The Old Neighborhood / the Disappearance of the Jews

By David Mamet

Book Overview

In The Old Neighborhood David Mamet confirms his stature as a master of the American stage, a writer who can turn the most innocuous phrase into a lit fuse and a family reunion into a perfectly... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1568657455
• ISBN13: 9781568657455
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: VINTAGE. NY 1998
• Length: 100 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

It's actually a masterpiece...

but nobody's read it. As far as I can tell, Mamet's biggest problem in holding onto the audience his Pulitzer Prize won him comes from an increasingly underappreciated quality in writers today: his admirable level of restraint. He may have won the people over with his dirty poetry but he's hung onto the faithful with nimbler, subtler writing. It's not that his recent work isn't at the level of his earlier work; I think it just takes a different tack. "The Old Neighborhood" is three good plays put together to comprise great theater. Each of these plays hits a different part of the human psyche and together they're so good they hurt. It's elegiac, wistful, bitter, furious, tragic; it's as bursting with adjectives as "Glengarry Glen Ross" was with expletives. It takes more work to appreciate this older, wiser Mamet; but the rewards are even greater.