Review: A Life in the Theatre by Tongue and Groove Theatre
by Michael Meigs
With David Mamet's name on the playbill, one expects edgy situations and sharp language, but this production of A Life in the Theatre was one of gentle comedy and smooth edges.
It's a two-man show in which we see two male actors in an unnamed fifth-rate theatrical company sharing a dressing room. Michael Stuart is the mature actor and Zeb West is the newcomer. Mamet gives us vignettes of them over the stretch of a season or so, sketching out their initial, stiffly polite contacts and showing the development of a relationship. The notion is that the stodgy, opinionated old-school actor is going to be eclipsed by the up-and-coming future rival. The implied question is whether there will be a passing of the torch or an arm wrestling contest for it.
Mamet gives his actors the opportunity for some pretty sharp stuff here. For example, when the younger man John praises a scene between an unnamed actress and Robert, the older man, Robert dismisses her as a "cunt" who relies on her supposed good looks. The suggested subtext is that Robert, an ageing bachelor, is homosexual.
Director Mark Stewart does not pursue that line of inquiry, however, and the older man Robert assumes a purely avuncular concern for John. We witness the two in the gym, rehearsing, and otherwise prepping for the stage. It becomes evident that the younger man is developing social contacts and attachments outside work, while Robert has none. He floats like a drab balloon attached to the playhouse.
The two climb onstage for some awful potboiler drama scenes. There's in a stiffly mannered "confrontation" over a seduced spouse; as shipwreck survivors afloat without hope on the sea, they earnestly mouth platitudes and display attitudes. When they play surgeons in an operating theatre, Robert becomes completely befuddled, losing his lines and prompting John simply to abandon him onstage with his hands fumbling inside the patient.
There's a duff sentimentality in much of this, and it arises from the cluelessness that Michael Stuart gives to the gradually failing older actor. Robert does lash out once in brief early spite, muttering "Bloody twit!" as John walks away. But we can see he really doesn't mean it. His heart is much more in his patient lectures to John on etiquette between colleagues, and he appears not to grasp the fact that his memory and his credibility are going. Some sharper edges might have roused greater sympathy from us, but Stuart's Robert is simply not self aware. In the end this makes him a caricature of every old ham who stayed on the stage too long.
Zeb West plays John as introspective, polite, and intently focused on his craft. He shows restraint in dealing with the older man. Late in the action Robert interrupts the younger man rehearsing a Shakespearian speech on the empty stage and simply will not go away; Robert hides, sniffling, in the dark rear rows in an effort to hear John declaiming. We see John's growing irritation, mixed with reluctant concern, but Robert remains offstage to us, unseen. I suspect that Mamet intended this to be played almost as a love scene, but that's not the interpretation here.
The sketch scenes are numerous and we enjoy the precise quasi-backstage ballet as a dressser for each actor lays out clothing and assists with the many changes of attire. Anyone who has ever applied greasepaint will respond to the setting and to the curious rituals we use to achieve stage make believe.
Mamet wrote this piece in 1977, just as he came tearing out of Chicago onto the national scene. Last year Ira Nadel published a biography of him entitled David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre. The title is something of a stretch. Mamet, now 61, certainly began in the theatre but quickly moved into screenwriting and directing for cinema and television, while continuing to write fiction and drama.
In other words, when he wrote this piece at the age of 30, he resembled John, the rising journeyman actor. The irony is that over the years A Life in The Theatre has generally served as a tour de force for the actor cast as Robert -- for example, Patrick Stewart, who played Robert in London in 2005.
Michael Stuart is no has-been, and we welcome him on Austin stages, usually at the Austin Playhouse, where Tongue and Groove Theatre staged this piece. His role in A Life in the Theatre as his own antithesis reminds us how fortunate we are to have his calm, canny presence and twinkling eye.
EXTRA
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A Life in the Theatre
by David Mamet
Tongue and Groove Theatre
