'Grace' star Paul Rudd

Chaplin

Barrymore Theatre

Opens September 10

In the footsteps of the Judy Garland biographical play End of the Rainbow tramps Chaplin, a musical about the life of Chaplin. Unlike other attempts to illuminate the lives of showbiz legends--a subgenre that also includes Master Class’s portrayal of Maria Callas--Chaplin is to have a cast of 22 in what surely will be splashy musical numbers. Rob McClure, previously of Avenue Q and, well, the La Jolla out-of-town tryout for Chaplin, takes on Charlie in a production that is likely to showcase every element of the actor’s legendary film career but for the silence.

Grace

Cort Theatre

Opens October 4

Paul Rudd, suddenly more prolific than he’s ever been with TV and film gigs, is headed back to Broadway. (He previously played second fiddle to Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain--but now he’s the star!) Mr. Rudd is to play one-half of an innocent couple moving to Florida in order to start religious-themed motels; his better half is to be played by Kate Arrington, whose real-life partner, Oscar nominee Michael Shannon, joins the fracas as the pair’s new neighbor, while legendary TV fixture Ed Asner plays an exterminator. (With all these mainstream stars, is this a Broadway show or the SAG Awards?)

Cyrano de Bergerac

American Airlines Theatre

Opens October 11

It’s been five years since the last Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac, and theater writers have been storing up nasal puns since then. (Who nose if this will be a success? We’ll be sniffing for hints from the producers! Etc.) Tony-winner Douglas Hodge straps on the prosthetic nose for the title role of the lovesick, prohibitively ugly French nobleman, while Clémence Poésy is to allure as Roxane, the not-so-obscure object of desire, and onetime Spider-Man villain Patrick Page makes us all glad he survived that production as he plays Cyrano’s erstwhile ally Comte De Guiche. We smell a good night at the theater!

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Booth Theatre

October 13

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Edward Albee’s rollicking domestic nightmare, the New York stage welcomes a production by way of Chicago and Washington. Tracy Letts, who moonlights as a Pulitzer-winning playwright, is to take on George, while Steppenwolf star Amy Morton (previously, too, a Tony nominee for Mr. Letts’s August: Osage County) has been honing her piercing shriek as Martha. Both actors appeared in the original production, which earned raves from local critics--and surely they’re ready for the big time--the three-hour play is the sort of marathon you can only really train for by two years and three cities’ worth of practice.

'Dead Accounts' star Katie Holmes

The Heiress

Walter Kerr Theatre

Opens November 1

Taking over the role of Olivia de Havilland and Cherry Jones? That’d be ultra-fast-rising starlet Jessica Chastain, who, like Paul Rudd, is taking a break from her prolific film career to portray Catherine Sloper. Catherine, originally a character in Henry James’s novel Washington Square, possesses that Jamesian fragility, shyness, and moth-to-flame attraction to callous villains; the character is set to inherit an enormous fortune, but is so taken aback at the love of a churlish fellow that she may just squander it all. Ms. Chastain’s Broadway debut will be watched closely by all those who love and/or envy her, but with support including castmate David Straitharn and director Moisés Kaufman, Ms. Chastain may not return to her day job anytime soon.

Annie

Palace Theatre

Opens November 8

Little girls of New York, begin beseeching your parents for tickets. After a long search, the producers of what may become the season’s most lucrative revival found their girl--preteen brunette Lilla Crawford is to strap on the red wig and belt out “Tomorrow” in the latest Annie. Though it’s toured the U.S. frequently, the saccharine show hasn’t been seen on Broadway since its 1997 revival. It’s not entirely for kids: James Lapine, a frequent collaborator of Stephen Sondheim’s, is to direct the production, while two-time Tony winner Katie Finneran assays the role of Miss Hannigan. Ms. Crawford, get former red-wig-wearer Sarah Jessica Parker on the phone to discuss how to be deal with newfound fame!

Glengarry Glen Ross

Schoenfeld Theatre

Opens November 11

Al Pacino, who starred in the film production of Glengarry Glen Ross as young, robust Ricky Roma, is showing his age: he’s coming to Broadway this season as Shelley Levene. Levene, scholars of David Mamet will surely recall, is the once-great real estate salesman who has grown unable to generate good leads (much as an actor of Al Pacino’s caliber has, for years until just now, been unable to get a lead on a role that required much more than senseless bellowing). The cast is rounded out by the high-toned likes of Bobby Cannavale and Richard Schiff; the “Coffee’s for closers” monologue is from the film and not the play, but we can dream it’ll be included.

