Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
■ Al Pacino will return to Broadway next year in a new play by David Mamet written with the Oscar-winner expressly in mind. Producers said Thursday that Pacino will star in China Doll directed by Pam MacKinnon starting in October 2015. Pacino will play a wealthy man about to retire and marry a younger woman when his plans are shaken by a phone call. “I wrote it for Al,” the playwright said in a statement. Pacino was last seen on Broadway in 2012 in the role of Shelly Levene in a revival of Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Glengarry Glen Ross. Mamet’s last new play on Broadway was the disappointing The Anarchist co-starring Debra Winger and Patti LuPone. The new play marks the fourth time Pacino and Mamet have worked together. They also paired up on a Phil Spector bio-pic for HBO. Pacino played the famed music producer who was jailed after the slaying of a model. It was written and directed by Mamet. Pacino, who played Shylock in a 2011 revival of The Merchant of Venice, earning a Tony nomination, said in a statement: “The opportunity to create a new character in the David Mamet canon was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
m While he’s not exactly yelling at kids to get off his lawn quite yet, Jason Reitman s ays he has a hard time relating to teenagers and it’s all because of the Internet. The 37-year-old director says that when he talks to kids who are 15 to 20 years younger, they “might as well be 100 years younger than me because the life they grew up with doesn’t resemble my childhood at all.” He says that while “a cordless phone versus a wired phone” separated him and his parents, newer generations are growing up with “the Internet as a fact of their life.” “And we’ll just be old people who don’t understand,” Reitman says. That generational relationship with technology is the focus of Reitman’s new movie,
Men, Women & Children, which expanded to wide release Friday. It focuses on a group of high school students and their parents dealing with the way the Internet affects their lives. The Oscar- nominated director says he doesn’t “get social media,” noting that his teen actors had to explain to him how Snapchat works.