is just right for launching the Goodman’s Mamet festival, a series intended to both reevaluate the playwright who helped shape off-Loop theater in the 70s and introduce his work to audiences who may know it mainly through his new TV drama The Unit. The play’s clipped rhythms, cryptic pauses, casual profanity, obsession with semantic precision–these are the hallmarks of a writer for whom drama lies in character and language rather than action. Thematically, too, this poignant 1977 comedy is quintessential Mamet. Like Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Oleanna, it charts the evolving relationship between an eager, hungry youngster and a needy, world-weary elder.
Robert is an old-school technician, for whom good acting derives from detailed textual analysis. John’s approach is more instinctive, but he comes to appreciate Robert’s emphasis on craft–even as Robert’s craftsmanship deteriorates under the influence of drink. Robert, meanwhile, sees in John the callow mistakes and boundless, unfulfilled hopes of his own youth. Garrulous, philosophically inclined, and facing his mortality, he eventually views John not only as a colleague but as his legacy.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Michael Brosilow.
