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David Mamet
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Biography:
Born 1947 in Flossmore, IL. Mamet is a founder and playwright-in-residence of
The St.
Nicholas Theatre Company in Chicago.
List of Major
Plays:
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3 Uses of the Knife:
On the Nature and Purpose of Drama
Playwright
David Mamet's three lectures at Columbia University are ostensibly about
issues of dramatic structure, but as they unfold, and Mamet continually
explores the relationship between dramatic structure and the lives we
live, much broader concerns are revealed. Here, for example, is Mamet on
political propaganda:
It is ... essential to the healthy
political campaign that the issues be largely or perhaps totally
symbolic - i.e., non-quantifiable. Peace With Honor, Communists in the
State Department, Supply Side Economics, Recapture the Dream, Bring Back
the Pride - these are the stuff of pageant. They are not social goals;
they are, as Alfred Hitchcock told us, the MacGuffin.... The less
specific the qualities of the MacGuffin are, the more interested the
audience will be... A loose abstraction allows audience members to
project their own desires onto an essentially featureless goal.
Although occasionally academic,
the overall tone of the lectures is consistent with Mamet's no-nonsense
manner of speech. He has no time for obfuscation and little time for
repetition, save when he must absolutely employ it for emphasis. He is
passionate about good theater, and passionate about the truth. 3 Uses
of the Knife makes an excellent companion piece to his True and False,
which addressed similar philosophical matters in the form of advice on the
actor's craft.
"Mamet has written about drama's
sociological and psychological implications before - Writing in
Restaurants (1986), Some Freaks (1989) - but never as
well as in these eight terse, elegant essays. He writes with thrilling
simplicity and authority, discussing problems all working playwrights
confront (What am I trying to achieve with this play? How come things
always get balled up in the second act? Why are most problem plays
ultimately unsatisfying?) and connecting his craft to large social issues
(violence, censorship, the abuse of public office). Previous Mamet readers
and those who know his work on stage and screen will recognize such themes
and personal obsessions as the search for authenticity, the yearning for a
moral center, and the search - some would say romanticized - for a very
masculine kind of stoicism. This time, Mamet's beliefs seem less the
wisecracks of a witty, sometimes hot-headed drinking buddy and more the
calm, cool, carefully measured meditations of a man passionate about the
truth and determined to share his ideas as clearly and powerfully as
possible. He writes with thrilling simplicity and authority, discussing
problems all working playwrights confront... Calm, cool, carefully
measured meditations of a man passionate about the truth and determined to
share his ideas." (Booklist, 1998)
"One of America's leading living playwrights
has crafted three short essays beginning with the premise that it is
"our nature to dramatize"... It will be compelling to students
of theater and serves as a good companion to Mamet's advice to actors,
True and False." (Library Journal)
Hardcover - 96 pages (March
1998) $14.70
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American Buffalo:
A Play
Paperback - 106 pages
(October 1977) $8.00
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Bar Mitzvah
A beautiful gift book that unites the words of David Mamet, one of
America's most respected playwrights, with stunning artwork by
contemporary artist Donald Sultan. 20 color illustrations.
Hardcover - 48 pages (April 1999) $18.87
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The Cabin:
Reminiscence and Diversions
In
a series of autobiographical essays, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
reminisces about his Chicago youth, his early years in New York, the
actors with whom he has worked, and his many travels.
Quotes from the back cover:
"Enormous powers of
observation...he has an ear for language."
- LA Weekly
"A very worthwhile
collection...Mamet walks a line between provocation and enticement, and
its precariousness almost always compels attention."
- Newsday
"A delight...there is a
lean, masculine quality to his essays."
- Baltimore Sun
Paperback - 157 pages (December
1993) $11.00
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The Cherry Orchard
"Drama in four acts written by Anton Chekhov as Vishnyovy sad.
Chekhov's final play, it was first performed and published in 1904. Though
Chekhov insisted that the play was "a comedy, in places even a
farce," playgoers and readers often find a touch of tragedy in the
decline of the charming Ranevskaya family. Madame Ranevskaya, who has
spent five years in Paris to escape grief over her young son's death,
returns to her home in Russia ridden with debt. She is obliged to decide
how to dispose of her family's estate, with its beautiful and famous
cherry orchard. The coarse but wealthy merchant Ermolai Lopakhin suggests
that Mme Ranevskaya develop the land on which the orchard sits. Eventually
Lopakhin purchases the estate and proceeds with his plans for a housing
development. As the unhappy Ranevskayas leave the estate, the sound of
saws can be heard in the orchard." (The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature)
Paperback - 91 pages (November 1987) $8.80
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The Chinaman:
Poems
Paperback - 144 pages
(May 1999) $15.96
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The Cryptogram
In this gripping family tragedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Glengarry
Glen Ross endows ordinary language with Hitchcockian menace and
Kafkaesque powers of disorientation. This intriguing play is a journey
back into childhood and the moment of its vanishing - the moment when the
sheltering world is suddenly revealed as a place full of dangers.
