David Mamet

For more information on David Alan Mamet, visit Britannica.com.

Mamet, David (b. 1947), playwright and director. Born in Flossmore, Illinois, he studied at Goddard College, then settled in Chicago where he helped found the St. Nicholas Theatre Company, which produced many of his early plays. New Yorkers first saw his work Off Broadway with the popular double bill Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Duck Variations (1975). Among his subsequent plays are The Water Engine (1977), American Buffalo (1977), A Life in the Theater (1977), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Speed‐the‐Plow (1988), Oleanna (1992), Cryptogram (1995), The Old Neighborhood (1997), and Boston Marriage (2002). Mamet has directed his and others' plays, as well as written and directed films. Much of his work is characterized by minimal plots, sleazy characters, and colorful, rhythmic dialogue punctuated with profanity.

Playwright and screenwriter David Mamet (born 1947) is highly praised for his accurate rendering of American vernacular, through which he explores the relationship between language and behavior.

David Alan Mamet was born in Chicago, Illinois, on November 30, 1947. He studied at Goddard College in Vermont and at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater in New York.

Mamet's first play to receive attention, The Duck Variations (1972), displays features common to much of his work: a fixed setting, few characters, a sparse plot, and dialogue that captures the rhythms and syntax of everyday speech. In this play, two elderly Jewish men sit on a park bench discussing a plethora of unrelated subjects. Mamet's next play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), examines confusion and misconceptions surrounding relationships between men and women. While some reviewers found this work offensive and misogynistic, Julius Novick contended that the play "is a compassionate, rueful comedy about how difficult it i…. for men to give themselves to women, and for women to give themselves to men. It suggests that the only thing to fear, sexually, is fear itself." This play was adapted for film as About Last Nigh….

In American Buffalo (1975) and The Water Engine: An American Fable (1977), Mamet explores contradictions and myths prevalent in the business world. American Buffalo, for which Mamet received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, is set in a junk shop where three men plot to steal a valuable coin. A lack of communication and understanding causes the men to abandon their efforts. The protagonist of The Water Engine creates an innovative engine but is murdered when he refuses to sell his invention to corporate lawyers.

A Life in the Theatre (1977) offers a stark and wryly humorous view of the theatrical world through the performances and backstage conversations between a veteran actor and a novice. Edith Oliver remarked: "Mamet has written - in gentle ridicule; in jokes, broad and tiny; and in comedy, high and low - a love letter to the theater." The Woods (1977) involves a young couple who discover the darker realities of their relationship while vacationing in an isolated woodland cabin. Mamet followed The Woods with three short domestic dramas in which he places considerable emphasis on dialogue. In Reunion (1977), a woman and her alcoholic father come to terms with their twenty-year separation; in Dark Pony (1977), a father relates a story to his young daughter as they drive home late at night; and The Sanctity of Marriage (1979) concerns the separation of a married couple.

Glengarry Glen Ross (1982), Mamet's most acclaimed work, is an expose of American business. In this play, four Florida real estate agents in competition to become their company's top salesperson victimize unsuspecting customers. Although Mamet portrays the agents as unethical and amoral, he shows respect for their finesse and sympathizes with their overly competitive way of life. Glengarry Glen Ross was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize in drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Mamet's next play, Edmond (1982), involves an unhappy businessman who leaves his wife and ventures into the seamier districts of New York City. After being beaten and robbed, the man turns to violence and is imprisoned for murdering a waitress. Gerald Weales viewed this play as a chilling example of how "we become part of our destructive surroundings." Prairie du chien (1985) and The Shawl (1985) are companion pieces in which Mamet employs supernatural elements. The first play centers on a bizarre, unsolvable murder, while the second concerns a psychic's fraudulent efforts to obtain a client's inheritance.

