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[[image]]David Mamet (left) sits in on rehersals but not obtrusively. Says Riegert: "We did a reading of the play yesterday, and David was here. He made a couple dof changes and went on his way. He's good that way."

Rebecca Pidgeon

Bobby Gould's beloved sister Julia - Bobby and Julia (Patti LuPone) and Julia's husband Carl (Jack Willis) are plunged in Mametian fury over the contemptible treatment they feel they've received over the years (indeed, in Bobby and Jolly's case, ever since childhood) from a mother, a stepfather and the stepfather's new wife.
Part three, Deeny, has Bobby Gould winding up a brief, autumnal visit to a woman he'd loved and been loved by in the days of their youth. If David Mamet hadn't written it, Ingmar Bergman might have-if he spoke Chicagoese. Deeny, the girl in the case, the woman in the case, is played by Rebecca Pidgeon (Mrs. David Mamet).
Is there any tensile link between the Danny Shapiro of Sexual Perversity in Chicago and the Bobby Gould of The Old Neighborhood?
"I don't know," Riegert said on a day when the current production was just coming together for first rehearsals in Boston. "I'm sure that if someone was doing an analysis of David's wok, he could draw some kind of a line, 20 years later-but that's not a line that's helpful to me as an actor."
Mamet, when he himself isn't directing, sits in on rehearsals, but not every day and not obtrusively. (The director of this Old Neighborhood is Scott Zigler, who did the same for its world premiere last spring at Boston's American Repertory Theatre.)
"We did a reading of the play yesterday," said Riegert, "and David was here. He heard what he had to hear, made a couple of changes and went on his way. We'll see him next week, maybe; maybe the week after. He's good that way."
To Peter Rieger, a son of the Bronx- i.e., of Milton Riegert, who was in the wholesale poultry business, and Lucille Riegert, piano teacher, both now gone- the three interrelated plays of The Old Neighborhood have "quite a bit to do, I guess, with the debate that's gone on for a couple of thousand years over what it is to be a Jew. As a matter of fact, part of being Jewish is the whole question of what it is to be a Jew. And certainly one of the argument these days is that assimilation is potentially as dangerous as the Holocaust was." 
There are implications beyond that in The Disappearance of the Jews and the other two plays. "This middle-aged man, Bobby Gould-in a short time he's going to disappear, literally, not figuratively: He'll grow old and die. As with all David's stuff, The Old Neighborhood resonates with many meanings."
Riegert is a long way from old--he was born in 1947--but he also "certainly didn't expect to be at this age and alone," which he is. Unbonded. Too busy acting. He says he wouldn't mind if that changed--not the busy-ness, the unbondedness.
Riegert came to acting from social work and teaching. And one thing more. Back when he was living on Horatio Street in the Village, he wandered over one day to where Bella Abzug, running for congress against ironclad incumbent Leonard Farbstein, had her office on Sheridan Square.
They put me to work typing and working the mimeograph machine. After a couple of days I felt this presence looming over my shoulder, with a look on her face like 'Who the hell are you?' It wasn't long before I was serving as Bella's aide, making her breakfast, driving her around, all that stuff. She beat Farbstein. I learned a lot about acting just from watching Bella.
Maybe David Mamet should write a play, Political Perversity in New York.

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Transcription Notes:
[[image: pg. 58 David Mamet]]