Paperback - 101 pages (June 1995) $8.80
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Five Television Plays:
A Waitress in Yellowstone or Always Tell the Truth, Bradford, The Museum of Science and Industry Story, A Wasted Weekend
Paperback 1st Ed. edition
(August 1990) $10.36
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Glengarry Glen Ross:
A Play
Paperback Reissue edition
(September 1992) $8.00
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Goldberg Street:
Short Plays and Monologues
Paperback (December 1989)
$9.60
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Jafsie and John Henry
David Mamet has said that if he hadn't found a life in the theater, it is
very likely he would have become a criminal. In Jafsie and John Henry the
master improviser takes on a range of roles and personae in a lively and
personal way. Though older and wiser than when he first shocked
theatergoers with the play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Mamet
remains one of the most provocative and iconoclastic voices in American
writing today, with an idiom so distinct, so American, that it defies
comparison. Mamet in this diverse collection turns his unique lens on
subjects ranging from houses to Hollywood producers. As the writer turns
fifty, he not only shares his reflections on the nature of creativity and
the challenges and rewards of aging but delves into his most intimate
obsessions. From a description of the labyrinthine psychology of poker to
sharp sallies on moviemaking gibberish and the meaning of macho, Jafsie
and John Henry is knit together by Mamet's unique perspective and
inimitably spare wit. Oscar Wilde, the tower of Babel, The House Committee
on Un-American Activities, Jewish scripture, police corruption, the art of
acting, and single-malt scotch are all grist for the mill of Mamet's
quicksilver mind. He reminisces about his first car, muses on the
Lindbergh trial, laments the loss of the art of knifemaking, and lambastes
Hollywood culture. The perennial outsider, David Mamet gives us an inside
look at the unique world of an American icon and an unromantic perspective
on the changing nature of creativity in an artist's life. In this new
collection, fans will discover the author's literary sharing on the nature
of creativity, the challenge of aging, and his most intimate interests.
Hardcover - 192 pages (April
1999) $15.40
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A Life in the Theatre: A Play
Paperback (December 1988)
$8.76
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Make-Believe Town"
Essays and Remembrances
Playwright David Mamet has forged a considerable reputation, particularly
in the theaters of New York and London, for dialogue that is austere,
sharp, complex, sophisticated and realistic, a skill that transferred
successfully to Hollywood with the movie version of his play Glengarry
Glen Ross. His first collection of essays, The Cabin, gave
Mamet enthusiasts the chance to see more directly what the author thinks
about the world. This second miscellaneous collection of twenty-four
essays again gives a lively scattershot view of his concerns and
obsessions: sketches of friends, a memoir of child abuse, an essay on
anti-semitism, thoughts on an early job writing pornography captions, much
about the theater, including his beginnings on Broadway. Definitely a clue
to the mind behind the dramatic art.
"The playwright's fans can find evidence of
his interests and obsessions . . . Mamet's writing remains spare and
lucid." (Publishers Weekly)
"The playwright's latest collection of
short, loosely written essays (after The Cabin, 1992) puts his
trademark one-upmanship and Chicago machismo on theatrical/literary
criticism, reminiscences, and social commentary. Both Mamet's subjects and
attitudes will be familiar. Once again, with varying degrees of
deliberation, he puts his stamp on stage and screen, men and women,
gambling and competition, diners and restaurants, Jewishness and the
American cultural mind. His reminiscences are pleasantly sentimental and
nostalgic, especially on his theatrical apprenticeship, toiling away at
captions for a girlie magazine, and his bygone favorite eatery. His
masculine disposition is well represented: The Diner defines the
art of hanging out (and writing) in places called the Idle-Hour and
Coffee-Corner, and the Hemingwayesque Deer Hunting articulates
Mamet's own sportsman's experience. For all the other essays' easygoing
style, his social criticism by comparison smarts with intractable
harshness, Juvenalian vigor, and not a little chutzpah. After castigating
Hollywood screenwriting and showbiz nudity, Mamet condemns the same cheap
desire for entertainment hidden in Nixon's funeral, the Oklahoma bombing,
and Washington's Holocaust Memorial. Like his plays' dialogues, Mamet's
essays argue purposively and energetically from an exaggerated viewpoint
in a kind of preemptive challenge to his readers' responses. In general,
although there are stand-outs among these pieces (which have been
published in venues as varied as Playboy, The New York Times
Magazine, and the Land's End mail-order catalog), none are
quite as good as those in Some Freaks or Writing in Restaurants.
