David Mamet

Author

• Born: November 30, 1947
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

PLAYWRIGHT

Mamet has been a dominant influence in theater for more than thirty years. His theories of writing, acting, and directing all ultimately sprang from his response to the disintegration of his Jewish faith, and also to his reengagement with the faith he had lost.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Entertainment; theater

Early Life

David Mamet (MAM-eht) was born in a Jewish community on Chicago’s South Side. His parents, Bernard Morris Mamet, a labor lawyer, and Lenore June Silver, a teacher, divorced when David Mamet was ten years old. He and his younger sister, Lynn, went to live with their mother in Olympia Fields. His mother married a former colleague of Mamet’s father, and in 1958 Mamet, who disagreed sharply with his stepfather, moved in with his father on Lake Shore Drive in downtown Chicago. There, Mamet attended Yiddish theater and began working at the Hull House Theater, watching productions and reading plays in a local bookshop. Mamet worked at Second City, doing theater sketches and improvisations, and also attended Francis W. Parker School, where he participated in theater activities.

Hoping to get into acting, Mamet enrolled in Goddard College in Vermont to study literature and drama. After two years there, he took off his junior year to attend the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York, studying Sanford Meisner’s approach to acting. After returning to Goddard the following year, he began to write plays and was awarded his bachelor’s degree in 1969.

On the strength of his first play, Camel, written in 1962 while he was at Goddard, Mamet was hired to teach acting at Marlboro College in Vermont. While there, in 1970, he wrote Lakeboat, for his students to perform. The following year he was back at Goddard, teaching drama and forming the St. Nicholas Company in 1973, an ensemble acting group composed of his students. Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago, a collection of vignettes about two sets of couples in Chicago, was performed in 1974. In 1977, Mamet’s American Buffalo won him an Obie Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for the best American play in 1977. American Buffalo marked Mamet’s move from an episodic structure to a play in two acts that concerns three grifters who plan to rob a coin collector.

Mamet moved to New York and continued writing plays, including children’s plays, and received a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts. He won the Outer Critics Circle Award and another Obie Award for Edmond (1975), a bleak play about a white man who destroys himself with his hatred of African Americans and homosexuals. He followed it up with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), an ensemble play focusing on three real-estate salesmen struggling to survive.

Life’s Work

With the success of Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet established himself as a leading American dramatist. He began to pursue possibilities in writing screenplays, an endeavor he had begun in 1981, with the screenplay for Bob Rafelson’s film, The Postman Always Rings Twice. He then penned the script for The Verdict (1982), directed by Sidney Lumet. Mamet’s screenplay for Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1985) underwent a succession of rewrites, but the film was successful, in no small part because of Mamet’s cynical characterization and dialogue. He had already begun writing House of Games (1987), the first film he was to direct, and it reflected his preoccupation with deception and betrayal. Mamet transferred his austere production code of withholding information and exposition from stage to screen. Mamet’s second film, Things Change (1988), explores similar themes of mistaken identity and of false information in the form of a Mafia satire. During the same year, Mamet finished writing Speed-the-Plow (1988), a cynical dissection of the treacherous world of Hollywood he had discovered while working there.

In 1992, Mamet’s play, Hoffa, the account of the union leader who disappeared, was produced, and his play, Oleanna, concerning a student who accused her professor of rape, appeared and was loudly criticized for his demeaning depiction of women. Extremely controversial, the play was marred by fights among audience members during its performance. Criticism of the film made in 1994 resulted from Mamet’s method of direction wherein the use of limited dialogue and action seemed unsuccessful.

Continuing his films about cons, Mamet, in 1997, completed the screenplay of The Spanish Prisoner, which proved to be his second highest grossing film at $10.2 million. Mamet’s characteristic themes of delusion, deception, and the con pervade the film’s corporate environment and spur appropriate character behavior of distrust and betrayal. Wag the Dog (1997), a screenplay cowritten by Mamet, was enormously popular during the Clinton administration scandal. Mamet’s other films in the late 1990’s included The Winslow Boy (1999); The Heist (2001), which grossed $23.5 million; and State and Main (2000).

Additionally, Mamet has written five novels, children’s books, eleven books of essays, including those on drama, directing films, and life in Vermont, where he lived for a number of years. He has written episodes for television programs, Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law, and has worked on The Unit, a popular television series.

In the late 1980’s, Mamet felt the need to renew his Judaism. He began to study Hebrew, to take an active role in his synagogue, and to establish a Jewish life. Divorced from Lindsay Crouse, he married Rebecca Pidgeon, who converted to Judaism. The intensity of his spiritual and intellectual values soon was expressed in his art. While his essays about his early life in Chicago and his play The Disappearance of the Jews, produced in 1983, dealt with Jewish identity, his new works, beginning with the film, Homicide (1991), reflected a newly found aggressive “tough Jew” attitude. Other works confronting Jewish issues included The Cryptogram (1994), concerning his childhood and his family’s attempt at assimilation; The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the real-life lynching of Leo Frank, a Jew, in Atlanta, Georgia; and The Old Neighborhood (1997), a dramatization of his reinvolvement with his Jewish past. Romance (2005), a courtroom satirical comedy laced with racial epithets and obscenities, was followed by The Wicked Son (2006), Mamet’s tough-Jew response to anti-Semitism.

In 2023, Mamet announced that he was that he would be directing and co-writing the mob thriller film Assassination, his first film work since 2008. Actors Viggo Mortensen and Shia LaBeouf were slated to appear in the project. In 2024, Mamet announced that he was working on a screenplay entitled The Prince centering on Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden.

Significance

The diverse achievements of Mamet have expanded into almost every aspect of American culture. An emotionally abused child of a Jewish lawyer who associated his own victimization with that of individuals preying on others in search of the American dream, Mamet recognized the ruthless, predatory behavior of people who practice deceit through manipulation of language. Decrying the absence of honesty and of credibility throughout America’s institutions, Mamet wrote, produced, and directed powerful plays and films, depicting moral corruption in business, entertainment, and educational systems. Mamet’s innovations in drama, including Mamet speak (interrupted and overlapped edgy dialogue), are powerful representations of unethical and immoral behavior running rampant through business enterprises. The fact that Mamet has saturated his works with characters who succumb to self-interest and refuse to live honestly entitles him to be studied and remembered.

Bibliography

Callens, Johan, ed. Crossings: David Mamet’s Work in Different Genres and Media. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.

Grobar, Matt. "Hunter Biden-Inspired Addiction Pic 'The Prince' In Works from Cameron Van Hoy & David Mamet; Scott Haze, Nicholas Cage, J.K. Simmons, Giancarlo Esposito & Andy Garcia to Star." Deadline, 12 June 2024, deadline.com/2024/06/hunter-biden-movie-the-prince-casts-nicolas-cage-giancarlo-esposito-more-1235971590/comment-page-2/#comments. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Mamet, David. Make-Believe Town: Essays and Remembrances. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1997.

Nadel, Ira. David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Price, Steven. The Plays, Screenplays, and Films of David Mamet: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Ravindran, Manori. "Viggo Mortensen, Shia Labeouf, Courtney Love Board David Mamet's JFK Thriller 'Assassination.'" Variety, 15 May 2023, variety.com/2023/film/global/jfk-assassination-viggo-mortensen-shia-labeouf-david-mamet-1235612087/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.