Two Unrelated Plays: Keep Your Pantheon & Duck Variations

This is a double bill by David Mamet.

In Keep Your Pantheon an impoverished acting company on the edge of eviction is offered a lucrative engagement and life is finally on the upswing. But through a series of riotous mishaps, the troupe finds its problems have actually multiplied, and that they are about to learn a new meaning for the term ‘dying on stage.’

Duck Variations, a sly meditation on the meaning of life written in the early 1970s, depicts conversations between two elderly men who are sitting on a park bench and watching ducks. Their observations about the ducks, whether factual or incorrect, create a beautiful fugue on the human condition – on family and friendship, the possibility of happiness and on death.