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Reprinted from http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~art/neigh4.html. This story originally ran on page F1 of the Boston Globe on 4/18/97.
CAMBRIDGE - You can't go home again, but don't tell that to Bobby Gould. It's something he has to find out for himself and, besides, if he didn't make the trip we wouldn't have David Mamet's excellent trio of short plays, The Old Neighborhood, which is receiving its premiere at the American Repertory Theatre. And don't tell that to Tony Shalhoub, who actually does make a successful homecoming in Cambridge after Wings and Big Night on the other coast.
Mamet and Shalhoub take us along for the ride back home, and it's hard not to admire the scenery as Gould looks back less in anger than in sadness. His only source of real warmth is his sister, Jolly, beautifully played by Shalhoub's wife, Brooke Adams.
His first stop, though, is for some traditional Mamet guytalk with his old high-school friend Joey in the first of the three, The Disappearance of the Jews. Or perhaps not so traditional. Because along with the talk about guns, sex, and having oneself a great old time in general is the Jewish question. Joey married inside the religion, and he and his wife have joined the synagogue. Maybe, it's implied, Bobby's "problem" is that he has strayed outside the tribe.
And if you think that question is going to be resolved - or even be discussed in Alan "The Vanishing American Jew" Dershowitz fashion - after 90 minutes, you don't know David Mamet.
Mamet's style goes more like Bobby complaining, "I should never have married a shiksa," and Joey, played by Vincent Guastaferro in perfect Joe Mantegna/Dennis Franz bulldog style, replying, "Yeah, I know. 'Cause that's all that you used to say. 'Let's find some Jew broads and discuss the Midrash.'"
Bobby's marriage is falling apart, and technically, Joey tells him, his son isn't Jewish because the mother isn't. Again, though, Mamet is not a Jewish A. R. Gurney, and we're off balance in Mamet's world, not knowing exactly what the problem is. Or even what, exactly, Mamet is driving at.
But the interplay is so rich - the macho posings and posturings, what's said and what's held back, the rhythmic sighs and stammers, the lyrical four-letter eruptions - that we give Mamet the slack he deserves and the time he needs to get to wherever he's going.
That's particularly true in the second of the three, Jolly, in which Bobby pays an all-too-rare visit to his sister. Adams gives her such radiance that our heart goes out to her in all her raggedness. Mamet is not known for the complexity of his female characters, but this one, who seems similar to the sister he's written about in his essay The Rake, is strikingly nuanced.
And Adams is wonderful as Jolly, whether making Bobby feel safe and secure, trashing their stepbrother or late mother, or singing the praises of her relationship with her children and simple husband, Carl. It's great, after ART's premieres of Oleanna, The Cryptogram, and now this play (all at the Hasty Pudding Theatre except The Cryptogram at the C. Walsh Theatre), that Mamet is finally tapping into the ART acting talent, and Jack Willis rewards him with an excellent job as Carl.
Jolly, like Mamet's male characters, talks a good game about having all the answers, but with a nod, a look away, or exhaling cigarette smoke, Adams lets us know - without Mamet coming out and telling us - that perhaps she doesn't really have it as together as she'd like us, and Bobby, to think. And Adams is so good at Mametspeak that you'd never guess this was her first Mamet. The play ends on a dreamlike note as creepy as anything in the playwright's larger works.
And in the last of the three, D., Rebecca Pidgeon (Mamet's wife) plays Bobby's former girlfriend, who had come up in conversation with Joey. When he meets her for lunch, she goes off on several seeming tangents about gardens, faith, passion, ritual abuse, and how we cut ourselves off from emotions. The more she talks, the more we realize how nothing she's saying is tangential.
Shalhoub has little to say, but his face says plenty about loss of soul and inability to connect. Mamet too speaks volumes. I had fallen off the Mamet wagon after The Cryptogram and the movie of American Buffalo. But Mamet so successfully plugs his "Glengarry"-like technique in to more personal concerns here that it's time to get back aboard. The Old Neighborhood is one cool place to hang out. Even if, or perhaps especially if, you can't go home again.