Overview

In these three short plays, middle-aged Bobby Gould returns to the old neighborhood in a series of encounters with his past that, however briefly, open windows to his present. In The Disappearance of the Jews (also included in Mamet’s Three Jewish Plays), Bobby and an old buddy fantasize about finding themselves in a nostalgic shtetl paradise, while revealing how lost they are in their own families. In Jolly, Bobby’s sister, from the comfort of her kitchen, unscrolls a list of childhood grievances that is at once painful and hilarious. And the old girlfriend in Deeny, faced with a man she once loved, finds herself obsessively free-associating on gardening, sex, and subatomic particles.