["Reunion"] is about the reunion, after twenty-one years, of a father and his daughter in his apartment in Boston…. Needless to say (for this is Mamet), the humor—and there is plenty of it—is as true as the emotion. By the time the play is over, two lives have been laid bare before us…. Time after time, the conversation plunges into depths, and time after time the father brings it back to the surface, realizing, after another reminiscent anecdote that comes to nothing, that all they have is the present and that they must go on from there. The ending is moving and right for this most moving play…. Mr. Mamet's ear for the small rhythms and patterns of the speech of working people and his sense of the subtle inflections of emotion in his characters is unerring. In its spare language and in the pressure of silence between the words, "Reunion," like "Duck Variations," is a poem for two voices—and a distinguished and remarkable one….
["The Sanctity of Marriage"] eluded me, and it was not a matter of its not quite working, either; with Mamet, it's all or nothing. In "Dark Pony"—just as brief, and a charmer—a father …, [driving his little girl] home in the middle of the night, tells her a familiar, scary, comforting story about an Indian brave and his pony, which is ultimately so reassuring that she has almost drowsed off by the time they turn in to their own road. Mood is all, and mood is maintained.
Edith Oliver, "The Theatre: 'Reunion'," in The New Yorker (© 1979 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. LV, No. 39, October 29, 1979, p. 81.
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