Rebecca

Broadhurst Theatre

Opens November 18

Daphne du Maurier via Alfred Hitchcock via Christopher Hampton! The well-loved playwright and screenwriter has adapted into English the book of a musical that played Vienna in the mid-2000s, recounting the twice-told tale of a second wife who must confront the ghost of her new, controlling husband’s former wife. As in du Maurier’s novel, the naive protagonist is never named but for “I”; Jill Paice is to attempt to make a name for herself in the role. The directors are about as prestigious as Mr. Hampton; Michael Blakemore won two Tonys for directing a play and a musical in the same year back in the day, while Francesca Zambello is an opera director with, one presumes and hopes, a flair for the dramatic.

Dead Accounts

Music Box Theatre

Opening Date November 29

When we think about Broadway’s breakout ingenues of the past decade, our minds don’t immediately leap to Katie Holmes’s turn in All My Sons in 2008. She was... fine? Certainly her time in New York, and exposure to paparazzi therein, engendered a high-water mark in the sales of “boyfriend jeans” nationwide. But the stage is apparently a safe place for Ms. Holmes, as it’s to Broadway she returns for her first new role post-extremely-notable-divorce. The midwestern woman trying to start over while living with her parents is to play a midwestern woman trying to start over while living with her parents. Well, Ms. Holmes is from Toledo and her character’s from Cincinnati. And her parents, we read, are in off and on. No matter--the play’s by super-prolific Theresa Rebeck, and could allow for a Kidmanian career renaissance.

The Anarchist

Lyceum Theatre

Opens December 2

A new work on Broadway playing blocks away from a revival of his best-loved work, and a daughter who’s one of those TV Girls? Could things get sweeter for David Mamet? Well, there was the little matter of actress Laurie Metcalf dropping out of the role of a women’s-prison warden in The Anarchist, the newer of his two currently produced plays--but no matter. Debra Winger removed herself from exile to drop in for the role, and Patti LuPone, playing a radical prisoner pleading for her own parole. Mr. Mamet’s neoconservative bent may well inform just how we see the role of the anarchist played out onstage, but we’d forgive Mr. Mamet anything!

Michael Moore recounts his memories of Gore Vidal.

Longtime friends, colleagues and admirers of Gore Vidal gathered in the currently patriotically decorated Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre—where Mr. Vidal’s 1960 play The Best Man is playing through September 9—on Thursday afternoon to pay their respects to the recently departed writer. The mood was serious yet not solemn as many who were likely humbled to be counted among Mr. Vidal’s contemporaries took the stage to recount memories and share anecdotes from their own experiences with the man.

Reading selections from his own eulogy for Mr. Vidal and praising his friend’s great wit, Dick Cavett recounted many of Mr. Vidal’s most celebrated one-liners. His favorite, he told the audience: “Success is not enough. One’s friends must fail.”

“Whenever my friend succeeds, I die a little,” was another Vidal aphorism recalled to much laughter, and, reading a line from a message prepared by David Mamet for the memorial, Liz Smith decreed Mr. Vidal “smart enough to see through the self-interest of everyone except himself.” Yet none of this seemed to remotely deter the hordes of successful friends who seemed to be endlessly seeking his advice.

“In 2003, when I determined that I would run for president, Gore was my first call,” explained Dennis Kucinich. “I said, ‘Gore, I’m going to run for president, and I’d like your advice.’ Ever mindful of the great death of the American political state, he said, instantly, ‘You’ve got to do something about your hair.’”

Laughing good-naturedly along with the audience, Mr. Kucinich reenacted the conversation. “Gore, what, then, do you suggest?” he inquired. “A guillotine,” was Mr. Vidal’s response.

Michael Moore also shared some advice Mr. Vidal gave him over lunch in 2003. His 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine had been nominated for an Oscar, and Mr. Vidal wanted to know what Mr. Moore would say in his speech if he won.

“Finally, I said, ‘Listen, Gore, I think all I’m going to do is thank my agent and my stylist and get the hell out of there,” Mr. Moore said, drawing predictable laughs from the audience at the mention of a stylist. “He said, ‘No, no, you must quote Jefferson. He’s never been quoted at the Oscars."

“I thought he was going to give me a bit Jefferson line,” Mr. Moore continued. “And he begins, and he doesn’t end until four or five minutes later, just reciting one continuous Jefferson quote from memory, and he finished this as if I could remember it. And I just looked at him and said ‘If I do win, will you go up and accept it?’ He seemed to like that idea.”

