We counterfeited once for your disport
Men's joy and sorrow; but our day has passed.
We pray you pardon all where we fell short—
Seeing we were your servants to this last.

— Rudyard Kipling, Actors

David Mamet is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such seminal plays of our time as Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, Oleanna, and Speed-the- Plow.  His A Life in the Theatre takes us into the lives of two actors; one young and rising into the first full flush of his success; the other older, anxious, and beginning to wane.  In a series of short, spare, and increasingly raw exchanges, we see the estrangement of youth from age and the wider, inevitable, endlessly cyclical rhythm of the world.