Mamet Musical Replaced with 'Keep Your Pantheon' in LA

David Mamet's much anticipated musical A Waitress in Yellowstone has been pulled from Center Theatre Group's Kirk Douglas Theatre's upcoming season, replaced by another Mamet world premiere, Keep Your Pantheon, according to CTG Artistic Director Michael Ritchie.

Keep Your Pantheon will be presented on a double-bill with an early Mamet piece Duck Variations, scheduled to open May 18, 2008 and run through June 8 at the Culver City theatre.

Neil Pepe, director of Mamet's courtroom farce, Romance, which was in CTG's 2005-2006 season at the Mark Taper Forum, will direct. 

In Keep Your Pantheon "an impoverished acting company on the edge of eviction is offered a lucrative engagement and life is finally on the upswing. But through a series of riotous mishaps, the troupe finds its problems have actually multiplied, and that they are about to learn a new meaning for the term 'dying on stage,'" state press notes.
 
Duck Variations, "a sly meditation on the meaning of life written in the early 1970s, depicts conversations between two elderly men who are sitting on a park bench and watching ducks. Their observations about the ducks, whether factual or incorrect, create a beautiful fugue on the human condition – on family and friendship, the possibility of happiness and on death."

Mamet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for Glengarry Glen Ross, for which he later wrote the screenplay.  His other plays include Speed the Plow, American Buffalo, Oleanna, Boston Marriage, Romance, and November, which opens on Broadway this month.  His screenplays include "The Postman Always Rings Twice," "The Verdict," "The Untouchables" and "Wag the Dog." Mamet created and is the executive producer of the critically acclaimed CBS-TV series "The Unit."

The Kirk Douglas Theatre is located at 9820 Washington Blvd. in Culver City.  For further information, please call (213) 628-2772 or visit www.CenterTheatreGroup.org.

Photo of David Mamet by Walter McBride / Retna Ltd.

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