Bernie's Personal Philosophy
In Reunion, Bernie is a recovering alcoholic who has not seen his daughter Carol since he divorced her mother twenty years earlier. Throughout his long conversation with Carol, Bernie expresses key points in his personal philosophy on life, developed as a result of his struggles to recover from alcoholism. Bernie applies this philosophy to his relationship with Carol, as he tries to develop a renewed personal connection with his adult daughter. In addition, Bernie attempts to provide Carol with some form of parental guidance by offering her his personal wisdom about life and relationships, gained from his own experiences, both good and bad.
In the course of his conversation with Carol, Bernie repeatedly refers to his alcoholism, an addiction he has only been able to resist over the past three years. A major characteristic of Bernie’s alcoholism was his refusal to take responsibility for his life, particularly in terms of his relationships with members of his family. Although he did work for the telephone company in Boston for ten years, he also drifted around the country and moved from job to job for a number of years after he divorced Carol’s mother. Because of his alcoholism, he eventually crashed his car into a police car, after which his driver’s license was revoked. As a result, he was fired from the phone company. Bernie even missed the funeral of his own brother, partly because he was drifting around and out of touch with his family, but also as a result of his drinking. Because he missed his brother’s funeral, his brother’s wife refuses to speak to him ever again. Bernie also mentions that, while he was drinking, he was always in debt. He points out that there was no good reason for him to be in debt all those years, except that he was irresponsible about work and money.
One of the most significant consequences of Bernie’s alcoholism and avoidance of personal responsibility is that he never tried to contact his daughter, even after she turned twenty-one and there was no legal restriction on his relationship with her. Further, even the fact that Carol’s mother was able to obtain a court order forbidding Bernie to see Carol was probably made possible on the evidence of his alcoholism—that is, Carol’s mother probably informed the court that Bernie was an alcoholic, and therefore unfit to see his daughter.
In the present, however, Bernie is much more concerned about the consequences of his actions, particularly in terms of how his decisions may affect his relationship with Carol. He mentions to her that he is thinking of remarrying, but makes a point of asking how that would affect her. He tentatively asks, ‘‘How would you, you know . . . feel if I got married again? Would that . . . do anything to you?’’ Even after she responds that she thinks it would be good for him, Bernie assures her, ‘‘Of course it wouldn’t get in the way of our getting to know each other.’’ Thus, although he can’t change his past, and the effect of his past actions on his relationship with Carol, he is very aware of weighing the possible consequences of his present and future actions on their relationship.
Bernie understands that, for him, drinking was a way of ‘‘looking for a way around’’ life’s challenges and difficulties, of avoiding his responsibilities and the consequences of his actions. His personal philosophy in the present, however, is grounded in the understanding that choices in life must be made based on the idea that one must be willing to face the consequences...
(This entire section contains 2102 words.)
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of one’s actions. As Bernie says, ‘‘pay the price’’ for one’s decisions in life, whether they be good or bad.’’ He explains,
You wanna drink? Go drink. You wanna do this? Pay the price. Always the price. Whatever it is. And you gotta know it and be prepared to pay it if you don’t want it to pass you by.
By this statement, Bernie is not advocating that Carol, or anyone else, go ahead and drink; rather, he is pointing out that, if one chooses to drink excessively, one must be aware of, and willing to accept, the consequences of that decision, to ‘‘pay the price’’ for one’s actions.
Bernie has only quit drinking over the past three years, and is trying to be a more stable, responsible person. He has clearly made progress in taking responsibility for his life, since he stopped drinking. He has had the same job for two years, has his own apartment, and has even begun to save money. Although Carol was the one to contact him, after so many years, Bernie clearly seems ready to take responsibility for trying his best to reestablish a relationship with his daughter.
Throughout his conversation with Carol, Bernie tries to admit candidly what kind of person he was in the past and what kind of person he is today. He understands that he can neither deny nor change his past. He also understands that it’s important not to have illusions about himself. While Carol clings to her childhood image of him as an idealized hero, Bernie repeatedly insists that he is ‘‘no hero,’’ that he is simply an ‘‘ex-drunk,’’ and that the only way for him to be happy is to accept himself as he truly is. He tells Carol, ‘‘I’m a happy man now,’’ but that he in no way takes happiness for granted, that ‘‘I don’t use the term loosely.’’ Although his life has become simple, Bernie expresses genuine contentment with himself. He tells Carol, ‘‘For the first time in a long time I get a kick out of what I’m doing.’’
