Two actors give life to 'A Life in the Theatre'

The nicest show in town is by - no kidding - David Mamet. It is also an exhilarating showcase for two terrific actors, Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight, and a thrilling joyride back to the days when Mamet was a baby virtuoso in crazy love with the theater.

This is not to say that "A Life in the Theatre" is an immature work in any way. Written in 1977, just five years before the ravenous Pulitzer-winning sharkfest of "Glengarry Glen Ross" (and apparent lifetimes before his soul-draining recent work), the backstage duet both celebrates the life cycle of theater actors and peels such sentimentality down to the bloody bone.

On the surface, this is just a series of short comic scenes about an older actor and a younger actor who rub personalities while performing a variety of wonderfully terrible potboilers. But the language - poetic dirty talk and all - was already vintage Mamet patter, commenting on our ability to say one thing while meaning something altogether different.

Stewart is dazzling as the second-rate master thespian, dispensing advice about diction, posture and the fancy theories of art while desperately fishing for praise and grasping at the romantic myths of the theater.

Knight has sprung delightfully from the TV ensemble in "Grey's Anatomy" to play a young actor buoyant with possibilities and increasingly impatient with his aging mentor. We never are sure how far up or down the actors are ultimately heading. It's how much they can stand each other that counts.

Directed with humor and real emotional delicacy by Neil Pepe, the men frequently turn their backs on us to overact to an imaginary audience in scenes about medical melodramas, being lost at sea and other horrors of the American theater. Although the play has no dancing feet, not even a song to hum on the way home, the production - complete with stagehands changing scenery - has as much rhythm, cadence and phony-baloney idealism as any beloved backstage musical.

Meanwhile, behind life's little makeup mirror, the men juggle guilt and respect, irritation and jealousy, dignity, pathos, backbiting, affection and a dose of irreverent cynicism about the ephemeral drama of the theater. This one, however, will last.

WHAT "A Life in the Theatre"

WHERE Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W. 45th St., Manhattan

INFO $76.50-$121.50; 212-239-6200; telecharge.com

BOTTOM LINE Dazzling actors in delightful early Mamet.