Susan Sarandon took the stage to pass on “one pearl of parenting wisdom” Mr. Vidal had shared with her shortly after the birth of her first child. “I was struggling to be the best mother, and he told me, ‘Darling, it’s inevitable that you give your children neuroses, just make sure they’re productive ones,’” she recounted.

In her own tribute to Mr. Vidal, Elizabeth Ashley referred to a dictionary, explaining, “As many of you may know, after any conversation with Gore a lot of us have to go to the dictionary.” She read aloud the definition of “heretic,” and then asked the audience, “Remind you of anyone?”

“I didn’t meet Gore until the ’70s,” she told the audience, explaining that Tennessee Williams dragged her to the Carlyle to meet the man. “Now, Tennessee and I were in no condition to even be in public, let alone at the Carlyle,” she informed the crowd, laughing and explaining that when they arrived, Mr. Vidal “jumped to his feet, embraced Tennessee and kissed him full on the mouth, to the somewhat dropped-jaw constellation of patrons at the Carlyle in 1974."

“Tennessee and Gore talked for hours, and I just sat and drank,” Ms. Ashley remembered. “When we finally got in a cab, I said to Tennessee, ‘I just feel so stupid,’ and he said, ‘Oh darling, never mind, he’s just an old smarty-pants.’”

Ms. Ashley reached down to the ground to pull out a shot glass. “So here’s to you, old smarty-pants,” she said, raising the glass to the portrait of Mr. Vidal that adorned the stage. “We’re gonna miss the hell outta you.”

John C. McGinley (Wikipedia)

The new adaptation of Glengarry, directed by Tony winner Daniel Sullivan and produced by long-time Mamet collaborator Jeffrey Richards, has already closed on a stellar cast. Mr. Pacino will be playing Shelly Levene, the desperate Chicago salesman made famous by Jack Lemmon in the 1992 film. Bobby Cannavale  will be playing Mr. Pacino's hot-shot Ricky Roma character from the movie, while Mr. McGinnley will be tackling the disgruntled employee of the month, Dave Moss (portrayed by Ed Harris in the movie) alongside The West Wing's Richard Schiff, making his Broadway debut as  George Aaronow (Alan Alda's character). Still to be cast is the role of Blake, immortalized by Alec Baldwin with the line "Coffee is for closers."

The Broadway revival is set to preview October 16, and will open to the public November 11th. And just to refresh our memory on why you should be your tickets now:
http://youtu.be/3A6aGw4l5XQ

It's Mr. Mamet at his lightest: As revived at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, where a new production starring Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight opened yesterday, A Life in the Theater is breezy, jokey and quick. It's also insubstantial and unfulfilling, more an exercise than a play.

A Life in the Theatre examines the relationship between two actors, an older man named Robert and one younger one, John, in a regional repertory theater. In 26 scenes--some running to several minutes, some as quick as a line or two--over 90 minutes, the two men rehearse an increasingly ridiculous variety of plays; they perform in them; and, in between, they talk about life and work.

The intended point, of course, is torch-passing, that Robert is past his prime, watching with frustration as his abilities decrease, and that John is learning to be a better actor and a more confident member of the troupe. The piece is about their shifting relationship, as all the press descriptions will tell you.

But onstage, directed by the longtime Mamet collaborator Neil Pepe, the play never makes clear exactly what's going on or what the relationship is. Until I read reviews of previous productions, I wasn't sure whether the two actors were rep players--and I couldn't tell if we were following them through many productions or just one interminable, cliché-ridden spectacular.

Mr. Stewart's Robert is blustery and self-impressed, but it's impossible to tell if he was once a good actor who's now losing his edge or a journeyman who's always had delusions of grandeur. (I suspect the latter, and that the commanding Mr. Stewart is actually too good an actor for the part.) Mr. Knight makes John pleasant and amiable, and you nicely see his attitude toward Robert shift from respect to contempt, but it's never obvious that this shift is the result of his own growth or just increasing familiarity. Certainly there's no evidence of the feats of acting that apparently impress critics and depress Robert.

The sets and costumes, by Santo Loquasto and Laura Bauer, make the visual jokes of the show work brilliantly. We see the actors in the dressing room, in an empty theater and in mid-production, watching from behind as they play to an imagined audience along the upstage wall. The actors work their way through doughboy uniforms for a World War I scene, Elizabethan costume for a discussion of fencing technique, Napoleonic dress for when their climb upon the barricades, and on and on.

