Mark Shilstone-Laurent is playing an older, more established actor whose theater spotlight is dimming, opposite his son Brady, who plays a young, rising actor who is displacing the elder. This is the simple premise in David Mamet’s 1977 play A Life in the Theatre, which Mark is also directing on the Carl Cherry stage starting this weekend.
Mamet is a legendary playwright trained on the East Coast and Chicago, who wrote seminal stuff like Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo. But he also made a good go of it in Hollywood as a screenwriter of The Verdict and The Untouchables. He’s gotten attention of late for changing from an avowed liberal into a staunch conservative.
But his early work, full of as much profanity as profundity, is how the Shilstones would like you to remember him in the coming weeks.
“I love [A Life in Theatre] because Mamet leaves so much up to actors and directors,” Mark says. “He puts the words down, doesn’t give a lot of stage direction, and says ‘Go!’”
The play, a fundraiser for Monterey County Theatre Alliance, follows the two actors across 25 or so short scenes that amount to a bigger-picture theater life: the technical and petty stuff, the rich and rewarding stuff. And more.
“The old being replaced by the new,” Mark, a longtime local theater veteran, says. “It’s so universal. It’s kind of sad but kind of beautiful.”