Review roundup -- absurd and absurder

November
Pardon this turkey. David Mamet’s latest, a surreal tale of a desperate and unpopular president in the final days of his bankrupt campaign, is fast-paced, witty and funny, but it wears out its welcome before grinding to its hackneyed ending. Kind of like one of those Saturday Night Live sketches that would have been great if they didn’t go on for a few minutes too long. As the Nixon-Bush-Harding lovechild that never was Charles Smith, Nathan Lane is giving one of his career-best performances, handily dispatching the ranting Mametisms. And it’s delightful to have Laurie Metcalf onstage as Smith’s speechwriter. Word has it that rewrites are still going on in previews, so here’s hoping they get it right by opening. Mamet almost seems apologetic in explaining some of the contrived moments, such as blaming a missing Secret Service on how some questionable characters have such unfettered access to the Oval Office. Maybe by opening, he’ll have done the same for some of my burning questions. Like why are we still talking about the bird flu? How does a turkey-raising association have such easy access to the same amount as the cost of the Iraq War? And why would such a moron have been elected president in the first…uh, scratch that last part.

The Homecoming
It’s taken a while for the Harold Pinter time bomb to go off inside of me, but I’ve come to the conclusion: this revival of the playwright’s 40-year-old work, directed by Daniel Sullivan, is a damn fine production. Yet when I walked out of the Cort Theatre on Sunday, I was somewhat ambivalent toward it. Pinter is never an easy meal, with his usual stock of nasty characters reacting to nasty situations as no human ever would. Like a freshly made soup, though, I guess it took a few days for the fine flavors of Pinter’s motley, bipolar family—papa Max (Ian McShane); eldest son Teddy (James Frain); his wife, who the family never knew existed for nine years, Ruth (Eve Best); the dim boxer Joey (Gareth Saxe); the vicious pimp, Lenny (Raul Esparza); and pathetic chauffeur Uncle Sam (Michael McKean)—to settle in my mind. Esparza’s a bit uneven at first but delivers when it counts, as Lenny turns more sinister, in the second act, and McShane is winningly horrid. Still, it’s the more subtle performers who really make the show worthwhile. Best and McKean can say more sitting silently in a chair than some actors can express in a soliloquy. Those purposeful silences are wonderfully uncomfortable, the best feeling to have when watching the cancerous but not so unreal family gathering.