In addition to his work for the theater, Mamet has written several screenplays. The first, an adaptation of James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, is generally considered Mamet's least successful effort. In The Verdict, based on Barry Reed's novel Verdict, a downtrodden, alcoholic lawyer battles injustice within the judicial system to win a malpractice suit for a woman who suffered brain damage during childbirth. Reviewers extolled Mamet's terse dialogue, citing the lawyer's jury summation as a particularly powerful sequence of the film. In his screenplay The Untouchables, Mamet incorporates elements from federal agent Eliot Ness's memoirs and from the popular radio and television series. Set in Chicago, the film focuses on Ness's struggle to uphold the Prohibition law and bring mobster Al Capone to justice. Although David Denby found the script substandard for a writer of Mamet's talent, he called The Untouchables "a celebration of law enforcement as American spectacle - a straightforward, broadly entertaining movie."

Mamet has also taught at Goddard College, The Yale Drama School, and New York University. Further, he often lectures to classes at the Atlantic Theater Company and was one of the company's founding members.

Further Reading

Bigsby, C. W. E., David Mamet, Metheun, 1985.

Bock, Hedwig, and Albert Wertheim, editors, Essays on Contemporary American Drama, 1981, Max Hueber, pp. 207-23.

Carroll, Dennis, David Mamet, St. Martin's, 1987.

Contemporary Authors Bibliographical Series, Volume 3, Gale, 1986.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 9, 1978, pp. 360-61; Volume 15, 1980, pp. 355-58; Volume 34, 1985, pp. 217-24; Volume 46, 1988, pp. 245-56.

King, Kimball, Ten Modern American Playwrights, Garland, 1982.

America, May 15, 1993, p. 16.

(b. 1947)

1972	Duck Variations. The Chicago playwright gains his first attention for this play about two old men who are sitting on a park bench and musing about their lives and the habits of ducks. The play showcases Mamet's characteristic sparse plot and convincing dialogue.
1974	Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Mamet receives his first critical success in this Chicago production of a drama about a budding romance jeopardized by the sexual hostility of the lovers' best friends. The play would reach New York in 1975, to be followed by a film version, About Last Night (1985).
1975	American Buffalo. Premiering in Chicago, Mamet's drama about a bungled heist of a valuable coin collection would reach Broadway in 1977, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and praise for its symbolic naturalism.
1977	A Life in the Theater. Mamet's drama contrasts attitudes toward acting and the theater from the perspectives of established and younger actors. Critics praise it as a witty encapsulation of the twentieth-century stage. The Water Engine, a play about the business world, in which an inventor is murdered after refusing to sell his creation, is also produced.
1982	Edmond. Mamet's play shows a middle-class New Yorker's descent into the city's seamy, criminal subculture, depicting, in the words of one reviewer, how "we become part of our destructive surroundings."
1983	Glengarry Glen Ross. Mamet's ensemble play features several male characters in a real estate office, vying to obtain sales from the same list of prospects. As much a comedy as a drama, Mamet explores not only the salesmen's mentality but the different ages of man, as they desperately confront the demand to get ahead. Notable critics such as Robert Brustein call the play a classic--as good or better than Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
1988	Speed-the-Plow. Mamet's trenchant dissection of Hollywood concerns a producer who is having an affair with his secretary. She persuades him to back a film adaptation of a literary work instead of his usual big-budget action films. The work wins the Tony Award for best play.
1992	Oleanna. Mamet's two-character play explores the timely subject of sexual harassment through the interactions of a female student and her professor, whom she denounces as a sexist. The professor may be self-satisfied or worse, but the audience is left to decide for itself whether he deserves the denial of tenure and ruined career that result from what might be the work of a manipulative woman with a political agenda.
1995	Death Defying Acts. Three authors each write one one-act play: Mamet, An Interview (in which a lawyer is sent to hell); May, Hotline (in which a hooker tries to gain solace from a neophyte phone volunteer); and Allen, Central Park West (a comic attack on Manhattan's upper crust). The plays are unified by an astringent, hard-boiled, big-city attitude.
1995	Cryptogram. The playwright wins the Obie Award for best play for this drama set in Chicago during the 1950s, about a child's emotional abuse. Reviewer Vincent Canby calls it "a horror story that also appears to be one of Mr. Mamet's most personal plays."
1997	The Old Neighborhood. Mamet's play is about Bobby, returning to his roots, rethinking what it has meant to grow up as a Jew. Critics find him an engaging character and are intrigued by Mamet's rare foray into his own Jewish background; they are also divided on how successfully this material is integrated into the play.

