David Mamet is expected to show up briefly at the Goodman Theatre’s David Mamet Festival — a seven-week shebang that includes a big production of his most recent play, panel discussions, a major revival of an old chestnut, and various readings, panel discussions and reminiscenses. He’ll be expected to gracefully discuss his life and work. That’s what polite playwrights do at retrospectives held in their honor.
Good luck with that.
There’s only one thing Mamet — once of Chicago, once of Cambridge, Mass., now, incredibly, of Los Angeles — hates more than participating in this kind of thing: talking about his participating in this kind of thing. Or pondering the reasons the Goodman is doing this kind of thing. Or, worse yet, shaping the larger narratives that are beginning to emerge from an astonishing body of work that seems to have been especially designed with one aim in mind: to confound those who dare to try and call it a body of work.
A Mamet festival? Which of the many contradictory Mamets would one fete? Not that he wants to be feted.
“The idea of life achievement,” Mamet said in an interview this week, “only means one thing to the artist. ‘Don’t you think that’s just about enough? The healthy artist would respond, ‘I’ll be the judge of that. At some point, I’ll leave. But you’ll have to kill me.’ “
Those who analyze Mamet for a living have a different take on who is more likely to kill whom. Mamet, they note dryly, is (among other paradoxes) a gun enthusiast and an expert in jiujitsu. Academics and critics, they suspect, would be his preferred targets. A Mamet festival can be a dangerous place for a sycophant with a pen.
“I once asked him something at a question-and-answer session in London,” says David Sauer, a professor at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala., and the president of the David Mamet Society, no less. “He yelled back, angrily, `You must be an English professor.’ He couldn’t even see me. He’d discerned it from the question.”
Such outbursts are legendary. At a memorable 1997 appearance in Chicago, Mamet put the Goodman Theatre’s genial dramaturg, Richard Pettingill, through a wringer. Pettingill thought he would throw out some play titles and get Mamet’s free-flow response. Nothing flowed.
“Let’s not talk about my work,” Mamet eventually said. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“I’m sorry,” Pettingill said. “All of my questions are about your plays.
“I’m sorry too,” Mamet said.
You can understand Mamet’s reluctance, say, to talk about his inner purpose in writing “American Buffalo,” a piece penned some 30 years ago. He prefers the work to stand for itself. And he couldn’t get back in his head then, even if he wanted to. Just as Edward Albee gets sick of answering inane questions about subtextual meaning, so it goes with Mamet.
`People hate artists’
It just goes noticeably deeper with Mamet.
“I think basically people hate artists,” he says. “They observe or they intuit that the artist is having a great time, that the artist doesn’t have to work, that the artist gets the girls, the boys, the adulation, the money. And it’s true. Once a studio executive or a journalist does that math, they are, of course, enraged.”
This amuses the actor Mike Nussbaum.
“David’s an academic himself,” Nussbaum said in an interview last week. Nussbaum has been acting in Mamet since there barely was a Mamet.
That’s long before Gregory Mosher finally produced Mamet’s “American Buffalo” in 1975 and gave Mamet a vital break. Not that Mamet is inclined toward institutional gratitude.
“Greg took this impossible death house, the place where you got the same feeling as you got when going to the dentist,” Mamet says, “and he made it the most exciting theater in the world.”
And now, here’s Mosher’s successor, Robert Falls, to pay homage to Mamet — not that Mamet is inclined to pay homage to him.
“I remember,” says the playwright, “when Bob got his first long pants. I remember how excited he was.”
By their nature, festivals and retrospectives imply coherence. They try to make sense of an individual artist by putting works next to each other. With Mamet, that’s an absurdity.
Read “Speed-the-Plow” or watch the movie “State and Main,” and you would figure Mamet to be an anti-Hollywood purist. But he now lives in Los Angeles, of all places, and he’s engaged in the creation of “The Unit,” a Tuesday night action series for CBS, wherein special-forces operatives cavort around the world, risking their lives while (to quote the jaw-dropping official network line) “their wives maintain the home front, protecting their husbands’ secrets.”
It all starts March 7, and it sure sounds like something Bobby Gould, the cocaine-loving, besuited, studio-loving anti-Christ of “Speed-the-Plow” would dream up. Just to irritate impoverished playwrights — like Mamet, once, long ago — who are trying to get a break to do something serious in Hollywood.
Is this a submission? Or a joke? Or both? Who knows?
“Among those of us who watch Mamet,” says Steven Price, a lecturer at the University of Wales, in Bangor, Maine, and a longtime Mamet specialist, “the move to Los Angeles has been regarded as a little odd. Perhaps it was to further his wife’s [actress Rebecca Pidgeon] career. Then again, Mamet always has been simultaneously an outsider and an insider.”
Mamet, in short, deliberately has become a self-canceling — or should that be self-revealing — enigma. And he moves inexorably toward his 60th birthday in 2007.
Yet he’s hardly shrinking from view. He directed the recent revival of “The Boston Marriage” at the Geffen Theatre (more and more, the playhouse of choice for Hollywood stars), even partying with un-Mamet-like cast members such as Alicia Silverstone. And he has been out and about in Hollywood — in his inimitable fashion — in support of his new TV show. But if you show up at the Goodman Theatre in the coming weeks expecting Robert Falls’ revival of Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre” to reveal something profound about Mamet today, or the new Mamet play “Romance” to better contextualize “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” you’ll be disappointed.
Past his prime
“His current stuff is nothing like the great things he used to write,” says Ira Nadel, a professor of English at the University of British Columbia and managing editor of the David Mamet Review. “He likes to experiment with different forms — often unsuccessfully. … The essay, for example, is a very odd genre for him. Most of his essays don’t reveal a lot of coherence. And I find `Romance’ to be juvenile. … But I think experimentation and change actually is what animates his oeuvre. He doesn’t want to be categorized. That’s what drives him.”
