Today is Sunday, December 2, marking the official opening night performance for two-time Tony Award winner Patti LuPone and three-time Academy Award nominee Debra Winger's debate on faith, politics, persecution and redemption in the world premiere of David Mamet's new two-woman drama The Anarchis at the John Golden Theatre.
LuPone is cast as an inmate serving a life sentence and Debra Winger as the woman who must determine whether she is fit for parole in the tautly-penned, 70-minute play that began previews November 13 for a 14-week run through February 17, 2013, at the newly renovated Golden. Tony Award-nominated and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Mamet directs.
According to producers, "LuPone plays the title character and Winger plays a prison official. These actresses will make theatrical fireworks as one character, put away for life, wants out while the other wants to make sure she stays inside. This explosive new work by Mamet is about passion, redemption, deception, and revolution."
I'm usually not a member of the spoiler alert squad, but seriously Backstage, spoiler alert!
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
Backstage seems to be an uber-blunt version of what most posters offered on the preview thread. If the critics showed no mercy for Reback's new play, I seriously doubt they'll give Mamet a break -- especially considering the issues in play and the brief duration...
How long before knowitall shows up to do spin control?
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
Knowitall is probably at the show right now. Unless he's just one of Jeff's lowly paid slaves than he's at home drinking to forget the past week at the office.
Matthew Murray is fairly positive with some very good words for Patti.
Even so, what is present finds full expression in Mamet’s quietly explosive staging, which contrasts the raging humanity of the story against the harshly institutional setting of Patrizia von Brandenstein’s stark office set beneath Jeff Croiter’s piercing lights, and particularly the actresses’ performances. LuPone does her finest, and most restrained, Broadway work in more than a decade, infusing Cathy with palpable angst and anger that seem destined to burst through her thickened skin. Yet these attributes are tempered by an oddly casual serenity that unquestionably imparts the impression that this is a woman who, for better or worse, is at peace with herself. You therefore believe both necessary halves of the equation, and are left guessing until the climactic revelations — and perhaps beyond — what her true motives are.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
I agree with Murray. I liked the play and the performances. Just because someone liked something you did not does not mean they are "on crack."
"The sexual energy between the mother and son really concerns me!"-random woman behind me at Next to Normal
"I want to meet him after and bang him!"-random woman who exposed her breasts at Rock of Ages, referring to James Carpinello
When I see the phrase "the ____ estate", I imagine a vast mansion in the country full of monocled men and high-collared women receiving letters about productions across the country and doing spit-takes at whatever they contain.
-Kad
One of the worst nights in the theater I've ever had. Well, most boring, really. Even crazy Patti was boring. This was like my college productions or community theater productions. Run away.
Matthew Murray loves to be contrary to the general consensus of most critics, when he doesn't flat out hate something, so if he liked it, it's definitely gonna get trashed.
"Hey little girls, look at all the men in shiny shirts and no wives!" - Jackie Hoffman, Xanadu, 19 Feb 2008