All this well-executed mockery of repertory tropes--the wallpaper of a life in the theater--is fun to watch. But without more holding it all together, it's an empty life.

joxfeld@observer.com

Of the fall's many anticipated productions, only A Steady Rain (with Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig), appears to have made much money. Among the casualties: the extensively analyzed Simon revival, and at least half of the Mametstravaganza. It remains to be seen how Mamet's Race—combining attractive celebrities with theater buzz—will fare.

Rain apparently shows us the "wave of the future":

Fred Zollo, the lead producer of A Steady Rain who works both on Broadway and in Hollywood, announced a deal with Broadway's biggest landlord, the Shubert Organization. Zollo and his investors will supply big stars and brief runs; Shubert will guarantee a great theater.

In Hollywood, it's known as a housekeeping deal, where a studio gives office space to a producer in return for first dibs on new projects. I expected other producers to howl over the arrangement; instead, most cheered it.

Also, "more Hollywood star-driven shows for limited runs."

There's only one problem with this carefully marketed plan: Race, Mr. Mamet's sure-to-be-great new play, isn't great at all. It's not even very good.

The curtain comes up at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where Race opened Sunday night, on a stylized Santo Loquasto set of a looming book-filled law-firm library, plopped like a diorama—this is an educational lesson, after all—in the center of an otherwise bare all-black and starkly lit stage. Four actors—two middle-aged white men, one middle-aged black man and a younger black woman—are in that conference room, awkwardly already in mid-conversation. (Mr. Mamet directs his play, yielding pacing and placement often as stilted and abrupt as his famous dialogue.)

The well-known and powerful billionaire Charles Strickland (misplayed by Richard Thomas, who never seems either powerfully angry or powerfully dismissive) is in the lawyers' office, attempting to hire them. He has been accused of raping a young black woman in a hotel room, which he denies. Jack Lawson (an excellent James Spader, who it could be argued has been training his whole career for this role) is the cynical and brilliant litigator he wants to represent him, and Henry Brown (David Alan Grier) is Lawson's black law partner, which makes this firm a good choice for Strickland, considering the accusation. Susan (Kerry Washington) is a young black associate at the firm, the novice to whom Lawson can pontificate—and to whom Mr. Mamet can make his arguments. It is she who, as the wobbly third leg of the firm, will be the center of Mr. Mamet's usual swirl of possible treachery and double-crossing.

The first act has Lawson and Brown discussing whether they want to take Strickland's case, and, with Susan, whether they think he's innocent or guilty. (Don't lawyers specifically not do that?) This provides Mr. Mamet the opportunity to put in his characters' mouths—especially Lawson's—his theories about guilt and innocence, truth and perception, back and white. All black people hate all white people, all white people are guilty; everyone feels all sorts of guilt and shame, truth is flexible and a smart lawyer's skill is to manipulate all that.

It's all rendered with Mr. Mamet's expected verbal pyrotechnics, but the inherent pleasure of virtuosity aside, the fireworks fall flat. The play is reveling in its subversive political incorrectness, but political incorrectness hasn't seemed flamboyantly subversive at any point in this new century.

In the second act (the roughly 90-minute play includes what the Playbill notes is a 12-minute intermission), things make less sense. When it turns out Strickland's accuser is a prostitute, Lawson announces he won't reveal that fact to the jury. (Huh?) When it appears that associate Susan has sold out the defense's strategy to prosecutors, Lawson's partner, Brown, reminds us that he never liked her, pulling her college thesis from his desk drawer (conveniently handy!) and announcing its title, "Structural Survivals of Racism in Supposedly Bias-free Transactions" (conveniently suspicious!).

When word comes that the hotel maid has amended her testimony to police, undermining Lawson's planned defense, we're to understand that it's a false statement, proof that the prosecution is onto his strategy. But when word comes that the responding police officer has found a lost page of his report, also undermining the defense, this revelation is presented as an honestly lost-and-found document (confusing!).

Race is an intriguing play, and far better than Mr. Mamet's last Broadway effort, the mediocre sitcom November. (It's also much better than "Keep Your Pantheon," the main piece of The Two Unrelated Plays By David Mamet, which played at the Atlantic earlier this season.) Ultimately, this is not thought-provoking Mamet so much as a parody of it.

IN THE LAST CARGO CULT, MIKE DAISEY'S most recent monologue, which opened Monday night at the Public, Mr. Daisey talks about traveling to the small, primitive South Pacific island of Tanna to visit a culture almost entirely different from our own, one of communal living, with no private property and—more important—no money. He's going there to witness John Frum Day, an annual religious celebration of the island's John Frum's cargo cult, a religion based on Tanna's brief exposure to American servicemen during World War II. On John Frum Day, the people of Tanna celebrate by recounting U.S. history—or at least their version of it—in song, dance and theater.

