Mamet, David 1947-

MAMET, DAVID 1947-

Playwright, screenwriter, director

Ambition

David Mamet later attributed his uncanny ear for naturalistic dialogue to several influences during his youth. His father, a lawyer, was something of a semanticist, and years of piano lessons gave Mamet a feeling for the rhythms and musicality of speech. His childhood, spent in a Jewish neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, was relatively uneventful until high school, when Mamet became interested in drama while working as a volunteer at a small local theater. A job at the well-known Second City comedy club in Chicago reinforced that desire, and Mamet rejected his father's suggestion that he become a lawyer. He wrote his first play, Camel, while at Goddard College in Vermont (B.A., 1969), During his junior year Mamet studied acting in New York, quitting when he realized that he had no real acting talent. In 1970 Mamet bluffed his way into a drama-teaching job in Vermont by claiming he had written a new play. After getting the job, he quickly wrote Lakeboat and staged it as a student production. Mamet continued to write short plays after he began teaching at his alma mater in 1971.

Reputation

Mamet began to circulate his plays. A one-act, Duck Variations, was produced at Goddard in 1972, and in 1974 the Organic Theater of Chicago produced Sexual Perversity in Chicago, which won the coveted Joseph Jefferson Award for best new play. He followed it with Squirrels, which he produced with his own theater company, the St. Nicholas Players. By this time, despite some pans from local critics, Mamet was beginning to develop a reputation as well as a distinctive voice as a playwright. American Buffalo, a character study of three small-time hoods, broke box-office records in a run at the Goodman Theater in late 1975. After its Off-Broadway premiere a few months later, Mamet won an Obie Award as best new playwright of the year. In 1976 Sexual Perversity and Duck Variations were also produced Off-Broadway; both became hits, and Time listed both plays as among the ten best of the year. Critics were already noting Mamet's trademarks: a flair for staccato, overlapping dialogue that was both violent and poetic; and a fascination with mind games, con artists, moral corruptibility, and machismo. After a Broadway run of 150 performances, American Buffalo won the 1977 New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

Stage and Screen

Established as an important playwright, Mamet continued to develop plays in Chicago with the St. Nicholas Players and then move them to Off-Broadway and Broadway stages. Reviewers were enthusiastic about A Life in the Theater (1977), a series of scenes about actors preparing for roles, and The Water Engine (1978), which was performed on Broadway as a radio drama. In 1978 Mamet moved to New York with his wife, actress Lindsay Crouse, and soon found himself in demand as a screenwriter. His first effort, a modern revision of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), reached a limited audience, but The Verdict (1982) earned Mamet an Oscar nomination. His next play, Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), became his most acclaimed effort and won him both a New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Centering on a group of corrupt salesmen all trying to outcon each other, the play is vintage Mamet. In 1983 Al Pacino also revived American Buffalo on Broadway with great success. Sexual Perversity was filmed as About Last Night …in 1986. In 1987, after writing the screenplay for Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, Marnet directed his first movie, House of Games, a critical success and another Mamet classic. In it Crouse plays a psychiatrist embroiled in a murder that turns out to be a high-stakes con game,

Cynicism

Mamet's experience as a screenwriter directly informed his next Broadway success, Speed-the-Plow (1988). "The movies," he commented, "are a momentary and beautiful aberration of a technological society in the last stages of decay." Speed-the-Plow focused on two corrupt Hollywood producers, one of whom is almost conned into choosing artistic integrity over commerce. As in Glengarry Glen Ross and House of Games, Mamet's characters' cynicism and corruption whenever there's money to be made became an apt comment on the worship of success and power in the 1980s. Although Madonna's performance as a secretary generated most of the media hype, Ron Silver won a Tony for his performance as Charlie Fox. Mamet's second movie as a director, Things Change (1988), was well received; Joe Mantegna (a favorite Mamet actor along with Crouse and Silver) starred as the perpetrator of a mob scam. Mamet continued to write screenplays, most notably Homicide (1991) and Hoffa (1992). Glengarry Glen Ross, with Al Pacino, was filmed in 1992; American Buffalo, with Dustin Hoffman, was released in 1995. Oleanna (1992), which Mamet later filmed, became one of his most controversial works. The play presents a charge of sexual harassment as an escalating game between accuser and accused.

Sources:

Dennis Carroll, David Mamet (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987);

Anne Dean, David Mamet: Language as Dramatic Act (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990);

Leslie Kane, David Mamet: A Casebook (New York & London: Garland, 1992).