Carol tells Bernie she used to think of him as a hero, in the person of Tonto, the Native American sidekick of the television cowboy hero The Lone Ranger. She tells him she was very upset after, when she was four years old, he told her that he was not Tonto. Bernie responds by insisting that he is not a hero. He even asserts that, although he was given a medal for his service in World War II, he was no hero in the war, but was simply doing what he did out of necessity. He explains, ‘‘They put you in a plane with a gun, it pays to shoot at the guys who are trying to kill you. Where’s the courage in that.’’ He tries to impress upon Carol that she needs to let go of her childhood ideals about her father and accept him for the flawed man that he is.
Bernie himself does not shy away from admitting his many faults and his mistakes in the past. At one point, he states, ‘‘I’ve spent the majority of my life drinking and, when you come right down to it, being a hateful sonofa[b——].’’ Yet he is willing to accept himself for who he is, and who he has been in the past. He explains that ‘‘I am what I am and that’s what happiness comes from . . . being just that.’’ In other words, happiness comes from accepting that he is no more nor less than who he really is. Carol at one point tells Bernie he is wasting his life working in a restaurant. He responds that he is not the hero Tonto, but only himself, an ‘‘ex-drunk.’’ Further, Bernie asserts that he likes who he is today, and likes his life as he is living it in the present, that ‘‘I like it like I am,’’ and ‘‘I like it at the restaurant. I love it at the restaurant,’’ regardless of whether or not he lives up to other people’s ideas about what he should be doing with his life.
As part of his philosophy of self-acceptance, Bernie tries to be honest with Carol about his feelings, expressing at various points anger, fear, and sadness. He tells her that he almost burst into tears when her husband, Gerry, informed him that Carol wanted to see him, and that he was scared by the prospect of seeing her after all of these years. Bernie is also honest with Carol about his feelings during the period after he and her mother were divorced. He admits that he felt guilty about not seeing Carol, but that he also felt angry with her mother, and even angry with her. On the positive side, Bernie expresses the feeling that he wants to get to know his daughter, and that their meeting after all these years is ‘‘a very important moment.’’ Through such honest expression of his feelings, Bernie does his best not to shy away from his past, and to be honest with himself and others about who he is and how he feels in the present. Bernie thus makes a point of taking responsibility for his feelings in both the past and the present, without dwelling unrealistically on a past that he has no power to change.
Bernie ultimately tries to impress upon Carol that he is not a hero, and that she cannot continue to idealize him in the way that she did as a little girl. He tries to explain that he is no more nor less than what he is, a recovering alcoholic who has made many mistakes in life but is happy with who he is in the present.
Bernie admits to Carol that he felt guilty about abandoning her, but he also makes it clear to her that he cannot undo the past. He tries to explain to Carol that their relationship as father and daughter at this point cannot be based on what’s gone on in the past, that he’ll never be able to make up for the fatherless childhood Carol suffered. He explains that wanting to get to know each other in the present is still ‘‘not going to magically wipe out twenty years . . . in which you were growing up, which you had to do anyway, and I was drunk.’’ He adds, ‘‘What’s past is in the past . . . it’s gone,’’ and that, ‘‘I can’t make it up to you.’’ Bernie understands that the best he can do is to accept the consequences of his past actions, to accept his own personal limitations in the present, and to make better, more responsible, choices in the future.
Bernie tells Carol he spent a couple of days in jail once, where he learned, ‘‘you’ve gotta be where you are. . . . While you’re there.’’ He also states, ‘‘The actions are important. The present is important,’’ in relation to his and Carol’s relationship to each other. He seems to be saying that they cannot have a relationship by dwelling on a past that cannot be altered, or trying to recapture the years they have lost, but must forge their relationship based on who both of them are at this point in their lives, by spending time together and doing things in the present. He suggests, ‘‘let’s get up, go out, do this,’’ because ‘‘what’s between us isn’t going nowhere, and the rest of it doesn’t exist.’’ While this last statement is a bit enigmatic, it seems that Bernie is trying to say the past cannot be altered, that it is ‘‘going nowhere,’’ and that the future does not yet exist. Their only choice is to develop a relationship with one another in the present by choosing to be together and do things together in the here and now. Bernie takes positive steps toward this end by giving Carol an engraved bracelet ‘‘from your father,’’ and letting her know that he is willing to do ‘‘whatever you want’’ as far as how they spend their time together from that point on.