Mr. Daisey is a funny, insightful, magnetic storyteller, and his travelogue—tales of flying to Tanna on a ramshackle plane, eating local delicacies, sleeping with a baby pig—are hilarious. They're also not really the point. Mr. Daisey is concerned with money, how Tanna survives without it and how much we rely on it. He's angry about the financial crisis; he's angry at the bankers who created it; and he's particularly angry to realize that the financial system has us all interconnected, that he can't revel in the bankers' misfortune because what's bad for them is bad for him, too.

He weaves several stories together—of the Tanna trip; of arriving at college and first being exposed to rich people; of all the "awesome stuff" in the world he wants and which require cash—to make us think about the role of money.

And you do think about it, for the time you're in the theater. Thinking about money is like thinking about air; you don't need to, because it's everywhere. More likely, what you will thinkk about Cargo Cult after you walk out of the theater is what a pleasure your last two hours have been.

TO SEE SO HELP ME GOD!, A LONG-LOST and very funny 1929 backstage comedy being presented by the Mint Theater Company at the Lucille Lortel, is to wonder why this one was forgotten while so many boring old backstage comedies—The Royal Family, currently at the Manhattan Theatre Club, for example—were remembered.

So Help Me God! is a witty and goofily screwball old-fashioned three-acter written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who a few years earlier had written the play Chicago. (The Kander and Ebb musical arrived a half-century later.) It was set for an October 1929 opening, but the Great Depression interfered. This production, with a script adapted by Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank, who also directed, is essentially its premiere.

It's an All About Eve story, but one in which Eve is outflanked by Margo. Kristen Johnston is fantastic as Lily Darnley, the domineering diva, a 6-foot-tall force of nature in dramatic deco gowns (the costumes, I should disclose, are by my friend Clint Ramos) who casually molds people and situations and the plot of the play-within-a-play to fit her needs. My Girl star Anna Chlumsky is less strong in the Eve part, flat and insufficiently steely as she plots her rise. But the rest of the cast ably supports, especially Catherine Curtain as Belle, the blowsy broad in the company, and Jeremy Lawrence as the put-upon stage manager.

The characters are deadly serious in their backstage machinations, but, for us, it's a fun (if slight) night at the theater.

MELISSA JAMES GIBSON'S THIS, WHICH OPENED at Playwrights Horizons last week, is poorly named but impressively written, a smart, funny and affecting play about four old friends (and one sexy new addition to the group) who wrestle with changing lives as they grow up and, as people do, grow both together and apart.

Jane (Julianne Nicholson), Marrell (Eisa Davis) and Alan (Glenn Fitzgerald) were classmates at an unnamed but elite school; they've remained tight for 15 years. Tom (Darren Pettie) was a staffer at the college; he's married to Marrell and together they have a newborn son who won't sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time. Jane has a daughter, too, and a husband who died a year earlier; Alan is gay and single and wittily self-lacerating. Finally, there's a Jean-Pierre (Louis Cancelmi), a handsome French doctor-without-borders ("I always think that makes it sound like he has a messy personal life," Alan snarks), who becomes enmeshed with the group as Marrell tries to fix him up with Jane.

Marrell and Tom are drifting apart, their distance exacerbated by the stress of young parenthood. Jane is exhausted by the world's sympathy and pity, and by the idea she had an ideal marriage until her husband got sick. Alan is lonely and bored and desperate to do something useful in the world. Jane and Tom fall into a brief affair. Tom doesn't want Marrell to know because he can't deal with the repercussions; Jane doesn't want Marrell to know because she can't stand to hurt her. There are kinds of unhappiness, Marrell tells Jane at one point, "personal, marital, professional, existential or interdisciplinary." Her own, she continues, is interdisciplinary. All of their unhappiness is interdisciplinary.

The unhappiness is also honest, and real, recognizable to us all if not in specifics then at least in spirit, intelligently rendered in sharp and wise dialogue. Together with another Playwrights production, Circle Mirror Transformation—which after being twice extended in the fall returns to Playwrights' upstairs space, the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, next week—it's one of the best new dramas of the season.