Characteristically provocative, amusing, and messy, Mamet's latest
collection of essays deliver wit, insight, and truculence in small, mixed
doses." (Kirkus Reviews, 1996)
Paperback - 207 pages
(January 1997) $9.56
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The Old Neighborhood:
Three Plays - The Disapperance of the Jews, Jolly, Deeny
Paperback - 96 pages
(January 1998) $8.00
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Oleanna
Paperback - 80 pages (May
1993) $8.80
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On Directing Film
According
to David Mamet, a film director must, above all things, think visually.
Most of this instructive and funny book is written in dialogue form and
based on film classes Mamet taught at Columbia University. He encourages
his students to tell their stories not with words, but through the
juxtaposition of uninflected images. The best films, Mamet argues, are
composed of simple shots. The great filmmaker understands that the burden
of cinematic storytelling lies less in the individual shot than in the
collective meaning that shots convey when they are edited together. Mamet
borrows many of his ideas about directing, writing, and acting from
Russian masters such as Konstantin Stanislavsky, Sergei M. Eisenstein, and
Vsevelod Pudovkin, but he presents his material in so delightful and
lively a fashion that he revitalizes it for the contemporary reader.Mamet
looks at every aspect of directing - from script to cutting room - and
draws from a wide variety of sources to make his points.
Paperback (January 1992)
$9.56
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Passover
"Mamet's status as a celebrated writer
will most certainly be further enhanced by this brief but dazzling
Passover tale, composed with a level of tenderness commensurate with the
story's potency. Quite simply, it is the story of a grandmother and her
young granddaughter at work together in the kitchen preparing a recipe for
the seder. The time for the feast draws near, and the child is captivated
by her grandmother's story of how family members once survived a pogrom.
Mamet adds a chilling note to the narrative's conclusion, compelling
readers to acknowledge the continuing threat of anti-Semitism today.
Illustrated with lyrical woodcuts by Michael McCurdy, Mamet's drama will
touch the hearts and minds of all who read it." (Alice Joyce, Booklist)
Hardcover (April 1995) $10.47
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Reunion and Dark Pony: Two Plays
Paperback (October 1990)
$8.95
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The Shawl and Prairie Du Chien
Paperback (February 1986)
$9.95
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Speed-The-Plow
Paperback - 82 pages
(September 1988) $8.00
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Three Sisters:
A Play
Paperback - 112 pages
(October 1991) $9.60
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True and False:
Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor
Never one to mince words, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet
lays out his advice to players in True and False with twenty-nine
curt, iconoclastic mini-essays. To put it simply, he believes that nearly
everything professional actors are taught in acting programs is
"hogwash"; he saves especially poisonous venom for Stanislavsky
and the vaunted Method. Mamet, author of nearly two-dozen plays and an
occasional actor and director himself, believes that actors should learn
their lines and blocking and speak clearly - nothing else. His
curmudgeonly, ferociously condescending, and revolutionary book will
provoke outrage and a great deal of useful soul-searching. Mamet gives a
blunt, irreverent, unsparingly honest guide to acting that overturns
conventional truths and tells aspiring actors what they really need to
know.
He leaves
no acting tenet untouched: How to judge the role, approach the part, work
with the playwright. How to concentrate and think about the scene. How to
avoid becoming the Paint-by-Numbers Mechanical Actor, the "How'm I
Doing?" Ham Actor, the over-the-top "Hollywood Huff "
Actor. The right way to undertake auditions and rehearsals. The proper
approach to agents, to individual jobs, and to the business in general.
The question of talent.
Mamet is unmistakably clear about why he thinks
actors should not be taken in by such highly touted notions as "the
arc" of the character or the play, "substitution,"
"sense-memory," the Method itself--in fact, by most of what is
being taught in acting schools and workshops across the country today. True
and False slaughters some of the profession's most sacred cows. It is
bold, witty, and likely to be as controversial as the author himself.
Quotes from the back cover:
"This book should be read
and considered by everyone who acts."
-Steve Martin
"Entertaining and enlightening... Mamet's new book on the actor's
life makes me proud to be a participant in that life."
-Joe Mantegna
"This is a very important book. No one has defined the actor's job
better than Mamet. So much of the acting we see these days is, in my
opinion, emotional glop. The actors are not really acting the story,
they are acting what the story means. When all is said and done, it's
just indicating. And as Mamet so outrageously and compellingly shows us,
the future belongs to those actors who don't indicate at all,
ever."