Although he does not make direct reference to it, Bernie’s newfound attitude about life resonates with the ‘‘serenity prayer,’’ recited regularly at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous: ‘‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’’ Bernie seems to have found personal serenity by quitting drinking and developing the wisdom to know the difference between what he can and cannot change. He is eager to change the things he can in the present, such as taking positive action to develop his relationship with Carol from one of two strangers into one of close interpersonal connection.
Source: Liz Brent, Critical Essay on Reunion, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Language and Indirection
Reunion is the story of a father and daughter coming together after a separation of many years. It is a quiet play, using Mamet’s trademark terse, cryptic dialogue; yet there is a degree of melancholy that distinguishes it from the playwright’s other, more noisy work. The play demonstrates how language can mark the distance between two people as well as draw them together and manages to convey a sense of festering bitterness, betrayal, and recrimination without ever addressing them head on. Silences are as pregnant with meaning as the verbal exchanges.
Like the plays of the British playwright Harold Pinter, to whom he is most often compared, Mamet’s plays often proceed in the form of ‘‘dramatized conversation.’’ This conversational tone, often constituting superficial or anecdotal exchanges, conceals stresses just beneath the surface, tensions that threaten to erupt violently. Like Pinter, Mamet is sparing in his use of directions. It can be argued that they are contained in the language itself, the way it is written on the page, for example, when Carol is looking at a photograph of Bernie’s bomber group. Language itself is the vehicle of dramatic action.
As with Pinter, Mamet employs silence, the space between words, as a kind of punctuation. This includes both the ways in which he organizes the individual speeches of his characters, often starting a new line with each sentence, as well as the indication of pauses written into the stage directions. This breaking up of the speeches places an emphasis on both what is said and left unsaid. In these gaps between words lie hidden meanings. It is no accident that both Mamet and Pinter began their careers as actors on the stage; their works are written to be performed. Mamet’s famous use of profanity serves a similar purpose; it is used as a rhythmic device, linking syllables while also creating an aura of authenticity. The effect is a kind of street language that is actually highly stylized and poetic.
Reunion is one of Mamet’s earliest produced plays but it already contains the elements of what is now recognized as ‘‘Mametspeak’’; the clipped, authentic-sounding, yet highly stylized economy of language that in its use of compression and indirection most resembles poetry. C. W. E. Bigsby, in his study David Mamet, has remarked upon how Mamet’s plays often proceed through the use of ‘‘parallel monologues.’’ His characters address one another indirectly, appearing to be only half listening, or incapable of following a line of thought. Exchanges threaten, at times, to break into incoherence. A monologue may be broken, in mid-sentence, and go off on a tangent.
There is something poignant as well as comical in these digressions. What is shown is a struggle for coherence. Assertions are made, then quickly contradicted, undermining the authority of the statements. There is a built-in instability to each utterance and the truthfulness of the speaker is constantly called into question. Bigsby notes that ‘‘the inarticulate sounds made by his characters are themselves shaped into effective harmonies.’’ This is certainly the case in Reunion where father and daughter, in an attempt to communicate with one another, speak half-truths, tell white lies, and construct self-serving or exculpatory narratives that allow them to finally approach a point where they can engage one another, directly and without pretense.
The play opens with uncertainty, when Bernie, a fifty-three-year-old ‘‘ex-drunk’’ remarks to the twenty-four-year-old daughter he has not seen in twenty years that ‘‘I would of recognized you anywhere. It is you. Isn’t it? Carol. Is that you? You haven’t changed a bit.’’ This confusion, assertion of certainty, then doubt, followed by blatant dissimulation sets the tone for the piece. Assertions by either character are not to be taken at face value, even if the motives for dissembling are benevolent.