THE NEW A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, which opened at the BAM Harvey Theater last week, is every bit as good as you've heard. What more is there to say? It's the classic and powerful Tennessee Williams play; Cate Blanchett gives a mesmerizing performance as the delusional faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois, and Joel Edgerton is hunky and duly animal (if, sometimes, a bit too Brando-sounding) as Stanley. The Liv Ullman-directed production, originally staged at the Sydney Theatre Company, is only here through Dec. If you can still find a ticket, go.

editorial@observer.com

For one thing, Mamet's self-conscious shocking posture has grown predictable. Writes Elisabeth Vincentelli in the Post:

Four-letter words are to Mamet what a vintage Bordeaux is to wine critic Robert Parker: Both swirl the object of their affection around their mouths with relish, then spit. It's more fun for them than for us.

But even so, it might a little too much fun—or at least, too easy—for the audience. Ben Brantley noticed a distinct lack of shock, or even discomfort, in his fellow (mostly white) theatergoers:

Standing ovations on Broadway have become a conditioned reflex, but this one seemed a shade more self-conscious and self-congratulatory than usual. You could argue this was the perfect coda to a play that examines the self-consciousness that descends on American white people when they talk about, or to, black people.

But that easy demonstration of approval didn't feel like a reaction to gladden the heart of a dramatist hoping to provoke, to stir, to disturb. . . .

I couldn't help longing for the days when a new play by Mr. Mamet so knocked the breath out of you that you wouldn't think of standing up afterward until you were sure your legs would support you.

The bright spot is James Spader's performance, which Vincentelli calls nuanced and Brantley says has "more layers than the who's-scamming-whom plot."

Oleanna's revival, the other half of this season's Mametstravaganza, has announced that it will be closing January 3rd after a three month run. How does this bode for Race? It remains to be seen.

Stay tuned, of course, for Jesse Oxfeld's review of Race in Wednesday's Observer.

Oleanna, David Mamet’s tense two-hander about student-professor gender politics and power dynamics, was arriving in theaters only three years after Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court. And it was just two years after Oleanna’s successful stage-play debut Off Broadway. But in those heady early-Clinton years, as the post-p.c. era was dawning, the Reagan- and Bush-era campus culture wars seemed far away, at least to those then on campus. Another 15 years later, with the Broadway revival of Oleanna opening at the Golden Theatre Sunday night, its sexual-harassment standoff feels as historic an artifact as Justice Thomas’ can of Coke.

In Oleanna’s first scene, Carol, a student who doesn’t understand what’s been going on in class, comes to her professor’s office to ask for assistance; John, the professor—distracted, as-yet untenured and attempting to be compassionate—offers to help. In its second scene, Carol has filed a report with the tenure committee, accusing John of sexual harassment, and John is attempting to find out why. In its explosive final scene, he has been denied tenure, and Carol has accused him of rape.

That first scene is meant to be ambiguous—whose interpretation of the events is true, or at least more true?—but at the Golden it doesn’t play that way. This is partially because its culture-war language is today so unconvincing. (“I saw you, Professor. For two semesters sit there, stand there and exploit our, as you thought, ‘paternal prerogative,’ and what is that but rape,” Carol says at one point, sounding ridiculous to our 2009 ears but not, I think, meant to read as self-parody.)

But it is also because Julia Stiles, the lovely film actress, is so miscast as the student. She gives a good if inevitably mannered performance in her Broadway debut. (The always-mannered Rebecca Pidgeon, Mr. Mamet’s wife, originated the role.)

“You have no idea what it cost me to come to this school” is simply unbelievable coming from a poised, confident Wasp. She never seems harassed, only commanding. Bill Pullman, who plays John, is on the other hand shamblingly professorial from the first scene. Which means that the audience is automatically wondering only to what extent, and to what end, Carol has manipulated her professor.

During the two scene breaks, director Dough Hughes has automated Venetian blinds along the upstage wall of John’s office raise and lower themselves, with the hum of their motor amplified through the theater. That amplified hum grows obnoxiously louder, especially leading into the final scene, presumably to convey building frustration and anger. What’s left—and there is something—is an interesting portrait of interpersonal power dynamics, rendered in dexterously handled vintage Mamet dialogue.

OLEANNA IS A mere adolescent alongside The Royal Family, George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s satire of the Barrymore family, which debuted on Broadway in 1927 and returned last week to the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in Manhattan Theatre Club’s latest revival of an aged script that was in no particular need of reviving.

