A Life in the Theatre Broadway Reviews

In 90 minutes of short vignettes, two actors run through every backstage story you've ever heard-missed cues, wardrobe malfunctions, dropped lines, broken props-all staged with comic dexterity by Mamet's frequent collaborator Neil Pepe in this fast-paced and fun revival, the show's first production on Broadway.

It is also an exhilarating showcase for two terrific actors, Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight, and a thrilling joyride back to the days when Mamet was a baby virtuoso in crazy love with the theater.

Stewart doesn't hide the large degree of ego-massaging motivating Robert's tutorials, as though he takes special delight in having mastered the role of the wise, old mentor. But his hammyness is cured with a seasoned charm. Knight plays it straight for most of the piece, but succeeds in the subtler job communicating how John's gratitude for veteran's attention gradually dissolves as he recognizes the man behind his off-stage character and grows more distant as his confidence builds and others recognize his own talent.

It's a good thing, then, that in this well-executed revival, Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight — playing the lead pair of theater actors at opposite ends of their careers — have the chemistry of offbeat pals who like to jabber. Stewart and Knight, both at the top of their game here, embrace the strange spirit of the show and imbue Mamet's 26 madcap vignettes with a feeling of buoyant, urgent comedy that elicits lots of laughs — and only the occasional grimace.

The production never quite finds its rhythm, but Mamet's writing certainly does. He shows us the poignance and the heroism of the performing life. 'The lights dim. Each to his own home,' Robert says to himself as he leaves the theatre, in the play's last line. But, to theatricals, home is where the art is.

Wonderfully assured in manner — until later in the story when Robert begins to falter — the craggy-faced Stewart suggests a rather florid artiste of the old school, complete with rich, plummy, vocal accents. Bouncing with youthful energy as John, Knight displays a puppy-dog eagerness that turns more reserved as he matures. The actors' personal interplay backstage might be expressed more intimately than it is here, but apparently director Neil Pepe intends to keep this production on the lighter, brighter side.

Now that David Cromer's 'Our Town' has closed, 'A Life in the Theatre' is the New York show to see. I wish that Mr. Stewart had a stronger partner opposite him, but his performance is rich enough to carry the play all by itself.

It's a trifle, but one that's dished out by Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight (the puppyish George on 'Grey's Anatomy'), two skilled, likable stars with a mellow chemistry and spot-on timing.

Neil Pepe's directorial concept is pretty grand, and he's gotten Santo Loquasto to provide more set changes and Laura Bauer more costume pieces that your average Metropolitan Opera production. This has the twin effects of slowing the show down constantly (so that a new thingamajig can be rolled onto the stage and Stewart and Knight can change into yet another witty set of outfits) and enlivening the proceedings enormously. Loquasto's reverse-perspective on-stage scenes, offering a view of the audience from the actor's point of view, are especially captivating.

Gentleness is not the first quality that leaps to mind when it comes to the work of David Mamet. But the bile master's 1977 two-hander, A Life in the Theatre-now making its Broadway debut in a slight but entertaining production starring Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight-has little of the rat-a-tat dramatic firepower of Mamet's later and more famous works. It is a knowing, affectionate, faintly nostalgic portrait of actors and the roles they play onstage and off, and Mamet tends to illuminate them not with the glare of a follow spot but rather by the soft glow of a ghost light.

Despite getting off on the wrong emotional foot, the production recovers once these hard-working thesps begin to throw themselves into their roles for the execrable shows in the company repertory. Mamet displays malicious glee in trotting out all the old chestnuts, from the World War I battlefield play ('Those dirty bastards, they stuck him on the wire and left him there for target practice!') and the Chekhovian social drama ('If we could leave this afternoon ... if we could just call, bring the carriage round, just leave this afternoon ...') to a definitive spoof of an English shipwreck drama, performed in thick lower-class accents ('Kid, we haven't got a chance in hell. But you shouldn't let it get you down, 'cause that's what life on the sea is about').

Pepe, a longtime Mamet collaborator, described Life in a recent Playbill interview with the playwright as '(not only) a love letter to the theater, but also to actors.' Mind you, lovable isn't the first word you'd apply to either of the two thespians who are the sole characters here. Robert, played by Stewart, is a gentleman of a certain age facing the twilight of his career, if not his vanity; John, Knight's role, is an up-and-comer who may not be as ingenuous as he seems.

What does emerge is a wonderful character study. Patrick Stewart is a marvel in dumbing down his God-given talents. This Brit playing a mediocre American actor, even manages to mangle Robert's British accent. There’s a poignancy as well when Stewart, through the laughs, reveals the emptiness in Robert’s life. T.R. Knight's role is basically one of second banana but he certainly holds his own especially when the two are botching a scene together.

But then, who’d be suicidal enough to want to get between Stewart and an audience? No one gets at the tragic dignity of a powerful man in irresistible decline quite like Stewart (and here I direct your attention, without shame, not only to his work in Macbeth and The Ride Down Mount Morgan, but to his towering, tumbling, still-unequaled performance in the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation). “Sound!” he declares, triumphantly and foolishly, “The crown prince of phenomena!” Embarking on a long and ultimately nonsensical digression about how sounds and smells emanate from the innermost self, Stewart’s Robert witlessly reveals himself a gaseous and empty person, vulnerable to the slightest pinprick. But Stewart himself is a creature of such remarkable vitality, it’s a little hard to buy him as a guy at the end of his powers.

Mamet wrote the play more than 33 years ago — a bold move for a 30-year-old. He would go on to stunning, explosive work, but left behind a work that shows a very different side to one of America's greatest playwrights: a sentimental one.

The sets and costumes, by Santo Loquasto and Laura Bauer, make the visual jokes of the show work brilliantly. We see the actors in the dressing room, in an empty theater and in mid-production, watching from behind as they play to an imagined audience along the upstage wall. The actors work their way through doughboy uniforms for a World War I scene, Elizabethan costume for a discussion of fencing technique, Napoleonic dress for when their climb upon the barricades, and on and on.

You can practically feel Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight's joy in performing in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's 1977 'A Life in the Theatre.' With his well-honed physicality and booming stentorian voice, Stewart is a master at conveying vainglorious self-regard. And Knight, who worked extensively on the New York stage before his Emmy-nominated, personally stormy stint on 'Grey's Anatomy,' seems delighted to be back.

That Mamet wrote this script when he was still, really, a kid, is both indicative of his prescient understanding of the daily grind to come and his astonishingly early powers of observation. Like 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' 'A Life in the Theatre' is a play about work. It just happens to be toil that takes place in the theater. It has the same deadening effect on the soul.

Regrettably, Neil Pepe's production fuses no such feelings into the backstage fun. His actors, both accomplished individually, make no emotional connection; Santo Loquasto's settings make the rep theater they work in seem as vast and anonymous as the Met.

What is sorely lacking is a plot or character development, and certainly affection for the hapless actors which might enlist our empathy. What action there is mostly involves stagehands moving scenery around, so much so, and so visibly, that I wondered whether they shouldn’t be listed as cast.

Though it's called 'A Life in the Theatre,' it can be difficult to detect any vital signs in the sluggish Broadway revival of David Mamet's 1977 comedy.

But such scenes here lack the precision timing that would make them seriously funny. And the sight-gag scenery they require - to evoke a low-budget theater's representation of a lifeboat at sea or the barricades of the French revolution - adds extra bulk to what is already ponderous.