This meeting between father and daughter, fraught with tension, proceeds through a series of indirect exchanges that define, obliquely, the characters and their needs. Carol is the more reticent of the two, with Bernie evidently having more to answer for. Bernie is suspicious of her motives for seeking him out after all these years and has constructed, out of habit or a bad conscience, a wellrehearsed narrative of his life that is meant to be both an admission of his failings and exculpatory. Bernie describes himself as ‘‘ex-this, ex-that,’’ in particular, ex-drunk. He speaks the language of recovery, with an ex-tail-gunner’s reserve. This emphasis on what he once was, is a way of separating himself from his past, appealing to Carol as who he is now. The inadequacy of this approach should be apparent; Bernie cannot describe himself except as something other than he was. He exists, in the present, only vaguely. As Bigsby points out, ‘‘Unlike the present relationship, which is fraught with danger, accusations, potential embarrassments and emotional traps, the past, once reshaped by memory and imaginations, is an object that can be handled with relative safety.’’
Just as Bernie falls back on platitudes and anecdotes as a way of steeling himself against any true communication, Carol constructs her own fictional narrative of a happy marriage and loving husband. The truth leaks through, as fissures open up revealing the depth of her despair and the real reason for this rapprochement with Bernie. The two of them attempt to find common ground in shared memories. They try to connect, weave fictions, halflies, and attempt to connect memories that don’t correspond. Both offer stories in the hopes that they will elicit recognition in the other. ‘‘Do you remember that?’’ is asked hopefully but is never answered. Carol tells how she thought her father was Tonto. She recounts how she asked him if it were true and he answered in the negative. ‘‘I didn’t understand why you were lying to me.’’ Later, Bernie responds angrily ‘‘This is not Tonto the Indian but Butch Cary, ex-drunk.’’ This self-identification seems no less a fiction, constructed out of need and convenience.
Through an accretion of details, one may draw conclusions as to why Carol chose an older man for a husband, although she does not seem conscious of what they may be. The failure of this union seems directly tied to her desire to look up her actual father. That she is unable or unwilling to address him as ‘father’ is revealed in their earliest exchange. At a moment when Bernie who has ventured some paternal advice to his daughter without having earned the right, Carol responds ‘‘He’s my husband, Bernie, not my father.’’ Bernie has not earned the right to patronize her, to play the paternal role. It is uncertain that it would be possible.
As the play progresses, Carol seems to hover on the brink of recognition. She speaks of coming from a broken home: ‘‘The most important institution in America.’’ ‘‘It’s got to have affected my marriage,’’ she says. Bernie once again falls back on a platitude: life goes on. Bernie seems to intuit that Carol’s admission of unhappiness in her marriage is an indirect reproach of him. He takes the offensive, admitting his own anger and hostility. He returns to the theme of ex-soldier, which he first said was ‘‘no big deal,’’ and rails against the Veterans Administration. He plays the victim in order to release himself from responsibility. The way that Mamet handles this scene is subtle, but effective.
Bernie: I mean, understand: I’m not asking you to understand me, Carol, because we’ve both been through enough.
Am I right?
Pause.
Carol: Gerry was in Korea.
Bernie: Yes? And what does he say about it?
Carol: Nothing.
The failures to find a shared memory lead them to search for common ground; Bernie becomes excited when Carol tells him she taught at the Horace Mann School in Newton. Bernie used to frequent a garage across the street when he was a phone company employee. When Carol tells him she worked there in 1969, Bernie’s hopes are de- flated; he tells her he has not ‘‘worked for the phone company since ‘55.’’ Once again, there is a disconnect, but they keep foraging, searching out a patch of shared experience:
Bernie: I’ll bet I saw you around. Boylston Street . . .
Carol: We must’ve seen each other . . . in the Common . . . A hundred times.
A common past seems irretrievably lost to both of them, yet they persist in their attempts to create a linkage. Bernie tells his daughter that he was in jail once. ‘‘What it taught me,’’ he says, ‘‘you’ve got to be where you are . . . While you’re there. Or you’re nowhere. Do you know what I mean? As it pertains to you and me?’’ Carol responds: ‘‘I want to get to know you.’’ The play has now shifted, so to speak, from the past tense to the present. Nothing can ‘‘wipe out twenty years,’’ the years of Bernie’s absence from Carol’s life. Finally, Bernie asks Carol directly why she came looking for him, now. ‘‘I felt lonely,’’ she replies. ‘‘You’re my father.’’
The penultimate scene opens with Carol stating ‘‘I feel lonely,’’ shifting from the past to the present tense. This gives her remarks immediacy, placing them in the moment. Finally, they are able to communicate in a direct, unambiguous fashion, yet this seems to discomfit Bernie. Out of the silence, Bernie remarks: ‘‘Who doesn’t?’’ As Bernie appears to back away, Carol presses forward. She tells him that she feels cheated that she never had a father.
