Issue 142, Spring 1997
David Alan Mamet grew up in a Jewish neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan. His father was a labor lawyer, his mother a schoolteacher; both sides of the family came to Chicago in the 1920s, part of the city’s last wave of central European immigrants. Mamet was a child actor who attended public schools on the South Side until his parents’ divorce; later, as a teenager, he would spend several unhappy years living with his mother in Olympia Fields, a Chicago suburb on the edge of the prairie.
Like many Chicago writers, he claims to have been shaped by the city’s peculiar duality, “the admixture of the populist and the intellectual.” He would write later of perceiving the city “not as an adversary … [but] as an extension of our dreamlife.”
In 1964 he went off to Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, where he was graduated with “no skills, nor demonstrable talents.” Over the next several years he pursued a series of odd jobs, including a stint in the merchant marines. With the expectation of becoming an actor, he joined a theater company at McGill University, before returning to Vermont for an instructor’s position at Marlboro College.
His first play was staged in 1970, almost by accident. He had won the job at Marlboro by advertising himself as the author of a play, though in fact there was nothing to which he could truthfully lay claim. Upon his arrival he learned that his “play” was scheduled to be performed, so he hastily set about writing Lakeboat, a one-act drama taken from his experiences in the merchant marines. Lakeboat was staged before the year ended; it would set the tone for his later work and eventually become a full-length feature, one that is still performed today.
He spent only one year at Marlboro before returning to Chicago, where he worked variously as a waiter, a cabdriver and a real-estate salesman. The following autumn, having abandoned acting, he went back to Goddard, which had offered to make him its artist-in-residence. There he formed an ensemble, the St. Nicholas Theater Company, which performed the plays he had written since Lakeboat. In 1973 he moved back to Chicago, bringing with him a batch of new plays and the means to have them performed.
He spent the next four years in Chicago, writing, directing, and teaching (at Pontiac State Prison and the University of Chicago). After a rough start his plays won the admiration of both critics and audiences. In 1974 he received the Joseph Jefferson Award (given each year to the best new local play) for Sexual Perversity in Chicago. More prizes followed—two Obies in 1976, and in the same year a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for American Buffalo, which had its Broadway debut in 1977 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. In all, nine of his plays—including A Life in the Theatre, The Water Engine, Prairie du Chien, and Lone Canoe—were produced between 1975 and 1978.
In the eighties, Mamet turned part of his attention to the movies, a genre that had attracted him since childhood. He wrote screenplays for six movies (two of which he directed himself) and received an Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of The Verdict. He also published Writing in Restaurants and Some Freaks, both essay collections. New plays continued to appear almost annually, including the revised version of Lakeboat, Speed-the-Plow, Edmond, and Glengarry Glen Ross, which received both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
Since 1991 Mamet has lived in New England. At forty-nine he is the author of twenty-two plays, twelve scripts and four collections of essays. His recent work includes the screenplay for Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, the novel The Village, and three plays: Oleanna, The Cryptogram, and Death Defying Acts.
INTERVIEWER
How was it that you were drawn to the theater?
DAVID MAMET
Freud believed that our dreams sometimes recapitulate a speech, a comment we’ve heard or something that we’ve read. I always had compositions in my dreams. They would be a joke, a piece of a novel, a witticism or a piece of dialogue from a play, and I would dream them. I would actually express them line by line in the dream. Sometimes after waking up I would remember a snatch or two and write them down. There’s something in me that just wants to create dialogue.
INTERVIEWER
Can you put a date to this?
MAMET
It’s always been going on. It’s something my mother used to say when I was just a little kid: David, why must you dramatize everything? She said it to me as a criticism—why must you dramatize everything?
INTERVIEWER
And did you have an answer for her?
MAMET
No, but I found out (it took me forty years) that all rhetorical questions are accusations. They’re very sneaky accusations because they masquerade as a request for information. If one is not aware of the anger they provoke, one can feel not only accused but inadequate for being unable to respond to the question.
INTERVIEWER
That happens in your plays a lot. There are a lot of rhetorical challenges.
MAMET
“Why must you always … ”
INTERVIEWER
One of the things that interests me is how uncompromising you are, both with yourself and the audience. The Cryptogram, for example, forces the audience to solve this puzzle that also happens to be troubling the kid in the play. You, as the author, have put the audience and the kid in essentially the same place.
