A Life in the Theatre

David Mamet's 1977 two-hander—now making its Broadway debut starring the charming and assured Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight—is an affectionate, faintly nostalgic portrait of actors and the roles they play onstage and off. Between oblique scenes of their evolving backstage interplay, Mamet offers amusing parodies of stodgy theatrical style, which director Neil Pepe has larded with somewhat broad slapstick. It is ephemeral stuff, but pleasant.—Adam Feldman