Carol: And I don’t want to be pals and buddies; I want you to be my father.
Pause
And to hear your . . . war stories and the whole thing. And that’s why now because that’s how I feel.
Pause
I’m entitled to it.
Am I?
Am I?
At the play’s end, Bernie makes an offering to Carol. He presents her with a bracelet that he found on a bus, but has taken the trouble to have it inscribed to her. Even here the narrative is fouled up: in an ironic twist, the date of the inscription is wrong. ‘‘It’s my fault. It’s not their fault. My threes looks like eights. It’s only five days off.’’ This symbolic exchange binds one to the other in a way that their memories cannot. As Bigsby remarks, ‘‘This is a reunion only in the sense that they reencounter one another. The intimate relationship of father and daughter is no longer recoverable; they come together out of simple need.’’
Source: Kevin O’Sullivan, Critical Essay on Reunion, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Reunion is Mametesque
David Mamet is one of the most famous of American writers: he has won a Pulitzer Prize, has an international reputation, and is equally at home on the Broadway stage, in independent theater, and in Hollywood, where his screenplays have been nomi nated for Academy Awards on two occasions. But Mamet has also suffered from being so identified with a particular genre, which he more or less invented: that of all-male workplaces bursting with an inventive and poetic dialect of American profanity. In his best-known plays, such as Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo, this language takes the place of plot in advancing an understanding of the world the characters inhabit. But it is a mistake to think that this only happens in Mamet’s ‘‘male workplace’’ plays.
In Reunion, one of Mamet’s early works, the language is neither profane nor stylized. There are only two characters, Bernie and Carol. They speak in a natural, realistic way. Neither person ever gets angry or agitated. It seems uncharacteristic of Mamet; but, a closer look reveals that the author’s method and preoccupations are present here as much as in his more famous plays, and in those works for which he is best known. Reunion is a short work in which a long-separated father and daughter meet in a series of scenes set on a single winter afternoon. Bernie ‘‘Butch’’ Cary has the vast majority of the dialog. Carol Mindler, a married woman in her early twenties, mostly listens. But in that dialog, we learn a lot more about the two people than may at first be apparent.
Take Carol, for example. Carol at first seems to be a passive figure, merely agreeable. Bernie does all the talking, and Carol seems to be content merely to provide cues for Bernie:
Carol: Bernie Cary. Army Air Corps.
Bernie: Butch. They called me Butch then.
Carol: Why?
Bernie: . . . I couldn’t tell you that to save my life. Those were strange times.
Carol: What’s this?
Bernie is a bore, the kind of middle-aged man who gasses on about his wartime experiences, his drinking days, his recovery from alcoholism and so forth, without ever seeming to notice that he is monopolizing the conversation. In the context of Reunion, it seems doubly obtuse. He has not seen Carol, his own daughter, in twenty years. And yet he asks her only the most perfunctory questions: ‘‘You still go to church?’’ ‘‘Tell me about your new husband.’’ ‘‘You got any kids?’’
But in fact, it is Carol who is in control of the conversation. Both people are in an awkward position; Bernie’s answer is to simply spill forth with everything that comes to mind. Carol is far more conscientious in what she tells Bernie; she doesn’t begin to open up to him until mid-way through the play. By asking Bernie questions, she learns much more about him than he does about her.
But if Carol’s very short, probing questions reveal something about her character, Bernie’s unguarded, loquacious speeches make his character fairly transparent. We feel that we know Bernie very well by the time Reunion is finished. And the way we know him is only to a limited extent the result of what he actually says. Bernie lets us know that he was a drunk, a bad husband and father, a veteran. But it’s in his asides that we really get a sense of how his mind works.
Bernie: . . . I mean, I’m fifty-three years old. I’ve spent the majority of my life drinking and, when you come right down to it, being a hateful sonofa[b——] . . . But you, married, living well. You live well. A nice guy. A fine guy for a husband. Going to have . . . maybe . . . kids. You shouldn’t let it bother you, but you have a lot of possibilities.
