Mamet Plays: 2

The second in a series of "World Classics" presenting David Mamet's stage plays. Those in this volume date from the 1980s.

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"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)