MAMET
Well, that, to me, is always the trick of dramaturgy; theoretically, perfectly, what one wants to do is put the protagonist and the audience in exactly the same position. The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always what does the protagonist want. That’s what drama is. It comes down to that. It’s not about theme, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about setting, but what the protagonist wants. What gives rise to the drama, what is the precipitating event, and how, at the end of the play, do we see that event culminated? Do we see the protagonist’s wishes fulfilled or absolutely frustrated? That’s the structure of drama. You break it down into three acts.
INTERVIEWER
Does this explain why your plays have so little exposition?
MAMET
Yes. People only speak to get something. If I say, Let me tell you a few things about myself, already your defenses go up; you go, Look, I wonder what he wants from me, because no one ever speaks except to obtain an objective. That’s the only reason anyone ever opens their mouth, onstage or offstage. They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it’s just coincidence, because what they’re trying to do is accomplish an objective. “Well, well, if it isn’t my younger brother just returned from Australia … have a good break?” The question is where does the dramatist have to lead you? Answer: the place where he or she thinks the audience needs to be led. But what does the character think? Does the character need to convey that information? If the answer is no, then you’d better cut it out, because you aren’t putting the audience in the same position with the protagonist. You’re saying, in effect, Let’s stop the play. That’s what the narration is doing—stopping the play.
Now, there’s a certain amount of essential information, without which the play does not make sense …
INTERVIEWER
And how do you fit that information in?
MAMET
As obliquely as possible. You want to give the people information before they know it’s been given to them.
INTERVIEWER
So to you a character is …
MAMET
It’s action, as Aristotle said. That’s all that it is—exactly what the person does. It’s not what they “think,” because we don’t know what they think. It’s not what they say. It’s what they do, what they’re physically trying to accomplish on the stage. Which is exactly the same way we understand a person’s character in life—not by what they say, but by what they do. Say someone came up to you and said, “I’m glad to be your neighbor because I’m a very honest man. That’s my character. I’m honest, I like to do things, I’m forthright, I like to be clear about everything, I like to be concise.” Well, you really don’t know anything about that guy’s character. Or the person is onstage, and the playwright has him or her make those same claims in several subtle or not-so-subtle ways, the audience will say, “Oh yes, I understand their character now; now I understand that they are a character.” But in fact you don’t understand anything. You just understand that they’re jabbering to try to convince you of something.
INTERVIEWER
So do you end up cutting a lot of material from your earlier drafts?
MAMET
Well, you know, Hemingway said it once: “To write the best story you can, take out all the good lines.”
INTERVIEWER
But do you then sometimes find that the audience has a hard time keeping up with you? It seems to me that in this climate one of the playwright’s problems is that the audience expects things to be explained.
MAMET
I never try to make it hard for the audience. I may not succeed, but … Vakhtangov, who was a disciple of Stanislavsky, was asked at one point why his films were so successful, and he said, “Because I never for one moment forget about the audience.” I try to adopt that as an absolute tenet. I mean, if I’m not writing for the audience, if I’m not writing to make it easier for them, then who the hell am I doing it for? And the way you make it easier is by following those tenets: cutting, building to a climax, leaving out exposition, and always progressing toward the single goal of the protagonist. They’re very stringent rules, but they are, in my estimation and experience, what makes it easier for the audience.
INTERVIEWER
What else? Are there other rules?
MAMET
Get into the scene late, get out of the scene early.
INTERVIEWER
Why? So that something’s already happened?
MAMET
Yes. That’s how Glengarry got started. I was listening to conversations in the next booth and I thought, My God, there’s nothing more fascinating than the people in the next booth. You start in the middle of the conversation and wonder, What the hell are they talking about? And you listen heavily. So I worked a bunch of these scenes with people using extremely arcane language—kind of the canting language of the real-estate crowd, which I understood, having been involved with them—and I thought, Well, if it fascinates me, it will probably fascinate them too. If not, they can put me in jail.
INTERVIEWER
Going back to your roots in the theater, how did you get involved initially?
MAMET
I was a kid actor. I did amateur theatricals, television, and radio in Chicago. Always loved the theater.
