Understanding David Mamet

Brenda Murphy

Description

Understanding David Mamet analyzes the broad range of David Mamet's plays and places them in the context of his career as a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction prose as well as drama. Over the past three decades, Mamet has written more than thirty produced plays and garnered recognition as one of the most significant and influential American playwrights of the post-World War II generation. In addition to playwriting and directing for the theater, Mamet also writes, directs, and produces for film and television, and he writes essays, fiction, poetry, and even children's books. The author remains best known for depicting men in gritty, competitive work environments and for his vernacular dialogue (known in the theater as "Mametspeak"), which has raised the expletive to an art form. In this insightful survey of Mamet's body of work, Brenda Murphy explores the broad range of his writing for the theater and introduces readers to Mamet's major writing in other literary genres as well as some of his neglected pieces.

Murphy centers her discussion around Mamet's most significant plays—Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, The Cryptogram, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Edmond, The Woods, Lakeboat, Boston Marriage, and The Duck Variations—as well as his three novels—The Village, The Old Religion, and Wilson. Murphy also notes how Mamet's one-act and less known plays provide important context for the major plays and help to give a fuller sense of the scope of his art. A chapter on his numerous essays, including his most anthologized piece of writing, the autobiographical essay "The Rake," reflects Mamet's controversial and evolving ideas about the theater, film, politics, religion, and masculinity. Throughout her study Murphy incorporates references to Mamet's popular films as useful waypoints for contextualizing his literary works and understanding his continuing evolution as a writer for multiple mediums.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• América
• Sharp practice
• The Wicked Son
• Pidgeon
• Erudition
• The Fantasticks
• Sandy Meisner
• Consummation
• Melodrama
• General officer
• Confidence trick
• Tevye
• Sanford Meisner
• Glengarry Glen Ross
• General
• American
• Howard Lindsay
• Theodore Dreiser
• David Mamet
• Drama
• Adage
• Robert De Niro

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 27 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172003
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING
DAVID MAMET
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
Volumes on
Edward Albee | Sherman Alexie | Nelson Algren | Paul Auster
Nicholson Baker | John Barth | Donald Barthelme | The Beats
Thomas Berger | The Black Mountain Poets | Robert Bly
T. C. Boyle | Raymond Carver | Fred Chappell | Chicano Literature
Contemporary American Drama | Contemporary American Horror Fiction
Contemporary American Literary Theory
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1926–1970
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1970–2000
Contemporary Chicana Literature | Robert Coover | Philip K. Dick
James Dickey | E. L. Doctorow | Rita Dove | John Gardner | George Garrett
Tim Gautreaux | John Hawkes | Joseph Heller | Lillian Hellman | Beth Henley
John Irving | Randall Jarrell | Charles Johnson | Adrienne Kennedy
William Kennedy | Jack Kerouac | Jamaica Kincaid | Tony Kushner
Ursula K. Le Guin | Denise Levertov | Bernard Malamud | David Mamet
Bobbie Ann Mason | Colum McCann | Cormac McCarthy | Jill McCorkle
Carson McCullers | W. S. Merwin | Arthur Miller | Lorrie Moore
Toni Morrison’s Fiction | Vladimir Nabokov | Gloria Naylor
Joyce Carol Oates | Tim O’Brien | Flannery O’Connor | Cynthia Ozick
Walker Percy | Katherine Anne Porter | Richard Powers | Reynolds Price
Annie Proulx | Thomas Pynchon | Theodore Roethke | Philip Roth
May Sarton | Hubert Selby, Jr. | Mary Lee Settle | Neil Simon
Isaac Bashevis Singer | Jane Smiley | Gary Snyder | William Stafford
Robert Stone | Anne Tyler | Gerald Vizenor | Kurt Vonnegut
David Foster Wallace | Robert Penn Warren | James Welch | Eudora Welty
Tennessee Williams | August Wilson | Charles Wright
UNDERSTANDING
DAVID MAMET
Brenda Murphy