Quotes:

"The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious."

"The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates."

"We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a Protective Monastery of Aesthetic Truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive."

"People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want."

"In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn't threaten us."

"Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status."

See more famous quotes by David Mamet

• Born: Nov 30, 1947 in Chicago, Illinois
• Occupation: Writer, Director
• Active: '80s-2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, Thriller
• Career Highlights: Vanya on 42nd Street, The Untouchables, House of Games
• First Major Screen Credit: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)

Biography

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet is one of a handful of American playwrights whose work has found almost as much success on the screen as it has on the stage. Noted for his spare, gritty work that reflects the hardened attitudes of his native Chicago and often revolves around domineering male characters and their macho posturing, Mamet has time and again spurred both discussion and controversy, inciting particularly angry reactions from feminists.

Born in Chicago on November 30, 1947, Mamet studied at Vermont's Goddard College and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre in New York. He returned to his hometown to found the St. Nicholas Theatre Company and also worked for a time as the artistic director of the famed Goodman Theatre. Mamet first earned acclaim in 1976 for a trio of Off-Off Broadway plays, The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and America Buffalo. The latter two works were later adapted for the screen, the first becoming About Last Night (1986, it was not adapted by Mamet), and the latter released in 1996 with a script by the playwright himself.

Mamet began writing for the screen in 1981 with a re-make of The Postman Always Rings Twice, his script emphasizing the base sexuality and brutal violence of the material in a way that the original 1947 film could not. After winning a Pulitzer for his play Glengarry Glen Ross in 1984 (a damning indictment of American business practices, it was made into a film in 1992 with Mamet's own script), Mamet had his first true screen success as a screenwriter with Brian De Palma's The Untouchables in 1987. That same year, he earned further critical acclaim for his directorial debut, House of Games, a crime thriller starring Mamet's then-wife Lindsay Crouse as a psychologist caught up in an elaborate con game.

After directing two more celebrated features, the (uncharacteristic) comedy Things Change (1988) and Homicide (1991), Mamet turned primarily to screenwriting (stepping back behind the camera to direct an adaptation of his controversial play Oleanna in 1994), giving voice to such films as Hoffa (1992), Malcolm X (1992), and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994). In 1997, his screenplay for Barry Levinson's political satire Wag the Dog earned Mamet both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Best Screenplay. That same year, he returned to directing with The Spanish Prisoner, a twisting, inventive thriller that had the added attraction of Steve Martin in an uncharacteristically dark performance.

After writing the fairly unsuccessful The Edge (1997), an adventure drama starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin, Mamet returned to the screen in 1999 with The Winslow Boy. Despite a radical change in material for Mamet -- an Edwardian courtroom drama originally written by Terence Rattigan, it was worlds apart from the raw, foul-mouthed work to which Mamet owed his fame -- it was widely embraced by the critics, and stood as a sizable testament to the playwright's versatility. If the subsequent State and Main didn't quite live up to expectations, Mamet could at least his screenplay for the popular Silence of the Lambs sequel Hannibal yielded a box office hit. The following year Mamet once again stepped behind the camera for the incisive crime drama Heist to moderate success. Embraced by crime buffs but largely ignored by the rest of the moviegoing public, Heist nevertheless offered memorable performances by such notable actors as Gene Hackman, Danny De Vito and Sam Rockwell. As the prolific writer/director became increasingly comfortable pulling duble duty, audiences eagerly anticipated the release of the political thriller Spartan in 2004. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide

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