TV REVIEWS : Triumphant Performances in ‘Theatre’

David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre” ventures away from the theater in an adaptation by Mamet for cable’s TNT (at 5, 7 and 9 tonight).

Some of the changes enrich the play; another one simply prolongs it. But Mamet’s taut look at the bittersweet bond between an aging actor and his young colleague remains as funny and as tender as ever, thanks to triumphant performances by Jack Lemmon and Matthew Broderick.

This is one of Lemmon’s finest hours. If you’ve ever thought of Lemmon as a ham, for better or worse, here’s a script that uses that quality for all it’s worth. A member of an unnamed repertory company that specializes in chestnuts from the past, Lemmon’s Robert chews the scenery in a hilarious series of onstage turns, complete with in-performance bloopers.

Even in the offstage scenes, Lemmon declaims more than his character did in Mamet’s original play, thanks to a stock of fancy quotations that Mamet has added to his lines. But Lemmon doesn’t lose sight of the man’s loneliness--or his integrity. Broderick performs with equal aplomb as John, polite on the surface but gradually losing patience with the old man.

Mamet and director Gregory Mosher, who was the first director of Mamet’s two-actor backstage play in 1977, have “opened it up” with scenes on city streets, at a bar where the men cash their paychecks, at a gym where John appears more interested in watching the women dancers than he is in listening to Robert.

We see Robert’s apartment--which implies he’s in his hometown, as opposed to John, who’s seen in his hotel room. John is interviewed by a reporter in a restaurant, Robert visits a cemetery. Other actors and workers at the theater are seen. Though none of them has any lines, one woman overhears an exchange between the two men that apparently misleads her to the conclusion that they’re having sex.

Later, as the men are dressed in bunny suits from a children’s play, a pack of autograph-seeking children surround them, but Robert keeps fulminating about the “bloodsuckers” who prey on actors. That’s funny. But another addition, a rambling monologue by Robert, directed at a woman in a bar, is too disjointed to add anything of value.