This kind of language is very characteristic of Mamet’s work. In many plays, the characters reveal themselves through finished speeches created and polished by the playwright; Mamet’s characters often speak semi-incoherently, struggling to get thoughts out. Because of that struggle, the audience can get a sense of not just the way they talk, but the way they think. Bernie, as a failure, sees anyone who has any kind of stability in their life as a fitting neatly into a category. He says, ‘‘married, living well’’ as if it were a kind of blue ribbon to stamp on Carol’s life—despite the fact that he knows almost nothing about her life. ‘‘A nice guy. A fine guy for a husband.’’ In fact, Carol will later tell Bernie a fairly intimate detail about her marriage, but its doubtful if even that will change Bernie’s way of looking at things. Carol’s life still has ‘‘a lot of possibilities,’’ whereas of course Bernie’s life is almost out of possibilities. One of the most interesting, almost poignant aspects of Reunion is the way the two characters use their own unhappiness as a way to try to open dialog with a long-lost, and badly-needed, relative.
One of Mamet’s quintessential themes is the search for a home; and both Bernie and Carol, despite the frequent triteness of their conversation, clearly both have a lot at stake. Although Reunion was originally written to be performed by itself, and often is, Mamet has written a very short companion piece, Dark Pony, which was performed as an epilogue to Reunion at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1977. In Dark Pony, the same actors who played Bernie and Carol play a father and daughter, twenty years earlier, riding home from a day in the country. The father, who is described as being ‘‘in his early 30s’’ (or Bernie’s age twenty years earlier) tells a tall tale to the daughter, who is described as being ‘‘dressed as if 5–8 years old.’’ Coming as it does after reunion, Dark Pony is intensely affecting, and the last line sums up the essence of what Reunion is really about: ‘‘We are almost home.’’
Given how emotional Dark Pony is for an audience who has just seen Reunion, one might be tempted to ask why Mamet didn’t write both scenarios as one play. One answer may lie in the fact that Mamet doesn’t like to give away too much. His characters don’t ‘‘express themselves’’ and if they do, it’s usually in the things they don’t say. Reunion is an extremely restrained work, and Mamet never once gives in to the temptation to let a little bit of explicit emotion break through. The last scene of Reunion consists of Bernie, in a characteristically awkward moment, giving a gold bracelet to Carol. He has had the date of their reunion engraved on it, he explains, but because his threes look like eights, the date is wrong. There would be ample opportunity for a less disciplined playwright to become mawkish here, in which Carol would say something along the lines of ‘‘it’s not perfect . . . nobody’s perfect . . . we just have to love each other as we are.’’ Instead, the close of the play is as follows:
Bernie: I’m not going to tell you that you don’t have to wear it if you don’t like it. I hope you do like it.
Carol: I do like it . . .
Bernie: So what’s the weather like out there?
Carol: It’s fine. Just a little chilly.
Bernie: We should be getting ready, no? Shouldn’t you call Gerry?
Carol: Yes.
Bernie: So you do that and I’ll put away the things and we’ll go.
Carol: The bracelet’s lovely, Bernie.
Bernie: Thank you.
As with so many other Mamet works, this exchange tell so much about both characters without really seeming to tell anything. Mamet’s men tend to talk too much, and his women hardy at all; but in between what they say, and why they say it, lies a world of feeling. It’s just a matter of the audience being sensitive to it. The feeling is real, but not rich; Reunion is not the kind of play that many people find easy to warm up to. Without Dark Pony as a payoff afterward, the audience might feel frustrated at having spent so much time with Bernie and Carol, and seen so little understanding or even relaxation between the two. They remain in the end as awkward and ill-at-ease as two strangers.
And two strangers they will almost certainly remain. Mamet doesn’t give much hope that Bernie and Carol will break down and open up to each other, after the fashion of TV movies. Bernie will remain a self-absorbed heel; Carol, like nearly all Mamet women, will continue to carry vast reservoirs of silent resentment around with her, and will have trouble connecting. But they both want badly to be father and daughter again. And that, more than anything else, is the driving force behind all their dialog, however stilted, indirect, or laconic. As the audience watches them try so hard to connect with each other, they begin to feel connected themselves. And not just with Bernie and Carol, but with all the things they have tried, and failed, to say. In Reunion, Mamet shows us how much courage it can take just to say anything at all—and why that courage is worth having.
Source: Josh Ozersky, Critical Essay on Reunion, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.