-William H. Macy
"I agree with almost nothing Mr. Mamet says in this book and
encourage you to devour every word. Mamet is a genius."
-Alec Baldwin
Paperback - 127 pages (March
1999) $8.80
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Uncle Vanya:
A Play
Paperback - 82 pages (May
1989) $8.00
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We're No Angels:
A Screenplay
Paperback - 131 pages 1st
Ed. edition (May 1990) $7.95
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The Woods, Lakeboat, Edmond
Paperback Reprint edition
(August 1987) $10.40
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Writing in Restaurants
Paperback - 160 pages
(December 1987) $8.76
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Collection of Dramatic Scenes and Monologues
Paperback (August 1985)
$5.50
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Henrietta
The acclaimed dramatist who has created some of the most memorable and
original films and plays of the past three decades tells a story unlike
any other to flow from his prolific pen, introducing a remarkable heroine,
Henrietta. A precocious pig pursuing the very American dream of attending
Cambridge's most esteemed law school, Henrietta must overcome the pride
and prejudices of others to prove her worth and follow the noble calling
in her heart. Brought to life by Elizabeth Dahlie's heartwarming
illustrations and suffused with local Cambridge color, David Mamet's
delighful fable of virtue and integrity triumphant is subtle, playful, and
eccentric, tinged with satire and told with flair.
Hardcover - 32 pages (November 1999) $11.20
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House of Games
This
is the screenplay of the first film
written and directed by David Mamet, a psychological thriller in which a
young woman psychiatrist falls prey to an elaborate and ingenious con game
by one of her patients who entraps her in a series of criminal escapades.
Mamet is commonly - and wrongly - considered a
writer who consistently litters his characters' speech with obscenities.
There are a good number of tongue lashings in House of Games, but
what this script really proves is that Mamet has an extraordinarily poetic
grasp of human language and human psychology. Every word, every exchange
counts in this twisty, suspenseful screenplay, one of those rare dramas
where it is impossible to predict what will happen next.
Paperback - 8 pages (October 1987) $8.80
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Oh Hell
Paperback (June 1990)
$4.50
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The Old Religion; A Novel
For his second novel, playwright David Mamet chose as a subject the 1914
trial of Leo Frank, a Jew living in Georgia who was falsely accused of the
rape and murder of a young girl at the factory he managed. Convicted on
the perjurious testimony of the actual killer and several of his
coworkers, Frank was later abducted from prison by a mob and lynched.
"They covered his head, and they ripped his pants off and castrated
him and hung him from the tree. A photographer took a picture showing the
mob, one boy grinning at the camera, the body hanging, the legs covered by
a blanket tied around the waist. The photo, reproduced as a postcard, was
sold for many years in stores throughout the South."
The events are straightforward, and Mamet leaves
no doubt over the course of the story as to the final outcome. But he does
not portray the events so much as he probes the state of mind of Leo
Frank, never relenting from the terse, stylized language familiar to fans
of his plays. At the beginning of The Old Religion, despite his
awareness of the growing anti-Semitism in the South (or perhaps because of
it), Frank suppresses his heritage as much as possible. Even at a seder,
"he pronounced the word kosher gingerly, as if to say, I don't
disclaim that I have heard it, but I do not wish to say it freely, as to
arrogate it to myself on the mere precedent of blood." But as the
trial goes on, we are shown Frank's growing realization that, although he
has embraced the American way of life, it will not embrace him in return.
"Macho minimalism serves a moral cause
poorly. Playwright, novelist (The Village, 1994), essayist (Make
Believe Town, 1996), and filmmaker Mamet is known for his
hard-driving, unsentimental portraits of rakish and raffish men contending
with life's rough-and-tumble. But this historical fiction about a bona
fide American Jewish martyr, circa 1915, is something else again. Part
failed Hemingwayesque melodrama, and part Platonic meditative monologue,
the book seems oddly set against its own success. Very brief chapters
peppered with monosyllabic dialogue scissor the plot into dull-edged
fragments, even though a unifying story lurks somewhere in there: the tale
of Atlanta, Georgia, factory owner Leo Frank's false accusation, arrest,
trial and conviction, and his lynching, for allegedly raping and murdering
Mary Phagan, one of his female employees. That's the melodrama; because
his religion is considered outer‚ in the South, Frank - originally a New
York Jew - must inevitably be a victim, Mamet suggests. The novel's
perversity lies partially in the jarring stylistic gaps between Mamet's
street-wise dialogue and his eviscerated philosophizing, conducted in
Leo's turgid, unpersuasively abstract, thoughts. On the one hand, readers
eavesdrop on realistically anonymous yet unmoored snippets of
conversation. Typically tight-lipped secondary deadbeat characters will
mutter, when feeling loquacious, such things as "There in the heat,
eh?" and "uh huh." At the other extreme, we hear this from
Frank himself: "How much do we unwittingly intuit," he thought,
"in extenuation of that which we lack the honesty to call random?"
