About the Play:

A Life In the Theatre is a full-length comedy by David Mamet. Follows two actors at opposite ends of their careers through a turnabout series of confrontations on-and-offstage. A Life in the Theatre pays homage to those who choose an actor's life. Between murderous critics, lifeless audiences and having to reapply for your job with every audition, it's not a life choice for the faint hearted.

A Life in the Theatre takes us into the lives of two actors: John, young and rising into the first flush of his success; the other Robert, older, anxious, and beginning to wane. They are seen performing, rehearsing, discussing and arguing over their work. In a series of snippets of plays running the gamut from melodrama to pseudo Chekhov to sheer corn, the two portray the reality as well as the illusion of acting and the theatre. Mishaps of the kind peculiar to the theatre occur with hilarious regularity. The older actor, Robert, is a seasoned professional. John, the younger one, is an eager to learn novice. Gradually their roles of teacher and pupil change and by the end we see the estrangement of youth from age and the wider, inevitable and endless cycle of life, in and out of the theatre.

A Life in the Theatre premiered in 1977 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Later that same year it premiered Off-Broadway at the Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre) in New York City. Since then it enjoyed a 2005 revival on Broadway, an Edinburgh Fringe production in 2008, and has been regularly performed around the world

Cast: 2 male, plus 1 non-speaking male

What people say:

"A glorious comedy about the artifice of acting… It is also about the artifice of living… An evening of pure theatre." New York Times

"A comic masterpiece." — New York Daily News

"The warmest and often the funniest play in town." — New York Post

"[Mamet has] the most acute ear for dialogue of any American writer since J.D. Salinger." — Village Voice

About the Playwright:

David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter as well as a director, novelist, poet, and essayist. He has written the screenplays for more than twenty films, including the Oscar-nominated The Verdict. His more than twenty plays include the Pulitzer Prizewinning Glengarry Glen Ross. His other awards include a Tony Award, an Academy Award, two OBIE Awards, two New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and Outer Circle, Society of West End Theatre, and Dramatists Guild Hall-Warriner Awards.