Reunion & Dark Pony

by David Mamet

In these two moving early plays, David Mamet displays the humor, sensitivity, and ear for language that have made him one of the most celebrated playwrights in American theater today.

Reunion depicts the awkward, tender meeting between a father and a daughter drawn together by their loneliness after twenty years of separation. Their cautious small talk, filled with evasion and cliché, gradually exposes the terrifying isolation in which they live, and ultimately, their great need for each other.

In the short vignette Dark Pony, a father tells a favorite bedtime story to comfort his young daughter as they drive home late at night. A foray into the realm of legend, the story of a young Indian brave and his trusty horse, Dark Pony has been called “a lovely, tiny moment of a play” by Julius Novick of The Village Voice.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

David Alan Mamet is an American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. His works are known for their clever, terse, sometimes vulgar dialogue and arcane stylized phrasing, as well as for his exploration of masculinity.

As a playwright, he received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).

Mamet's recent books include The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and antisemitism; and Bambi vs. Godzilla, an acerbic commentary on the movie business.

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poignant shorts. Reunion: a lonely woman and her estranged father try to connect. Dark Pony: earlier, closer, easy connection.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reunion is pretty strong work, but didn't quite make it into 4-star territory for me. Reminds me, in part, of A Life in the Theater, and also, a little less, of The Duck Variations. Each episode in the play is well-focused on a particular point and each episode resolves cleanly. Also, the teacher-student theme recurrent in Mamet's work is definitely in full effect here, though the "teacher" role seems to shift occasionally in the daughter's favor.

Dark Pony is probably, as many critics have argued, a snapshot of the father-daughter from Reunion many years earlier. In fact, when it was first staged, both father roles were played by Michael Higgins and both daughter roles by Lindsay Crouse, lending credence to the above theory. With this possibility in mind, I found Dark Pony a bit more engaging and illuminating than I might have otherwise. Still, it is straight-down-the-middle average Mamet material.

[Nick Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two short, early plays by David Mamet. In the edition I read, Reunion is 26 pages long, Dark Pony only 5 pages. Both have two characters, a father and a daughter. Reunion was first staged in 1976, Dark Pony in 1977 – and, on its first performance, Dark Pony played in a double bill with Reunion. If American Buffalo showed a step forward from his previous work, these two plays perhaps show a step back: they feel like promising works by a talented dramatist, but they also feel like apprentice pieces, Mamet still finding his legs, discovering his territory and methods. In Reunion an adult daughter meets her estranged father. He is nervous, uncertain, makes excuses for his absence during her childhood, talks of his time as an alcoholic. Everything is tentative, as though they are jostling for position, trying to find if their relationship will work. There is no resolution at the end, the father seemingly wanting to move on from the failures of the past and look to the future, the daughter wanting the emotional security that was missing from her childhood because of her absent father. Both plays feel like sketches: they are intriguing works and feel like a young playwright finding his feet – but if you place them into the context of Mamet’s career, as works following American Buffalo, they are a little disappointing.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

fine enough but not notable imo

[Víctor Solís · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reunion is as heartfelt as I've ever seen or read from a master of drama like David Mamet.
Truthfulness breathes on the page, and fractured memories and re-discoveries colour the unspoken words and the silences of the father and the daughter.
As with THE SHAWL and FAUSTUS, et al: seek the audioplay. The Mamet-approved ones, with Ricky Jay, Rebecca Pidgeon, Lindsay Cruise, and more.

[TrumanCoyote · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first one pretty good. Can't say I much agree with the back-cover blurb ("terrifying isolation" and all those garfunkels--and "filled with cliches"...yeah, like terrifying isolation), but then I guess it serves me right for reading those things. The last one is a poignant vignette...yeah, that's it: a poignant vignette.