“He’s constantly reinventing himself,” Sauer says. “`Romance,’ for example, is a courtroom drama. You can find nothing else even remotely like that anywhere in his whole canon.”
“I think the whole phenomenon of journalism and the arts is a great witch’s brew,” Mamet says. “As anyone in a position of power knows, the mark of the philosopher is restraint. All wisdom grows out of restraint.”
Coherent or not — and restrained or not — Mamet’s influence on contemporary playwriting is undeniable.
It usually gets expressed in terms of language — that sparse, profanity-laden method of Mamet-speak wherein men speak macho, and rhythms and subtext are all. It’s the part of Mamet that has passed into popular culture. It is variously described as Mametian, Mamet-like, or in-your-face. The stereotype is only partly accurate.
“So many people focus on the style of Mamet’s language,” says Chicago playwright Brett Neveu, perhaps this city’s closest current equivalent to a young Mamet. “I think his influence comes from the way he tweaked language. People think all his great plays are the same and all the characters these macho guys. But it’s amazing how different these works are. His main focus is on the specificity of language in the dynamic situations he creates in his plays.”
As Falls sees it, Edward Albee remains the elder statesman of American playwriting. But when it comes to influencing the theater of today, the twin peaks of Sam Shepard (who first emerged from rural Illinois in the 1960s) and David Mamet (who emerged in Chicago in the 1970s) loom largest.
You could also argue that Shepard has come to represent the rural aspects of American drama — his works (and his followers’ works) evoke wide-open spaces, domestic dysfunction and long, brooding silences on the prairie. Mamet, by contrast, invented the dramatic language of urban America, especially the workplace, typified best by the desperate Chicago salesmen of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
There’s a school of thought about Mamet that says he has always been, first and foremost, a satirist. A provocateur. An artist who deliberately takes a contrary view to get a rise from the viewer.
Ahead of their time
Under this line of thinking, the early Mamet plays were not only tongue-in-cheek but way ahead of their time in their pre-HBO, pre-“The West Wing” use of irony and layer. And in the case of an incendiary work such as “Oleanna” — which felled forests of trees in service of those trying to discern its political sympathies — the real point is that the play is, at its core, an elaborate joke.
Ditto “Bobby Gould in Hell.” Ditto most of the Mamet movies.
Ditto “The Unit”? Mamet surely knows it’s all he railed against for years.
“It’s fun” is all he says.
America has never been entirely comfortable with satirists. And Mamet is a doozy.
Yet the role of dark prankster doesn’t entirely sum up Mamet. Perhaps he gets away with so much because of the way he assumes power with ferocity — some feminist scholars long have argued along those lines. During this era in which most American artists are impotent, that’s surely not a moniker you could attach to Mamet. This is appealing. Other Mamet scholars have made much of religion, charting Mamet’s course from avowed secularity toward a new spiritualism and ease with his Jewish heritage. Perhaps. But he’s hardly a spiritual figure.
You can also make the case that he’s finally becoming politicized. Recent Mamet essays in London’s The Guardian newspaper have implied a disaffection with the current U.S. administration. Or maybe the change in Mamet is more existential.
“The Goodman festival,” Price says, “emphasizes the absuridst Mamet. People long have thought of him as kind of classicist. But I think he’s experimenting now with much looser forms.”
Then there’s the matter of Chicago. One can make too much of the link between the city and its favorite playwright. Mamet left young — much younger than the Chicago literary icons such as Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth whom he so admires — and he has infrequently returned. He rarely premiered his later works here. He does not have a close relationship with the Goodman — or any other Chicago theater. In fairness, he was not widely supported here in his early years (contrary to the way it’s often told). And as he points out, his longtime Chicago collaborators (with some exceptions such as Nussbaum, actress Linda Kimbrough, costume designer Nan Cibula-Jenkins and a few others) also have gone to L.A.
“Everyone I worked with in Chicago,” Mamet says, “now lives here.”
True. But it’s not hard to get Mamet talking about Chicago and its identity as a worker’s town.
And as Falls sees it, the workplace is the most palpable through-line in Mamet’s work. He thinks it’s one of the keys to his work.
“David writes about people who have jobs,” Falls says. “Work is a trade. You learn from the people who do it. It doesn’t matter if you’re making a chair or a play. There’s no art in it. He’s learned the craft. He embraces that.”
And then there’s the matter of loneliness. If you want to psychoanalyze Mamet’s work (and why not?), you could say he is obsessed with creating families in the workplace, because there does not seem to be an emotional core anywhere in the writer’s domestic realm.
“David had a fairly brutal childhood,” Falls says. “From the age of 24, he’s had to create families with himself at the head.”
That might not entirely jell with today’s Santa Monica, network-TV Mamet. But you still get the sense that Chicago is, well, something of a mother.
He admits it a tad reluctantly, perhaps, but it’s there.
A Mamet festival might not be all that interesting to Mamet, but a Chicago Mamet festival is at least more tolerable than a festival anyplace else.
“You know to have people, quote, honor you is, frankly, an arrogation on their part,” Mamet says. “In many cases, their bestowing something on you is an imposition — which is not to say they are not sincere. But it’s tough to be put in the position of insulting someone who thinks they are doing something nice for you. Say they give you an honorary literary degree. It’s nice to be appreciated. But I might have something I had planned to do that week. But then to come back to Chicago … that, at least, means something.”
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COMING FRIDAY
Want to know more about the David Mamet Festival? In this week’s ON THE TOWN, a guide to attending the fest:
– Previews of the plays and one-act performances.
– A test-your-Mametspeak quiz.
– A complete schedule of events.
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