David Mamet

David Mamet (1947- ), American playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose dramatic style reflects the inarticulate and violent ethos of the lower-middle class. Poetic, repetitively scatological, comically fragmented, and often shocking, Mamet's use of language has been compared to Aristophanes, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter.

Born in Chicago, Mamet graduated from Goddard College, where he served as an artist-in-residence in the early 1970s. Although frequently associated with the regional theatre movement that grew up in Chicago at the time, many of Mamet's strongest influences come from his east-coast training, especially his work at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. Borrowing from an acting exercise that schooled performers in developing character repetition, Mamet created a fascinating syntax of half-spoken thoughts and rapidly shifting moods for his scripts.

Mamet's first plays, Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Duck Variations (1972), were produced Off-Off Broadway in 1975 and quickly established him as a writer of the “new realism”. Set in the poisonous atmosphere of a Chicago junk store (a metaphor for American capitalism), American Buffalo (1975) startled audiences and critics with its bleak outlook and antisocial undercurrents. Mamet received a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his equally disturbing play, Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), about a group of disparate Chicago real estate agents. Other successful plays by Mamet include: A Life in the Theater (1977); Speed-the-Plow (1988); Oleanna (1993); The Cryptogram (1995); and Dangerous Corner (1995), which he adapted from the 1932 play by English dramatist J. B. Priestley. His 1997 work The Old Neighborhood, composed of three one-act plays, was thought by critics to be Mamet's most autobiographical work. In the second play siblings reminisce about their childhood and the emotional abuse they endured. A new play in 1999, Boston Marriage, set in turn-of-the-century New England and featuring an all-female cast, gradually revealed the secrets of the relationship between two women. In 2006 a new version of The Voysey Inheritance by Mamet opened Off-Broadway, adapted from the original play by the Edwardian dramatist Harley Granville-Barker.

Mamet achieved acclaim as a screenwriter in Hollywood with The Untouchables (1987), Hoffa (1992), Wag the Dog (1997), and Hannibal (2001); and directed the films House of Games (1987), Things Change (1988), Homicide (1991), Oleanna (1994; from his own play), The Spanish Prisoner (1997), The Winslow Boy (1999; adapted from the play by Terence Rattigan), State and Main (2000), Heist (2001), and Spartan (2004). For television, he also created the special-forces drama series The Unit (2006- ). In addition, he has written several non-fiction books on theatre, including Writing in Restaurants (1987), Freaks (1989), and Cabin (1992). His controversial book on acting, True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (1997), attacked the respected techniques of Stanislavski and the Method approach. 3 Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, a collection of lectures about playwriting, was published in 1998. Other works include the novels The Village (1994) and The Old Religion (1997), and The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred, and the Jews (2006) and Bambi Vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business (2007).