More absurdity for Ed O'Neill in David Mamet's 'Keep Your Pantheon'

Mamet, as it happens, met O'Neill in New York long before the actor ever got famous in that oh-so-broad and bawdy prime-time hit and through the years has cast him in two productions of "Lakeboat" and other plays and films. Now, Mamet has given him the lead in "Keep Your Pantheon," a one-act farce set in ancient Rome, on a double bill with "The Duck Variations" (starring Michael Lerner and Harold Gould), opening today at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

"With him, you work," O'Neill says, heading out of the rehearsal room in Culver City after a long afternoon of getting the play on its feet with the 10 other actors, under the supervision of both the playwright and director Neil Pepe.

Mamet and O'Neill are physical opposites -- the playwright a wiry, fit and diminutive 60-year-old, and the actor a tall, beefy former collegiate defensive end, now 62.

At a nearly deserted restaurant near the Douglas, O'Neill orders an iced tea and considers the menu. He's dressed in a hooded sweat shirt with "Redbelt" printed in red on the back, the title of the new Mamet martial arts film in which O'Neill has a cameo.

"He was involved," O'Neill says, remembering Mamet's presence during the rehearsals for "Lakeboat," their first collaboration at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., in the early 1980s. "The way he is here. He's around, shaping it."

The two Midwesterners share an interest in Brazilian jujitsu, a martial art Mamet learned about from O'Neill, who is a distinguished American practitioner. "It's been a really worthwhile relationship over the years," O'Neill says. "We're good friends."

Mamet, nevertheless, declined to be interviewed for this article.

In "Keep Your Pantheon," first produced as a radio play for the BBC last year, O'Neill plays Strabo, the narcissistic head of a second-rate acting troupe in the age of Julius Caesar. During the rehearsal he stopped after repeating a laugh line about another Roman being "one arch shy of an aqueduct," to ask Mamet "is it a-QUAduct or a-QUI-duct?" Either way, he was funny. Not yet in costume, he was neatly projecting the slap-happy banter of an overbearing lounge act -- or "Plautus meets Vaudeville," as director Pepe put it.