Keep Your Pantheon (and School): Two Unrelated Plays

Two comic short plays by one of the theatre's most celebrated and compelling writers:

Keep Your Pantheon is a rousing farce that follows the fortunes and misfortunes of an impoverished acting troupe in ancient Rome. Featuring an over-the-hill acting guru who lusts after both his toga-clad protégé and a spot in the Sicilian Cork Festival, Mamet’s play returns to the roots of comedy, paying homage to the Roman playwright Plautus, whose works also inspired Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
“With Keep Your Pantheon, David Mamet, who’s been crowned the heavyweight playwriting champion of trash-talking masculinity, showcases what is perhaps his most underrated gift: his Houdini-like ability to slip out of pigeonholes. Mamet, one of the undeniably great playwrights of the baby boomer generation, is a literary conglomerate all his own, a writer too street-smart to let artistic success suffocate him. Give him a genre—in any medium—and he’ll be more than happy to show you what he can do. Mamet is like a shark shooting through the ocean, his very survival dependent on moving forward.” –Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times

Also included in this volume, School is a crackling curtain-raiser in which two teachers shoot back-and-forth on topics ranging from pedophilia to recycling.
“School offers a textbook example of the style that made its author famous. This merry little sketch moves with the show-off alacrity of a calculus prodigy whizzing through equations at the blackboard. The characters’ words bounce and click like the soles of virtuoso tap dances, riffing with their feet. This is verbal vaudeville as only Mr. Mamet can deliver it.” –Ben Brantley, New York Times


David Mamet is a playwright, essayist and screenwriter who directs for both the stage and film. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Glengarry Glen Ross. His plays include China Doll, Race, The Anarchist, American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, November, The Cryptogram, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Lakeboat, The Water Engine, The Duck Variations, Reunion, The Blue Hour, The Shawl, Bobby gould in Hell, Edmond, Romance, The Old Neighborhood and his adaptation of The Voysey Inheritance.