Biography of David Alan Mamet

Name: David Alan Mamet
Bith Date: November 30, 1947
Death Date:
Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Male
Occupations: writer, playwright/dramatist, screenwriter, director/producer

David Alan Mamet

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

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 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. 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 become increasingly known as a screenwriter and director. His first screenplay, 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 has lectured to classes at the Atlantic Theater Company and was one of the company's founding members.

David Mamet has acquired a great deal of critical recognition for his plays, each a microcosmic view of the American experience. "He's that rarity, a pure writer," noted Jack Kroll in Newsweek, "and the synthesis he appears to be making, with echoes from voices as diverse as Beckett, Pinter, and Hemingway, is unique and exciting." Since 1976, Mamet's plays have been widely produced in regional theaters and in New York City. His most successful play, Glengarry Glen Ross, earned the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best American play and the Pulitzer Prize in drama, both in 1984. Critics have also praised Mamet's screenwriting; his adapted screenplay for the film The Verdict was nominated for an Academy Award in 1983, his coauthored screenplay for Wag the Dog was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Writers Guild of America award in 1998, and The Spanish Prisoner was nominated for both an Independent Spirit Award and an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1999.

Mamet "has carved out a career as one of America's most creative young playwrights," observed Mel Gussow in the New York Times, "with a particular affinity for working-class characters." These characters and their language give Mamet's work its distinct flavor. Mamet is, according to Kroll, "that rare bird, an American playwright who's a language playwright." "Playwriting is simply showing how words influence actions and vice versa," Mamet explained to People contributor Linda Witt. "All my plays attempt to bring out the poetry in the plain, everyday language people use. That's the only way to put art back into the theater." Mamet has been accused of eavesdropping, simply recording the insignificant conversations of which everyone is aware; yet, many reviewers recognize the playwright's artistic intent. Jean M. White commented in the Washington Post, "Mamet has an ear for vernacular speech and uses cliche with telling effect." Furthermore, added Jack Kroll, "Mamet is the first playwright to create a formal and moral shape out of the undeleted expletives of our foul-mouthed time."

In the latter half of the 1980s, Mamet published two collections of essays, Writing in Restaurants and Some Freaks. Both books are packed with Mamet's fascinating thoughts, opinions, recollections, musings, and reports on a variety of topics such as friendship, religion, politics, morals, society, and of course, the American theater. "The 30 pieces collected in David Mamet's first book of essays contain everything from random thoughts to firmly held convictions," stated Richard Christiansen in his review of Writing in Restaurants published in Chicago Tribune Books, "but they all exhibit the author's singular insights and moral bearing." Christiansen pointed out that "many of the essays have to do with drama, naturally, but whether he is talking to a group of critics or to fellow workers in the theater, Mamet is always urging his audience to go beyond craft and into a proud, dignified, loving commitment to their art and to the people with whom they work."

Writing for the Times Literary Supplement, Andrew Hislop declared that "Mamet has been rightly acclaimed as a great dialoguist and a dramatist who most effectively expresses the rhythms of modern urban American (though the poetic rather than mimetic qualities of his dialogue are often underestimated). The best writing in [Writing in Restaurants] comes when he muses on the details of America--and his own life." Hislop continued, "Running through the book is the idea that the purpose of theatre is truth but that the decadence of American society, television and the materialism of Broadway are undermining not just the economic basis but the disciplines and dedication necessary for true theatre."

Some Freaks, Mamet's second collection of essays, was described by Gerald Weales in the Chicago Tribune as "a happy encounter." "Freak pieces or life pieces," noted Weales, "what we have here are ruminations on politics, aesthetics, society; recollections of other times; personalized journalistic reports.... A grab bag like Some Freaks cannot be expected to have the power of Glengarry Glen Ross or even House of Games, but it provides nice, small pleasures."

A man with numerous creative talents, Mamet has also written stage adaptations for several fictional works by Anton Chekhov; made his directorial debut with the 1987 film House of Games (for which he also wrote the screenplay), about a psychiatrist's involvement with a con man and penned pop songstress Madonna's Broadway debut Speed-the-Plow. In the 1990s he continued his forays into film, scripting and directing the racially-charged Homicide, and performing the same tasks on the 1994 film adaptation of his play Oleanna (which was first produced on stage in 1992). Among Mamet's most popular film projects is the screenplay he co-wrote with Hilary Henkin for Wag the Dog (1997), a political farce about a plot to fabricate a war in order to draw attention away from a presidential scandal. Mamet's next works included the films The Winslow Boy and State and Main in 1998, the year in which his essay collection Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama was published. Mamet's works since the late 1990s include the films Hannibal and Heist and the novel Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources, all released in 2001.

Associated Works

American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Verdict (Screenplay)

Historical Context

The Life and Times of David Mamet (1947-)
At the time of Mamet's birth:
Harry S Truman was president of the United States
Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers
Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire was published
United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established
First piloted aircraft broke the speed of sound
The times:
1950-1953: Korean War
1957-1975: Vietnam War
1960-present: Postmodernist period of American literature
1967: Six-Day Israeli-Arab War
1973: Israeli-Arab War
1991: War against Iraq
1992-1996: Civil war in Bosnia
Mamet's contemporaries:
Anne Tyler (1941-) American writer
Bob Dylan (1941-) American folk singer
Isabel Allende (1942-) Chilean writer
Alice Walker (1944-) American writer
August Wilson (1945-) American playwright
Bill Clinton (1946-) American president
Steven Spielberg (1946-) American director
Tony Kushner (1956-) American writer, playwright
Selected world events:
1952: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was performed
1953: Arthur Miller's The Crucible was performed
1955: Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was used for the first time
1956: Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night was performed
1961: The first United States human-piloted space expedition was launched
1966: United States troops entered Cambodia
1974: Peter Shaffer's Equus was performed
1978: Louise Brown, the first "test-tube baby," was born
1992: Tony Kushner's play Angels in America was performed