Made it somehow, against all reason, even though my plane squatted on the tarmac for 55 minutes more than it should have before dropping me into LaGuardia one brief hour before the Tuesday 7PM curtain time (which has thwarted me before: see Equus).
Made it, somehow, which I'm sure is what William H. Macy was thinking after the first night of his run in Mamet's Speed-the-Plow in a role that Jeremy Piven bailed out of as the result of mercury poisoning from too much sushi. (Or so his doctor says. Mamet was unforgiving and wisecracked that Piven was off to pursue a career as a thermometer).
Macy is Mamet's man and he pulled it off with only a few recovered flubs and one duped line and two big hugs from his co-stars -- Raul Esparza and Elisabeth Moss -- which he received shyly (does William H. Macy do anything any other way?) in the twilight space where the curtain drops on the other world of the play before it rises again to the hot footlights of the curtain call and whatever the audience has to dish.
K says Macy's no Piven and I believe her, but I loved him all the same.
Posting by cameraphone from Times Square.
p.s. More on Mamet »
4 comments:
All right, I must clarify before people think I'm an idiot: I have no doubts that on the whole, Macy is a better (and far more subtle) actor than Piven, who has become a little one note. Only that I thought this role played particularly well to his one note -- and that Macy did a totally different take on it, as is his wont. I preferred Piven's take, that's all, which also may not have been the case had I seen Macy in the role first.
There. Did I CMA? (So glad you made it, by the way. Miracles do happen!)
lol & oh dear: I didn't mean to make you look like an idiot. I completely agree: I've been slotting Pivens into the role in my mind and I can see where it would be a completely different read -- especially in the interplay between the two old pals.
it was Mamet's script that saved the show last night -- Macy was still a little too uncertain to inhabit it entirely well; Moss wasn't nearly as persuasive as she needed to be (a one note performance, I thought, regrettably -- she needed to be sweetness and siren and all hidden agenda -- hidden from her own self, even. didn't hardly happen.)
you could definitely feel that the whole room was rooting for Macy, which made it more of an endurance race than anything else. and he made it. which means all is right with the world.
so. good. to see you two.
happy happy birthday.
Thank you. Very well stated. And it was a pleasure to be a part of such an audience.
sweeping back through this post to clean up my typos and formatting and realized we talked about the whole play without once mentioning how FRICKIN' BRILLIANT ESPARZA IS.
still tired from the week so I'll leave it at that, but wow.
frickin' brilliant.
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