‘I have no idea how to work these machines,” says David Mamet, trying to get himself on to Zoom. He has managed to log on but is just a disembodied voice. “It’s like those old movies where they have one of the first telephones and the grumpy old guy doesn’t know how to make it work.”
Mamet is far from a grump, though he is now 74. His tone is baritone deep, bouncy, surprisingly Tigger-ish. He fiddles with his laptop but quickly concedes defeat with regards to us speaking face to face, saying: “Look, I can give you a description. I’m not that interesting anyway.” The writer is at home in Santa Monica, California, where it’s 72 degrees outside. He is sipping tea. There are occasional interjections from others who are ushered away politely with the words: “I’m speaking to the Guardian.”
Dialogue in Mamet’s plays is generally staccato, gum-chewing hard talk but his own conversational style is bubbly and loquacious, at times taking on an unstoppable, locomotive energy. He jokes about Shakespeare (“Another Jew – his real name was Velvel Shaperstein, did you know that?”) and describes the latest batch of cartoons he has been drawing. They sound funny, I say. “I’ll send you some,” he replies, and a parcel arrives some days later with a cartoon of “Madame de Sade” and a punning S&M punchline, another one with a cute Jean-Paul Sartre joke, and a copy of the book he has ghostwritten for the adult-film veteran Priscilla Wriston-Ranger, The Diary of a Porn Star.
Sex and sexual politics have long featured in Mamet’s work. He has an immense, omnivorous oeuvre, from Hollywood hits to Broadway smashes as well as novels, children’s stories, essays, articles and cartoons. Theatre was where he started and we are Zooming to discuss The Woods, a two-person play that serves as a prime example of the Venus-and-Mars-like gender dynamics in Mamet’s fiction. It premiered in 1977, starring Patti LuPone and Peter Weller, with a 29-year-old Mamet directing, and will be revived at the Southwark Playhouse in London this month.
The two characters, Ruth and Nick, are in a remote rural cabin and the drama goes from woozy repartee on desire, biology and commitment to point-scoring and then something much worse. It could be seen to follow on from Mamet’s 1974 drama Sexual Perversity in Chicago (later adapted into the film About Last Night, starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore), about a couple embroiled in an emotional tug-of-war after realising they want different things from the relationship. Was The Woods intended to continue that conversation?
Mamet, never one to explain his work, takes a step back and talks about the place of men and women. It is clear that sexual differences for him are grounded by biological absolutes and polarities. Nick and Ruth, he suggests, are re-evaluating sexual desire and destiny in an era newly liberated by the pill: “The feminists come in and say, ‘Yes, we’re in charge of our own bodies. We don’t have to get married to have sex.’ So the boys – and I was one of them – say, ‘OK, fine by me.’” This, he says, created the illusion that sex comes at no cost. “But sex is never at no cost to anybody, specifically not at no cost to women because, just as men have a biology necessity to have sex, women have a biological urge – whether they give in to it or not – to have babies.”
So Ruth and Nick in 1977 is where we are now? No, he replies, we are even more confused. “We say, ‘We don’t have to get married to have sex.’ Then we say, ‘Actually, we don’t have to get married at all. Anybody can have babies.’ So people are walking around impossibly confused about what is a man, what is a woman, who can have babies, blah blah blah. This is a very unhealthy situation. Like most unhealthy situations, it presents itself as a solution but it’s not.”
The locomotive hurtles on as Mamet talks about law, morality, the decline of western civilisation and religion, giving answers that are treatise-like and opaque. But bring him on to the art of writing and his early life in Chicago, and he becomes bouncy again, full of memories that are vivid and vigorous. “Playwriting is a job for the young. It’s a huge expense of energy and exuberance. It’s a magnificent release to write these plays – and I got to not only write them but do them. If there’s no place to put on your play, you can’t learn to write a play, because you learn from the audience.”
When Mamet first staged The Woods, he and the actor William H Macy were running their own theatre company, St Nicholas, from an abandoned dairy rented for “around 200 bucks a month”. Mamet often doubled up in day jobs as a cab-driver, window-cleaner or telephone carpet salesman. Did he develop his ear for dialogue – its demotic rhythms, pace and profanities – then? No, it was far earlier, in his Jewish-American family household: “We’re very oral people, the Jews. That’s what we do. We love ambiguity. And it wasn’t that I was listening on purpose. I just got a kick out of listening.”
