THE PENITENT (previews)

[cjmclaughlin10]

Posted: 2/8/17 at 12:55pm

I am really hopping this new play at the Atlantic Theatre Company will be a rebound for David Mamet...  I was burnt by purchasing tickets to The Anarchist and China Doll before previews started.  

 

The premise for this new play sounds intriguing: A renowned psychiatrist is asked to testify on behalf of a young patient. When he refuses, his career, ethics and faith are thrown into question.

 

Early reports are appreciated as always 

[boonanas]

Posted: 2/8/17 at 12:57pm

I will be seeing this tonight, huge fan of Mamet although I missed China Doll due to the negative reviews

[PianoMann]

Posted: 2/8/17 at 1:10pm

I'll be there in a few weeks and am very much looking forward to it. I'm a big fan of Mamet, too, and actually found China Doll quite engaging (I know, I know). Looking forward to early reports!

[LightsOut90]

Posted: 2/8/17 at 10:31pm

soooooooo any thoughts on this one?

[boonanas]

Posted: 2/9/17 at 5:36am

VERY Mamet play. Hard to follow at first.  overall found it to be good but not one of his best.. the ending is a little unearned. Very short.. clocking in around 80 minutes. Lawrence Gillard and Jordan Lage are great in their respective roles. I found the problems in the more complex characters that Chris Bauer and Rebecca Pigeon play, although it was the first preview so they may still work that out. I'm curious as to others thoughts.

[PianoMann]

Posted: 2/22/17 at 9:26am

I saw The Penitent last night and overall found it a mixed bag. Mamet explores some big, interesting ideas in the play (professional and personal oaths, religion, homophobia, etc.), but never truly capitalizes on the inherent drama of those topics. In fact, this short 80-minute play feels like it should be the first act of a longer work. Most of the actors do well in their roles: Chris Bauer anchors the show quite well as the conflicted psychiatrist, and Lawrence Gilliard Jr. and Jordan Lage play well off of him.  Gilliard Jr. in particular has the standout scene opposite Bauer, but he felt underutilized with only about 30 minutes of stage time. Unfortunately, I thought Rebecca Pidgeon was horrible, giving a truly stunted and awkward performance. I know Mamet does not have a particularly great track record writing realistic, well-rounded female characters, but Pidgeon's performance did nothing to elevate his writing of the character. Overall, I think it's worth seeing if you're a fan of Mamet's work and it was certainly worth the price of the Back25 ticket I bought. If you sit this one out, though, you won't be missing anything particularly special.

[AC126748]

Posted: 2/22/17 at 9:31am

SPOILERS

The Penitent is another in the long line of boring and pointless treatises we've come to expect from this author. It is a character study of a psychiatrist, Charles (played by Chris Bauer), whose career and life are derailed after he refuses to testify on behalf of a former patient who committed a massacre. The patient claims that Charles will not testify because the patient is gay, and Charles, having recently become religious, is prejudiced. Most of the plot hinges on a misprint of an article that Charles wrote on homosexuality; the title was "Homosexuality as an Adaptation," but it was printed as "Homosexuality as an Aberration." I found most of the play patently unbelievable and the writing pedestrian. Neil Pepe's production is sleek, but even at a running time of ninety minutes (including an entirely unnecessary 15-minute intermission), it felt endless. The acting ranges from solid (Bauer and Jordan Lage, as his attorney), to perfunctory (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.), to one of the worst performances I've ever seen on a professional stage (Rebecca Pidgeon, aka Mrs. Mamet, employing what sounds like an Irish accent for no discernible reason). After this excruciating evening, I think I can say that I will be skipping any and all future Mamet plays.

[Kad]

Posted: 2/27/17 at 12:55pm

Yeah, even with its very short running time (with intermission, just under 90 minutes- meaning the play itself is just over an hour, marked with a totally perfunctory act break), this one is a massive slog.

Mamet's trademark dialogue style, full of interruptions and half-thoughts, here comes off as nothing short of stilted. Sentences are cut off after a word by silence. Dialogue is more like a Meisner repetition exercise than a conversation. Sentences are constructed in a vaguely antiquated way, despite ostensibly being set in the present. Rebecca Pidgeon's inexplicable dialect does not help here; she seems to be attempting the Mid-Atlantic stage standard dialect but ends up landing in various ports on both sides of the pond.

The play itself is fairly inert.. It seems to be a half-hearted lash out at various topics- the press, the medical profession, the nature of law- but ends up just being an amorphous blob. It focuses on a psychiatrist whose patient ends up committing a massacre, and in a letter blames the psychiatrist for not helping him out of bigotry (the murderer is gay, you see). However, driving issue of the play is that the press has decided to brand the psychiatrist a homophobe by claiming he wrote a paper calling homosexuality an "aberration"- when in fact the paper said it was an "adaptation." This leads the psychiatrist, who is also a newly religious Jew, to take a moral stand against testifying for the defense and turning over his files, citing the Hippocratic oath.

It all becomes very muddled very quickly, but with surprisingly little action. The characters talk and talk, often winding up in conversational cul-de-sacs, before finally ending the scene with no sense of anyone having changed in any way. I know Mamet's theatre philosophy hinges on the idea of the dialogue as written providing everything necessary for a performance, but this ultimately just becomes a very surface-level exploration of thinly-drawn characters. The final scene, packed with unbelievable revelations, basically undermines everything we've seen before- before ending the play, like all of its other scenes, in a perfunctory way.

Late-career Mamet is coasting on fumes- and it really seems like even those fumes are dwindled down to nothing.