Uncle Mamet

I just read Ira Nadel's biography of David Mamet, A Life In The Theatre.  It has serious flaws--dry, technical and repetitive, not to mention some surprising editorial errors--but it's not bad and as far as I know is the most comprehensive book on Mamet.

Mamet is, if nothing else, prolific, having written over thirty plays, often directed by himself, as well as numerous screenplays, teleplays and books--fiction and non-fiction--and also directed ten films and produced a TV show.  The book spends the most time on his plays, understandably, since they're how he became well known and are also the reasons people take him seriously as an artist.

The best part of the book covers his early days, since we can see, in Mamet's intense upbringing in Chicago, followed by his early days in the theatre in the same town as well as out in Vermont, how he developed his theatrical style and theories. 

Much of his writing is based on his ear--lines taken from the various types (including laborers and lowlifes) he hung around with.  His "Mamet" dialogue, with its stops and starts, its elliptical and highly profane manner, attempts to capture in a naturalistic yet stylized way how people show themselves, often unconsciously, even though they may think they're expressing something else.

Mamet's ideas on theatrical presentation are all about expressing the text.  Many of his ideas originated in Stanlislavski, filtered through certain followers, but he stopped short of supporting the Method as taught in America.  He's not interested in the emotions or sense memories of the actors, he wants a more no-nonsense approach where characters are action and the actor's job is simply to bring forth as clearly as possible what the play is getting at.

Though Mamet generally writes serious drama, he's got a comic gift, and his more famous plays, such as American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow (he's also got a talent for obscure titles) get as many laughs as comedies.  Whether these works will survive we'll see, but at present he may be America's most significant living playwright.

Nadel's book was published in 2008, and while it includes Mamet's growing fascination with his Judaism, it stops short of Mamet's recent and very public conversion into a conservative.  It also just misses one of his most recent plays, Race, which I read along with Nadel's book.

As the title--generic as his others have been obscure--implies, it's about Race in America.  The play had a major Broadway production in 2009, and while I can see how, with its blunt look at certain things we don't normally talk about, it might act well, it seemed to me rather unnatural and didactic. (It also seemed to borrow some of its dynamic from Speed-the-Plow.)

The reviews of his latest on Broadway, The Anarchist, suggested this problem has been getting wrose.  Based on this biography, I can see Mamet thinks nothing of critics.  He believes the audience teaches you how to write.  I just hope the audience has time to teach him we'd prefer he show us, not tell us.