Plays: 3 "Glengarry Glen Ross", "Prairie Du Chien", "The Shawl", "Speed-the-Plow"

by David Mamet (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1996

  $26.36

  The finest American playwright of his generation (Sunday Times) Glen Garry Glen Ross (also made in to a film starring Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino) his superb play about real estate salesmen in a cut-throat sales competition (New Society); in Prairie du Chien a railway carriage speeding through the Wisconsin night is the setting for a violent story of obsessive jealousy, murder and suicide, told within shooting distance of a card-hustler and his victim. A short poignant study in violence and the twin drives of love and money, told with hypnotic power thorugh a travelling raconteur (City Limits); The Shawl shows a clairvoyant wondering whether to cheat a bereaved woman of her inheritance and confirms Mamet's place as about the best living writer of vivid American dialogue (Daily Telegraph). Set in the cut-throat world of Hollywood, Speed-the-Plow sees two old-time movie collaborators manipulate the aspirations of a young woman who will do anything to attain her dream of success a brilliant black comedy, a dazzling dissection of Hollywood cupidity. (Newsweek)

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $12.37

  A collection of outstanding plays from one of America's greatest playwrights Cryptogram: Mamet's play suggests that deception is an endless spiralling process that eventually corrodes the soul. But it also harps on a theme that runs right throughout Mamet's work: the notion that we use words as a destructive social camouflage to lie to others and ourselves...And here through all the repetitions, half sentences and echoing encounter of one question with another, you feel the characters devalue experience through their use of language. As Del cries in desperation at the end, 'If we could speak the truth for one instant, then we would be free.' Mamet's point is that we are held spiritually captive by our bluster and evasions. (Michael Billington, Guardian) Oleanna: An exploration of male-femal conflicts which cogently demonstrates that whe free thought and dialogue are imperilled, nobody wins (Independent) The Old Neighborhood: Mamet, ranked with Miller, Albee and Shepard as America's finest living playwrights, distills the raw, rank flavour of people wading down streams of consciousness...A play of riveting disquiet (Evening Standard)

• New

  Paperback
  1996

  $25.62

  The finest American playwright of his generation (Sunday Times) Reunion shows the meeting between a father and daughter after nearly twenty years of separation: It would be hard to over-praise the way Mr Mamet suggests behind the probing, joshing family chat, an extraordinary sense of pain and loss...although the play has a strong social comment about the destructively cyclical effect of divorce, it is neither sour nor defeatist (Guardian); In Dark Play, a father tells his five-year-old daughter a story about an Indian boy and his pony a subtle, lyrical, dreamlike vignette (Star Tribune); in The Woods, a young man and woman spend the night in a cabin together a beautifully conceived love story (Chicago Daily News); Lakeboat portrays eight crew members of a merchant ship exchanging wild fantasies about sex, gambling and violence Richly overheard talk...loopy, funny construction. (Village Voice); Edmond is an odyssey through the disturbing, suspended dark void of a contemporary New York it is also a technically adventurous piece pared brilliantly to the bone, highly theatrical in its scenic elisions. (Financial Times)