INTERVIEWER
You loved it, but I wonder if your plays aren’t in some sort of debate with its conventions and what it should be.
MAMET
Maybe, but I always understood that as one of its conventions. Like David Ogilvy said, you don’t want to create an ad that says “advertisement.” That you will not look at. Concerns of content, concerns of form, it’s all the same to me. It’s the theatrical event. As for thinking against the sort of conventional narrative formulae of the theater … Well, I have the great benefit of never having learned anything in school, so a lot of this stuff …
INTERVIEWER
Were you a bad student?
MAMET
I was a nonstudent. No interest, just bored to flinders. I was like the professor in Oleanna who all his life had been told he was an idiot, so he behaved like an idiot. Later on I realized that I enjoy accomplishing tasks. I get a big kick out of it because I never did it as a kid. Somebody said that the reason that we all have a school dream—I’ve forgotten to do my paper! I’ve forgotten to study!—is that it’s the first time that the child runs up against the expectations of the world: “The world has expectations of me, and I’m going to have to meet them or starve, meet them or die, and I’m unprepared.”
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever feel unprepared?
MAMET
Much of the time. But the prescription for that is to do more, to work harder, to do more, to do it again.
INTERVIEWER
If you hadn’t found the theater, what do you think you might have been?
MAMET
I think it’s very likely I would have been a criminal. It seems to me to be another profession that subsumes outsiders, or perhaps more to the point, accepts people with a not very well-formed ego and rewards the ability to improvise.
INTERVIEWER
Is that why con men and tricksters appear so often in your plays?
MAMET
I’ve always been fascinated by the picaresque. That’s part of the Chicago tradition—to love our gangsters and con men, the bunko artists and so forth.
It occurred to me while I was doing House of Games that the difficulty of making the movie was exactly the same difficulty the confidence man has. For the confidence man it is depriving the victim of her money; for me it is misleading the audience sufficiently so they feel pleased when they find out they’ve been misled, tricking them so that every step is logical, and at the end they’ve defeated themselves. So the process of magic and the process of confidence games, and to a certain extent the process of drama, are all processes of autosuggestion. They cause the audience to autosuggest themselves in a way that seems perfectly logical, but is actually false.
You know, also being a very proud son of a bitch, I always thought that the trick was to be able to do it on a bare stage, with nothing but one or two actors. If one could do it like that, then one has done something to keep the audience’s attention, make it pay off over an hour and a half, on a bare stage with nothing but two people talking.
INTERVIEWER
Did you read a lot when you were a kid?
MAMET
I always read novels. To me that was “real” writing. I liked all the Midwesterners—Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson.
INTERVIEWER
Was it just that the Midwest was familiar terrain, or something in the tone?
MAMET
Both. I mean, I loved Dreiser—he talked about streets that I knew and types that I knew and the kinds of people and kinds of neighborhoods that I actually knew. But I also liked the Midwestern tone. It was very legato. Perhaps the rhythm of the Midwestern seasons—a long, impossibly cold winter, and then a long, impossibly hot summer. It was a vast, impossibly big lake, a huge sea of wheat. It has that same rhythm, the same legato rhythm, moved on like that. Things were going to unfold in their own time, kind of like a French movie, except not quite that drawn out.
INTERVIEWER
You held a number of odd jobs while you were starting in the theater.
MAMET
Yes. After college I worked as an actor, a cab driver, a cook, a busboy—I did all of that. At one point, after I’d been running a theater for a couple years, this guy came up to me at a party and said, “I saw the whole play. I like it very much.” I said, “Thank you.” He said, “You want to come be an editor at Oui magazine?” I said, “Why did you ask me? I have no idea what the job entails, and also, I’m sure I’m unqualified for it.” And he said, Y“ou know, I’m not sure what it entails either, but it will be a little bit of this, little bit of that, little bit of this. Make it up. And I’m sure you are qualified for it.” And I said, “Well, I hate sitting in an office.” He said, “Don’t. Come in and do the work for however long it takes you, and go home.” And I said hum, hum, hummer. And he said, “I’ll pay you twenty thousand dollars a year.” This was 1975. Twenty thousand was a vast amount of money—about three times more than I’d made in my life. So I said OK. I worked there for a while. Before that I was selling carpet over the telephone. Cold calling out of the blue book, absolutely cold.