Granted, if you must revive The Royal Family, this is the way to do it. The cast is near uniformly excellent: Jan Maxwell plays Julie Cavendish, the reigning star of a legendary family of stage actors, and Rosemary Harris, who was Julie in the 1975 revival, plays her mother, Fanny, the aging Cavendish matriarch. They share a sprawling East Side duplex with Julie’s daughter, a promising ingénue played by Kelli Barrett; an overburdened butler and housekeeper; and, finally, when he returns from Hollywood with press and perhaps police giving chase, Julie’s brother, the womanizing bon vivant Tony Cavendish.

Jon Lee Beaty’s set is decadent and commanding, a huge Edwardian living room filled with overstuffed furniture, a grand piano, tchotckes on tables, stagebills on walls, and plenty of doors and hallways to be run in and out of. And the period costumes by Catherine Zuber are—pun intended, but unavoidable—exuberantly handsome.

The basic question of the night is whether these to-the-stage-born actors can be happy as normal people, folks who, for a change, value their romances and real-world commitments over their devotion to their craft. And in the second act, when Ms. Harris and Ms. Maxwell sing the praises of their profession with ardor and enthusiasm, when director Doug Hughes moves his many actors on and off the stage with farcelike speed and precision, bringing them together at center stage in perfect tableaux, everything comes together, and the audience is delighted.

But, alas, you’ve got to sit through a lot to get to those moments of delight. The boring first act is heavily expository—though one suspects it would be funnier if today’s audiences had a finer appreciation for Barrymore jokes—and the third is dull and maudlin. And, of course, we all know the answer to that main question from the moment the curtain first rises:

There’s no business like show business; there’s no people like show people; and of course all the Cavendishes will remain onstage.

I just saved you—well, Irving Berlin and I just saved you—three hours.

WHILE NEW YORK’S major institutional theater companies are keen to gaze wistfully at the past—whether that early-20th-century acting dynasty at MTC; Elvismania and the putting on of a happy face, starting tomorrow night at Roundabout; or the eternal question of whether one can in fact spend an enchanted evening with a man who has two half-Polynesian children, for a solid year and a half at Lincoln Center Theater—the Second Stage Theatre has the odd habit of confronting with the present.

Let Me Down Easy, Anna Deavere Smith’s new one-woman show, which opened there last week, takes on current, pressing, real-world issues—life, death and the health care system—and it’s spectacular.

Ms. Smith is best known for her technique, performing monologues of real peoples’ words, mimicking each speaker, often with the aid of small props—glasses, a hat. The result is a series of impressive, uncannily realized performances. But it’s also something of a parlor trick, Rich Little in a legitimate theater.

Ms. Smith’s true genius lies in the editing. She is a wonderful actress, but she is an even better journalist. Let Me Down Easy uses the words of 20 different people, from whom Ms. Smith has elicited fascinating, moving, sad, funny and gut-wrenching stories. She knows how to ask questions, and she knows how to assemble the answers, well-crafted testimonials shaped into a well-crafted play.

Lance Armstrong talks about the body as a machine, one that must be kept in proper operating condition. Brent Williams, a rodeo rider, has a Westerner’s skepticism of big plans and big government but speaks admiringly of the care he received at a military hospital, where doctors are all government employees and work together, for a salary. Hazel Merritt, a poor woman in New Haven, Conn., tells of her daughter’s disastrous dialysis—the machine malfunctioned, blood spewed on Merritt, her daughter, and the room, but no medical staff was nearby to hear their cries for help. Finally, nurses shut down the machine, told Merritt to bring her daughter back another day and sent them home in a taxi, Merritt’s blood-soaked daughter wrapped in a sheet.

And Kirsta Kurtz-Burke, a doctor at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, talks of the dawning realization during Katrina that her poor patients were being ignored and forgotten.

“You just see the desperation of being poor in this country, and in some ways the distrust, I mean the deep down—this is not the first time this has happened to people,” she says. “I’m privileged, and this is the first time I’ve ever been totally abandoned by my government. But this wasn’t the first time for my patients or the nurses.”

The Kurtz-Burke monologue is devastating, but each one is profound and meaningful. (A few of the celebrities could have been excised; Eve Ensler and Lauren Hutton, for example, add little.) Together, they create a deeply thought-provoking look at life and death and a powerful and necessary reminder that the health care debate isn’t just about reimbursement rates and CBO scoring and Olympia Snowe but about real people, who sometimes get sick and who eventually die.

It’s the best theatrical experience I’ve had this season.

