BAD MEMORY

By Richard Zoglin

Beware of autobiography. An artist who draws on his own life for subject matter may, in the process of working out private demons, be unlocking major creative forces. But rummaging through that old trunk in the attic can just as easily be a sign of flagging inspiration. Of course, it may also be a smart marketing move: in the age of Oprah, a writer who abandons boring fiction in favor of juicy self-revelation is apt to win friends and influence critics.

David Mamet has created some compelling fictions in his time--about small-time crooks (American Buffalo), real-estate hustlers (Glengarry Glen Ross), conniving Hollywood producers (Speed-the-Plow). In The Old Neighborhood, which just opened on Broadway, he has turned inward. In three brief, tenuously related sketches, we watch as Bobby (Peter Riegert), on a visit to his hometown, has a series of encounters with friends and family: an old pal from the neighborhood; his sister Jolly and her taciturn husband; an ex-girlfriend. It's not hard to recognize Bobby as a stand-in for Mamet, the town as Chicago, where he grew up, and the memories as very likely drawn from his own life. Alas.

Mamet's clipped, macho, Ping-Pong dialogue still has a good deal of satiric punch. ("How's Laurie?" "Fine." "Yeah, but how is she, though?") Scott Zigler has directed with haunting spareness. And the acting is top-notch, particularly Patti LuPone, feisty and funny as Jolly. But raiding the memory bank has made Mamet lazy. His plays have never been much concerned with plot, but The Old Neighborhood has no forward propulsion at all. Bobby spends most of the time staring off into the distance, head cocked slightly, as if groping for memories, meaning, connection. So are we. Because the play, in its terse but meandering way, occasionally stumbles on a snatch of family observation to which we can all relate (Jolly complains that her parents never bought her skis), or wrestles with the intermittent big idea (Bobby's longing for his Jewish roots), some people may mistake this for profundity. But it's pretentious doodling.

What's more, it is oddly similar to a very different playwright's latest failure. Neil Simon's Proposals--the comic kingpin's first Broadway effort since Laughter on the 23rd Floor in 1993--is, like The Old Neighborhood, a memory play that doesn't add up to much. Guided by the family's (now dead) housekeeper, we are taken back to the Poconos in the 1950s, on a summer weekend when several characters encounter a new love or are reunited with an old one. It would be nice to describe this as a flimsy pretext for a batch of Simon gag lines, except that the gags are too lame even for Simon in a nostalgic haze. One character is a boorish Italian stud with a penchant for malapropisms (he calls Roman gladiators "gladiolas"), and the play's comic piece de resistance is, so help me, a bird's funeral. Simon, like Mamet, is content to trot out his characters two at a time for a series of unfulfilling, barely connected dialogues.

Critics have been indulgent with Simon's play, enthusiastic about Mamet's. That's understandable: these two are among the last serious American dramatists able to get their work produced on Broadway, and it's nice to have them back. But to be satisfied with these half-baked efforts is nostalgia of the worst kind.

--By Richard Zoglin