"The relationship that fails to excite Mr. Mamet and his longtime collaborator, the director Neil Pepe, is the one between audience and play...And yet, if you prick up your ears, you can still hear a little of that old Mametian magic...He makes the plot take a couple of pretty unlikely turns...This blurs the play’s focus and weakens the surprise of its finish. The ending of 'The Penitent' pulls the rug out from under us, but that rug has already been worn pretty thin."
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“Under-conceived and underwritten…It feels wrong to describe Mamet's interchanges as conversations. All of them are arguments had in bad faith; certainly, little effort has been made to make them sound like human speech…The marks of something hastily written are all over the text, and its world is badly imagined and unbelievable. An accidentally hilarious denouement tries to power-pack action into the dull tale.”
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"The worse tragedy of Mamet, more than his political conversion, is that his later works mostly bore and repel as plays. In 'The Penitent,' the dialogue maintains the artillery rhythms of his early work but there is no sensible character motive behind it; it chases itself in circles and often sounds as if it were erratically transcribed from hackneyed genre movies. The cast, under Neil Pepe’s clumsy direction, doesn’t help much."
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"Each scene in this chamber piece leaves Charles, for all his high principles, haplessly outpaced...He misreads and is misread. And we too are uncertain about how to judge and how much to trust. But alas, our understanding of his dislocation never coheres. We are never fully convinced about either the plausibility of these events or of the characters’ motivations...The play is like a domestic dispute that has gone on too long without an outsider’s perspective."
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“It’s intermittently sparky writing but ultimately lazy drama, with an ending that’s less a surprise twist than a playwright’s admission that even he’s too bored to go on."
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"The press, the law, psychiatry, religion, marriage and friendship all get bashed in this intriguing but flawed drama...A late surprise changes everything that's come before—and is meant to surprise. It annoys instead, since the supposed big reveal would’ve come out by the defendant. Directed by Atlantic Theatre head Neil Pepe, the acting is 75% capable. The less said about the mannered performance by Pidgeon, Mamet’s wife, the better."
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"To a wordsmith like Mamet, a slip of the tongue can be fatal for a character – although it’s difficult to care too much either way in this limp drama...Director Neil Pepe’s affinity for Mamet-speak can’t fill in the plot holes...Bauer makes a hearty meal of Mamet’s juicy dialogue...But it’s hard to grasp why the psychiatrist feels complicit in his patient’s crime — and harder still to understand his conflict of faith and ethics when the reason for it is withheld until it’s too late to care."
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"Yet another clunker...Whereas Mamet’s stylized dialogue once crackled with electricity and tension, it now plays as hopelessly stilted. The mannerisms have become irritating, and the characters come across less as real people than mouthpieces for the ideas the playwright wants to express...The evening runs a scant 90 minutes, including an unnecessary intermission (perhaps a considerate gesture to playgoers wishing to flee), but it feels interminable."
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