Mamet Plays: 4: Crytogram; Oleanna; The Old Neighborhood: v. 4 (Contemporary Dramatists)

by David Mamet (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2002

  $25.24

  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

  $24.36

  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)