David Mamet has moved on. That's the unmistakeable message in Ira Nadel's fascinating new biography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre.
Yes, Mamet's name still conjures up images of con men in back rooms, planning burglaries that never succeed, speaking in a fragmented, garbled argot that's simultaneously obscene and pathetic. But the Mamet this image references — the author of American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow in particular — has apparently lost interest in being a scorching but underpaid Great American Artist. Now it's money and popular culture that have his attention: now it's his TV show The Unit, his TV-ish Broadway play November and a forthcoming movie about a jiu-jitsu expert. Now, as one critic complained, Mamet is "a major dramatist turned minor film director." Certainly his plays since Oleanna (1992) — with the possible exception of Romance — have been largely turgid or anachronistic or just plain unsuccessful. And meanwhile, he's moved out to Santa Monica, where he's just a drive away from Hollywood and the industry that apparently means more to him than artistic excellence. Asked in 1997 why he chose La-La-Land over the theater world, he said, "It's screaming good fun. It pays very, very well. … I'm not an ascetic. I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else." Hollywood's gain is theater's loss. During his best days, Mamet developed a breathtaking look at American capitalism that built courageously on the view first suggested by Death of a Salesman. Now he's been swallowed up by the very same monster he was anatomizing. Nadel doesn't say so, but this story is not a cheering one.
Nadel's strategy as a biographer is to find everything about Mamet that's been published in the last 35 years — including Mamet's own autobiographical essays — and put it in some type of chronological order. What's missing, as the New York Times Book Review pointed out some weeks ago, are new interviews with the book's subject; we have to assume that the playwright declined such encounters. But if you don't mind benefiting from already-published sources, Nadel's story is more complete than anything else you can find. He's strongest of all on the earlier years. He tells us about the playwright's demanding labor-lawyer father, who used to harangue his children at the dinner table for their lack of language skills, and the playwright's unstable, unpredictable mother, who combined loving kindness with sharp-tongued criticism. Mamet's sister Lynn compared their childhood to a 1950s Dachau and labeled her brother and herself "survivors" — and who can argue that she has no right to be so wounded? In any case, by the time Mamet got to Vermont's Goddard College as an undergraduate, he was tough-skinned and forceful and not about to be hurt further. At Goddard, he more identified as an actor than a writer, but his junior year at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse acting school was discouraging (W. H. Macy said Mamet disliked acting because "he wasn't in charge"). Turning to teaching and directing, he eventually put together a theater company in Vermont — and then had to write plays for it since he had no money to pay royalties. He moved his company to Chicago, spent days at odd jobs and nights playing poker at a North Side junk shop (the model for the location of American Buffalo). After writing Lakeboat and Duck Variations among other plays, he penned Sexual Perversity in Chicago — and had a hit. (One reviewer wrote that the play "makes its own beautiful music from the ugly and often obscene sounds of this city.") But it was the New York production of American Buffalo that made Mamet famous and the 1984 Glengarry Glen Ross that won the playwright his Pulitzer and brought a thrillingly debased English language to the attention of astonished theatergoers. In 1988, Mamet moved from the junkshop dealer of Buffalo and the junk real estate vendors of Glengarry to the junk movie-makers of Speed-the-Plow. No other American playwright seemed as powerful in dissecting the tawdry underside of the American Dream.
And then that dream — which is about money, not art, after all — claimed its best analyst. Mamet wrote one more minor masterpiece — Oleanna, which is really about the dangerous ambiguity of speech and action — before succumbing to the allure of "the Big Table" in Hollywood. He didn't stop writing plays, but like a distracted detective, lost the scent he'd once followed with so much success. In fact, plays as bizarre as Boston Marriage and Faust have next to nothing in common with the works of Mamet's heroic period. But he was on to something else: box-office successes like Wag the Dog and Heist. His TV show The Unit was a hit almost immediately, and Mamet, refusing to identify himself with images of artistic integrity, even directed two commercials for Ford Motors. Known for his swagger and his toughness, the playwright would probably say that no one's going to tell him what to do with his talent. But for those who believe that there is something precious called art — that it's not just an elitist fantasy — the thought of the great David Mamet using his prodigious skills to sell cars is more than a little depressing. And all his essays about the depravity of Hollywood (see Bambi v. Godzilla) can't absolve him of his participation in that arena.
Nadel's book is an eye-opener. It's not perfect by any means, but till something better is written, it'll stand as the basic biography. Read it as a cautionary tale — about an artist who sold out, not as a last resort, not to pay the bills, not because his public deserted him — but with shameless enthusiasm.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2008.