Stage

...Squirrels is hardly a statement on art and commerce...

...Sam is schooled finally by pain, not by intellection, and he even reaches a spiritual revelation, if that is the correct phrase to describe his recognition of his own uncertainty...

...In his usual arrogant way, he announces that he will leave Glory, his wife, turn his back finally on his father, and take his son to a safe place where he will not be infected by Everett's God, Glory's softness...

...New York theatergoers have no great taste for ideational confrontation, their intellectual perceptions having been dimmed by too much moving scenery...

...It was first performed at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge in 1984, and a year later, a new version-this version-opened at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles...

...Mavis's death has triggered Sam's need to reexamine his life, but for most of the play his analysis is fake, his way of papering over the doubts that have undermined his assurance...

...Each on his own quest rides unseeing over those closest to him and does not notice how his way is cleared of the annoying interruptions of daily life...

...It was published in Norman's first collection, Four Plays, in 1988...

...Those, at least, are opposing forces, although the struggle is really going on within Sam himself...

...What Sam resents is not Everett's God, but the man himself...

...After all, there are more squirrels in this play than the stuffed one on the writer's desk or the ones that keep turning up in his unfinished story...

...The two men have met here because Sam, his wife, and son have come for a funeral, the burial of Sam's nurse, Everett's surrogate daughter, whom all Sam's surgical skills could not save...

...all three characters squirrel away material pilfered from the minds of the others-or from the wastebasket they share...

...Macy were then running in Chicago...

...It is true that it lacks the dramatic force of Norman's earlier plays-Getting Out, 'night, Mother-but it is an intriguing character study and a fascinating philosophical/theological debate...

...To be fair, Macy never said that this is Mamet's reading of his own play...

...When the man supersedes the doctor, the preacher, he can become the son, the husband, the father...

...Heavy...

...One of Mamet's first plays, Squirrels had been produced in 1974 by the St...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Sam remembers most of all how Everett used him and his grief after his mother's death to make an evangelistic point...

...The strength of the play is that we are shown that the savior of souls and the savior of bodies are as alike as father and son...

...He suggested that it depicts a struggle between commercialism (the older writer) and imagination (the cleaning woman) for the artistic soul of the young man, and that the former wins since, at the end of the play, he is dictating to the young man at the typewriter while the cleaning woman, in a spot downstage, is improvising a new narrative...

...There's the rub, I suppose...

...It is little more than a playful exercise of a young writer feeling his way through words...

...Not only does the interpretation sit uneasily on the comedy, it is textually suspect because, while the two writers have appropriated one of the the cleaning woman's stories, she is beginning to play with the squirrel plot that has haunted the older writer through much of the play...

...Before the end of the play, however, Sam has learned that he has been as blind to Glory's devotion as his father was to his mother's, has never seen Mavis clearly-certainly not the illness that would kill her-and has misunderstood the son who chooses not to be the means to his reformation...

...As for the twinkling star, to each playgoer his own message...

...Nicholas Theatre Company that Mamet and W.H...

...It is a funny play about the creative process-shifting encounters among an older writer, his young assistant, and a cleaning woman, who is also a writer...

...The play is set in an abandoned garden-once a magic place, of sorts-not so neutral ground in the struggle between Sam, a doctor who believes in the human mind and the verifiable fact, and Everett, his father, a clergyman whose faith is intact even though he is not the fiery evangelist he once was...

...At the end, after the four characters are once again a family, the father recalls and Sam finishes the second verse of a nursery rhyme, a favorite of his mother: "As your bright and tiny spark/Guides the traveler in the dark/Though I know not what you are /Twinkle, twinkle little star...

...Macy, who directed the new production and played in the original, spoke briefly after the performance I saw...

...Squirrels manages to touch cheerfully on writer's block, on how a writer's personality transforms material, and on the way everything-including other people's inventions-is fair game for the writer in need of a workable idea...

...The weakness of the play, if we take it on a realistic level, is that we have to accept on faith-the playgoer's faith in the author-that Sam is a genius of the scalpel and Everett an inspired preacher...

...The Philadelphia Festival Theatre of New Plays gave what they called the play's "professional premiere" (perhaps to protect the "New" in their name) as their first program in 1990...

...David Mamet's Squirrels has been around much longer than Traveler, and it still has not reached New York, although it is getting closer...

...His mother, who hovers over the play as insistently as Mavis does, was the keeper of this garden with its strange statues, a lover of fantasy and fairy tales who marked her child...

...Whatever it is, it is an effective finish to Traveler in the Dark...

...It finally arrived in Manhattan in mid-January when the York Theater Company mounted an effective production for a limited run...

...He remembers his father's treatment of his mother, his taking for granted that she would be there for him, a convenience-if a beloved one-that could be ignored while he did God's work...

...Reading the play, seeing the play, I find it difficult to guess why the delay...