MEANWHILE, DOWN AT the Public Theater, artistic director Oskar Eustis is busy trying to convince the world that his current (and excellent) cash cow, the Broadway transfer of 1968’s “American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” Hair, is actually about modern gay-rights protesters. (It’s not.) But on Monday night, as the Hair cast returned from Washington and a gig at the National Equality March, Lemon Andersen’s entirely up-to-date one-man memoir, County of Kings—a production not of the Public but of the Culture Project, plus high-profile backers including Spike Lee—opened in the Public’s Newman Theater.

County of Kings begins with Mr. Andersen onstage at the Tony Awards; Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam, in which he performed, has won for special theatrical event. (“When they say this is the Great White Way,” he says, “man they sure ain’t playing.”) It flashes back from there: He grew up in a Brooklyn housing project with a loving but heroin-addicted mother and a loving but heroin-addicted and car-stealing stepdad. Mom died of AIDS; Mr. Andersen dealt drugs and did two stints in prison. Behind bars a second time, he discovered books and words. And, when released, he stumbled upon an open-mike night at the El Puente community center in Williamsburg. Words—poetry—saved his life.

The play suffers from some of the standard pitfalls of biographical solo shows. (There’s a bit too much of “And then I remember my neighbor, Mrs. Judy,” followed by a stylized portrayal of crabby Mrs. Judy.) But that’s a small matter. The thrill Mr. Andersen gets from language, from massaging it, finessing it, delivering it, is palpable and delightful. His script is impressive, his delivery better. And Elise Thoron’s direction (she’s also listed as a “developer” of the show), combined with Jane Cox and Lily Fossner’s lighting and Robert Kaplowitz’s sound design, give impressive texture and dynamism to what could otherwise be one guy standing onstage talking.

Most important, County of Kings is unmistakably a piece for today. And it has brought an audience of actual New Yorkers—my fellow theatergoers were much younger, and far more diverse, than usual in New York, especially at a Sunday matinee—to the theater. Their exuberance at the show’s end was cathartic—and infectious.

editorial@observer.com

"I have never even seen or heard anything like this. I don’t even know if a Hollywood movie producer could come up with this script."—Tom Cross, quoted by Ben Calhoun, City Room, Chicago Public Radio, December 10, 2008.

"Putting aside the peculiar dialect of desperation that made the governor sound like a John Malkovich character in a David Mamet play, the complaint showed a man trolling the depths of darkness."— Timothy Egan, The New York Times.

"If David Mamet didn't write the profane, wiretapped dialogue for the Illinois governor's attempt to sell Obama's Senate seat, he should have." — Choire Sicha, Salon.

"[H]is alleged attempts to fill president-elect Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat in exchange for favours could have been lifted wholesale from a mafia B movie..."— Edward Luce, The Financial Times.

But signs that the play might lay an egg were already in evidence last Friday afternoon at Café Une Deux Trois, where a press lunch with the cast had been scheduled. Instead of excited actors ready to begin the new Broadway run of a perfectly timed critique of inflated valuation, a near empty restaurant, and a sheepish hostess greeted the Daily Transom. "Yes, they were supposed to be here, but the event was cancelled," the hostess said with a shrug. "The actors are tired."

An invitation to the premiere's after party in Chelsea on Monday night met with similar frustration. After the Daily Transom responded positively to a publicist's request for coverage, we were met with the following reply via email: "I'm so sorry, but I was just informed that this party is closed to the press."

The reason for the change of plans, this time, revealed a production in disarray. "Well, it was a smaller party than we expected," the publicist said. After being pressed for what exactly that meant, she passed us on to another publicist, "who is in charge of events." That publicist said, "I'll let Richard Kornberg know about your inquiry. He represents the entire show. We only represent one of the producers, Stuart Lane."  

Okay then!

Mr. Kornberg was not thrilled to hear from us; "I don't even know what you're talking about," he huffed when we got him on the phone. After a review of the situation he admitted that one of the events had been canceled. But where, he asked, did the Daily Transom get the idea that the after-party was closed to the press? After being told about the email he barked, "I've got five people holding, let me call you back."

A few minutes later, he did.

"This is fucking moronic on their part! They don't have the right to ban anyone. I would have invited you. It wasn't closed because Michael Musto was there," Mr. Kornberg said, referring to the Village Voice gossip columnist. "Would you please forward me that email right away, so I can show it to a producer that is holding on the other line. I can't wait to show these people!"

The luncheon was an entirely different story, Mr. Kornberg said. Making it clear that it wasn't his idea, Mr. Kornberg explained, "The producers weren't nervous. It was a bad idea in the first place to schedule the lunch." Calming down a bit, he added, "The director wanted the three stars to be able to save their voice, so it was just postponed."