David Mamet

David Mamet, born in 1947, American playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose dramatic style reflects the inarticulateness and violence in alienated members of the lower-middle class. His characters struggle against seemingly endless cycles of failure in personal relationships and commercial ventures alike. Their frustration is expressed in terse, pugnacious dialogue, littered with profanity. Mamet’s tightly constructed language functions as a weapon to dominate and manipulate. Poetic, comically fragmented, and often shocking, Mamet’s use of language has been compared to that of Greek dramatist Aristophanes, American writer Ernest Hemingway, Irish author Samuel Beckett, and English playwright Harold Pinter.

Mamet was born in Flossmoor, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, on November 30, 1947. He received a B.A. degree in 1969 from Goddard College, where he served as an artist-in-residence in the early 1970s. In 1973 he founded the St. Nicholas Theater Company in Chicago, where he worked as artistic director from 1973 to 1976. He also served as associate director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago in 1978 and 1979. Although his career as a playwright originated in Chicago’s regional theaters, many of Mamet’s strongest influences came from his early training on the East Coast, especially his work with American acting teacher Sanford Meisner at Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. Borrowing from an acting exercise that schooled performers in developing character repetition, Mamet created for his scripts a syntax of half-spoken thoughts and rapidly shifting moods.

When Mamet’s first plays, Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Duck Variations (both 1972), were produced off-Broadway (see Broadway) in 1975, they quickly established him as a writer of the “new realism,” a style marked by naturalistic language and a small number of characters in a contained environment. American Buffalo (1975), set in a Chicago junk store (used as a metaphor for American capitalism), startled audiences and critics with its bleak outlook and antisocial underpinnings. Mamet received a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his play Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), about a group of troubled Chicago real estate agents. Mamet’s characters in these plays are desolate, yet the rhythms and ironies of their language make the plays viciously funny. American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross became his most popular plays; they criticize the capitalistic basis of American society, in which he sees human relationships reduced to transactions in a commodities exchange. Both plays concern the execution of petty business crimes and the obsession with money.

Mamet’s other successful plays include A Life in the Theater (1977), Speed-the-Plow (1988), Oleanna (1993), The Cryptogram (1995), and Dangerous Corner (1995), which he adapted from the 1932 play by English writer J. B. Priestley. The Old Neighborhood (1997)—composed of three one-act plays—was thought by critics to be Mamet’s most autobiographical work. In the second of the three, Jolly, a brother and sister reminisce about their childhood and the emotional abuse they endured. Boston Marriage (1999) is a drama set in the Victorian era, and Romance (2005) is a courtroom farce. The play November (2008) centers on an unpopular president up for reelection.

Mamet achieved acclaim as a motion-picture screenwriter and director with productions of The Untouchables (1987), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), and American Buffalo (1996), all of which he wrote; and House of Games (1987), Oleanna (1994), The Spanish Prisoner (1997), State and Main (2000), and Spartan (2004), which he wrote and directed. His screenplay for The Winslow Boy (1999) was based on a play by Terrence Rattigan. Mamet turned to television in 2006 with The Unit, a military drama series about a special forces team, which he created, wrote, and directed.

Mamet’s nonfiction writings on theater include Writing in Restaurants (1987); Freaks (1989); and True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (1997), a controversial book that attacked the Stanislavsky Method, a technique developed by Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky, and the Method approach of American director Lee Strasberg. Cabin (1992), Make-Believe Town (1996), and Jafsie and John Henry (1999) collect essays on Mamet’s life and varied interests. A collection of lectures about playwriting, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, was published in 1998. Other works include the novels The Village (1994) and The Old Religion (1997). The Wicked Son (2006) is Mamet’s take on anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred. In 2007 he published a collection of essays on the movie business, Bambi vs. Godzilla.