The University of South Carolina Press
© 2011 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2011
Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Murphy, Brenda, 1950–
Understanding David Mamet / Brenda Murphy.
p. cm. (Understanding contemporary American literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-002-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Mamet, David Criticism and interpretation. 1. Title.
PS3563.A4345Z8 2011
812'.54 dc22
2011010283
ISBN 978-1-61117-200-3 (ebook)
To my parents, Phil and Priscilla Murphy, and my sisters and brothers, Bill, Claire, Bob, Rich, and Pat, with cherished memories of a Chicagoland childhood
CONTENTS
Series Editors’ Preface
Chapter 1
Understanding David Mamet
Chapter 2
The Essays
Chapter 3
Men with Men, Women with Women
Chapter 4
Men and Women
Chapter 5
Parents and Children
Chapter 6
Confidence Games
Chapter 7
Degeneration and Descent
Chapter 8
The Novels
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
The volumes of Understanding Contemporary American Literature have been planned as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers. The editors and publisher perceive a need for these books because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands. Literature relies on conventions, but conventions keep evolving; new writers form their own conventions which in time may become familiar.
The word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express. Although the criticism and analysis in the series have been aimed at a level of general accessibility, these introductory volumes are meant to be applied in conjunction with the works they cover.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
A decade into the twenty-first century, Professor Bruccoli’s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
CHAPTER 1
Understanding David Mamet
Understanding David Mamet is no mean feat. As his friend and collaborator of forty years, William H. Macy, told an interviewer, “He’s an easy man to know a little [. . .] he’s a difficult man to know well.” 1 Born in 1947, Mamet has been in the public eye since the 1970s, when his success with Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) and American Buffalo (1975) turned him into the theater’s boy genius from Chicago. In the decades since, the public has been treated to a series of David Mamet personae, decked out in a series of suitable costumes. In 1977 the twenty-nine-year-old Mamet was described by an interviewer as “looking as respectable as an assistant librarian” and “precisely the type of young man that corporate executives and university faculty love to write references for. He is young, bright and personable. Neat, sober and responsible. Honest, alert and probably dozens of other virtuous things as well.” 2 It was hard to imagine that Mamet had been “the author of the foulest language on Broadway” in American Buffalo. A photograph shows an earnest Mamet with a stylish modified shag haircut and large glasses with clear plastic frames, wearing a neutral sweater with a scarf wrapped casually around his neck. Another interview from the same period describes him as “chunkily built and button-bright-eyed” with “a certain post-academic puppy-dog charm.” 3 The photographs with this piece show a tousle-headed Mamet without glasses and in a dark pullover, jeans, and sandals.
In his younger days Mamet was voluble and enthusiastic in interviews, and a number of interviewers noticed his curious style of conversation, the tough-guy street talk of Chicago blending with multisyllabic words and references to his voluminous reading that ranged from Aristotle and Epictetus to Veblen and Tolstoy to Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Brecht. “David Mamet isn’t afraid of words; he makes you believe that words are afraid of him. They come pouring out of his mouth the same way they stream through his pen in perfect rhythm,” 4 wrote one interviewer. As Mamet grew older and experienced some of the not-so-welcome side effects of fame, however, he became more circumspect. In 1984 an interview preceding the production of Glengarry Glen Ross described his manner as “coiled, caustic, funny, slightly guarded.” 5 In the years that followed, a Mamet interview increasingly became a contest between an interviewer trying to wrest information or opinions out of him and a writer who evaded questions with monosyllabic answers, jokes, tangential lectures, or questions of his own.
In the early nineties, after Mamet wrote some startlingly revelatory essays about his difficult childhood, his manner in interviews became even more closed. One interviewer commented that “it’s hard to know many things for sure about David Mamet because Mamet works hard at being unknowable.” 6 Yet, even now, Mamet continues to give interviews, partly because, as playwright, director, and filmmaker, it is necessary to his job, and perhaps partly because he enjoys the performance and the contest. In 1999 the British reporter Andrew Billen, who was interviewing Mamet “with the non-confrontational purpose of celebrating The Winslow Boy, ” Mamet’s film adaptation of Terrence Rattigan’s play, soon found himself in an interview “with David Mamet, Chicago’s native bard of lies, deceit and aggression. Mamet believes interviewers merely pose as honest truth-seekers and are actually there to catch him out.” Although “superficially polite,” Mamet, dressed “in his usual combat uniform of black shirt, black beard and black crew cut [. . .] likes getting his retaliation in first.” 7 When Mamet began the interview with stories about men dueling with Bowie knives, Billen realized that “while I am content to do my best, this is an interview Mamet wants to win.” 8 Mamet won.
The classic image of Mamet from the 1990s and early 2000s is that of the film director in baseball cap, signature large, round, dark glasses, short beard, and casual clothes that suggest his beloved Vermont woods. In 2000 a Canadian reporter said that, although “his behaviour with strangers is polite, unassuming and almost courtly,” a conversation with him “is like trying to lure a wolf away from guarding its pup. He’ll pace back and forth, watching for a moment of weakness, but he won’t lunge until he feels he or his territory is threatened.” 9 In the same year, a British reporter was surprised to find Mamet in a “cheery and affable mood” when he met him, but when they started to discuss his novel Wilson, “cheery-normal Mamet suddenly turns into odd, threateningly-playful Mamet, intent on coating each answer with a layer of comic strangeness and turning the interview into something akin to performance art.” 10 In 2002 Mamet moved with his wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, and their two children from Newton, Massachusetts, and Cabot, Vermont, to Santa Monica, and he seemed to have u