An incongruously slow and disjointed start leads to somewhat better things
as the story fitfully unfolds, but the author's literary mannerisms
continually befuddle the action and limit our access to Frank, a forlorn
and fatalistic figure whose jailhouse dedication to learning Hebrew and
reading all 47 novels by Trollope seems implausible as rendered here. The
close is swift, true, and brutal, like the best of Mamet - but the rest
isn't. A writer staggers and mumbles." (Kirkus Reviews, 1997)
Notes from the publisher,
Simon & Schuster:
The
Old Religion is a novel based on actual events: the 1914 trial of Leo
Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Georgia falsely accused of raping and
murdering a young white Southern girl. Convicted by the perjured
testimony of the actual killer and the lies of other factory girls, the
mild-mannered Frank hears himself portrayed as a leering sexual predator
while outside the courthouse a frenzied demagogue whips the crowd into
an anti-Semitic fury. Sentenced to life in prison, Frank is dragged from
jail by an angry mob, castrated, and then Iynched. Frank's murder caused
a national sensation, and a postcard of his corpse was sold for many
years in stores throughout the South.
In The Old Religion, Pulitzer Prize-winning
author David Mamet turns these events into a work of profound
originality and literary impact. Through mesmerizing short vignettes, we
enter Frank's bewildered mind and follow his thoughts and feelings
throughout the trial. With growing awe, Frank reflects upon his
sacrificial role and even comes to accept it as the consequence of
giving up his social isolation as a Jew in the pursuit of
self-fulfillment beyond the bounds of his traditional community.
The story of a Iynching, then, The Old Religion
is also the story of the victim's short-lived spiritual awakening.
Frank's inner dialogue is powerfully compelling and is drawn with great
precision and dramatic skill, artfully bridging the gap between two
literary genres: the novel and theatrical drama. But in a sharp
underlying polemic, it also develops the complex themes of Jewish
insecurity in a Christian society, the conflicted psychology of
assimilated Jews, and the misplaced faith of Jews in a system of laws
that is intended to protect the weak and marginal, but that Mamet
implies is just a mask for human cruelty and tribalism.
Harrowing, mysterious, psychologically acute,
The Old Religion is a haunting and timely performance from a major
American writer.
Hardcover - 288 pages (October
1997) $24.00
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Sexual Perversity in Chicago and the Duck Variations:
Two Plays
Paperback (April 1986)
$11.00
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Spanish Prisoner and the Winslow Boy:
Two Screenplays
Pulitzer
Prize winner David Mamet ranks among the century's most influential
writers for stage and screen. His dialogue - abrasive, rhythmic -
illuminates a modern aesthetic evocative of Samuel Beckett. His plots -
surprising, comic, topical - have evoked comparisons to masters from
Alfred Hitchcock to Arthur Miller. Here are two screenplays demonstrating
the astounding range of Mamet's talents.
The Spanish Prisoner,
a neo-noir thriller about a research-and-development cog hoodwinked out of
his own brilliant discovery, demonstrates Mamet's incomparable use of
character in a dizzying tale of twists and mistaken identity. The
Winslow Boy, Mamet's revisitation of Terence Rattigan's classic 1946
play, tells of a thirteen-year-old boy accused of stealing a five-shilling
postal order and the tug of war for truth that ensues between his
middle-class family and the Royal Navy. Crackling with wit, intelligent
and surprising, The Spanish Prisoner and The Winslow Boy
celebrate Mamet's unique genius and our eternal fascination with the
extraordinary predicaments of the common man.
"Elegant, entertaining. . . . Mamet's
craftiest and most satisfying cinematic puzzle." (The New York
Times on The Spanish Prisoner)
"One of the most subtly compelling love
stories of the year." (The New York Observer on The Winslow
Boy)
Paperback - 224 pages
(September 1999) $9.60
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Things Change
Paperback - 96 pages 1st
Ed. edition (December 1988) $6.36
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Three Children's Plays:
The Poet and the Rent, The Frog Prince and the Revenge of the Space Pandas or Binky Rudich and
The Two-Speed Clock
Paperback (October 1986)
$8.95
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