Reunion and Dark Pony: Two Plays Book

Reunion is pretty strong work, but didn't quite make it into 4-star territory for me. Reminds me, in part, of A Life in the Theater, and also, a little less, of The Duck Variations. Each episode in the play is well-focused on a particular point and each episode resolves cleanly. Also, the teacher-student theme recurrent in Mamet's work is definitely in full effect here, though the "teacher" role seems to shift occasionally in the daughter's favor.

Dark Pony is probably, as many critics have argued, a snapshot of the father-daughter from Reunion many years earlier. In fact, when it was first staged, both father roles were played by Michael Higgins and both daughter roles by Lindsay Crouse, lending credence to the above theory. With this possibility in mind, I found Dark Pony a bit more engaging and illuminating than I might have otherwise. Still, it is straight-down-the-middle average Mamet material.

Two short, early plays by David Mamet. In the edition I read, Reunion is 26 pages long, Dark Pony only 5 pages. Both have two characters, a father and a daughter. Reunion was first staged in 1976, Dark Pony in 1977 - and, on its first performance, Dark Pony played in a double bill with Reunion. If American Buffalo showed a step forward from his previous work, these two plays perhaps show a step back: they feel like promising works by a talented dramatist, but they also feel like apprentice pieces, Mamet still finding his legs, discovering his territory and methods. In Reunion an adult daughter meets her estranged father. He is nervous, uncertain, makes excuses for his absence during her childhood, talks of his time as an alcoholic. Everything is tentative, as though they are jostling for position, trying to find if their relationship will work. There is no resolution at the end, the father seemingly wanting to move on from the failures of the past and look to the future, the daughter wanting the emotional security that was missing from her childhood because of her absent father. Both plays feel like sketches: they are intriguing works and feel like a young playwright finding his feet - but if you place them into the context of Mamet's career, as works following American Buffalo, they are a little disappointing.