His mother, a teacher, and his father, a lawyer, split up when he was 11. They were not theatre lovers but the young Mamet got some early exposure through his uncle, who was the director of radio and television for the Chicago Board of Rabbis. “It meant putting on what they called The God Ghetto at seven o’clock on Sunday morning. He needed actors so my sister and I were in these shows.”
There was also Chicago’s Goodman theatre which, in those days, he thinks was “bullshit – it imported second-rate New York productions of The House of Bernarda Alba. Who cares? So that was the theatre I grew up with. I looked around and thought, ‘This is garbage. I don’t get it.’” It all changed when, working as a bus-boy while at school, he encountered The Second City, a now renowned troupe whose actors he’d watch doing improv. Then he started reading Chekhov. “There’s no plot in these plays but you don’t mind because they’re brilliant. That, to me, is what theatre should be.”
Mamet dedicated his 1984 Pulitzer-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross to Harold Pinter, another Jewish-born playwright with a sharp ear for vernacular. This was because Pinter was instrumental in bringing the play into being. “I did a reading [of it] in my kitchen and everyone said, ‘It doesn’t work. Don’t worry, we’ll do another one.’ We had the greatest actors in New York and a wonderful director – and it just fell flat. So I sent it to Harold. I said, ‘Harold, I’ve never done this in my life. I’ve never asked anybody for advice. But what’s wrong with this play?’ He wrote back and said, ‘Nothing. It just needs a production.’” Pinter added that he’d given it to the great director Bill Bryden and it was going to be staged at the National Theatre.
Mamet’s writing credits range from acclaimed films such as The Untouchables and The Postman Always Rings Twice to the Tony-nominated plays Speed-the-Plow and Glengarry Glen Ross. What have been his highlights? “When you look back, you think, ‘Jeez, I can’t believe I came up with that gag.’ Or, ‘Jeez, I can’t believe I was there when so-and-so did that on stage.’ That’s the stuff that you remember. All those awards and stuff are just plastercast. Big deal.” Does he ever feel the desire to rework anything? “I always want to fix my movies but I never want to fix the plays. I don’t know why.” Which ones? “Oh, I’m not going to tell you.”
He does not go back to see his plays revived either. So he didn’t catch Lucy Bailey’s recent, feted production of Oleanna, arguably his most controversial play, which is about political correctness, a university professor and an aggrieved student. The drama sparked stand-up rows in auditoriums in 1992. He hasn’t seen it since that New York premiere, which starred Macy opposite Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon. But he agrees with Bailey’s view that there is as much a threat to free speech today as there was then. He has, he says, only just written a book called Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. “I’ll send it to you,” he says and it arrives electronically the following day. Does he think universities are places where we cannot talk freely? “I know they aren’t. Of course they aren’t.”
In 2019, he staged Bitter Wheat, a black farce inspired by the Harvey Weinstein scandal that starred John Malkovich. It came soon after the #MeToo watershed. Was he a little frightened to go there? “I didn’t find it frightening. That’s the terrible thing about the death of free speech. You do a play because there’s something so thrilling you’ve got to write it down – or something so unfortunate you’ve got to figure it out. So I wrote the play and I sent it to John and he called back an hour later and said, ‘I read it twice. I’ll do it.’”
It wasn’t just about Weinstein, he says, but the entire movie business, “because the dark secret of the movie business has always been that it was run by men – mainly men – who got into it to get money to get power, and to get power and money to have sex.”
But how can he talk about the death of free speech if he got to put on the play? “I got to do it then – but I can’t do it now. Absolutely not. People have become so frightened that it seems rational to say, ‘I have to take into account this constituency and that constituency.’ So, while you’re taking all those constituencies into account, you just wrote yourself out of the equation.”
On to Mamet’s much-documented swing to conservatism, from his stand against the NFL’s kneeling-during-the-anthem protests to his support for Donald Trump. It seems so far away from the leftist leanings of his youth, the critiques of capitalism clearly visible in American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross. “I was never, ever a communist,” he says. “All you need to know about communism is that Marx was a sponger. He lived off Engels’ family who had a furniture factory.”
He was raised as a “red diaper baby”, he adds – meaning his parents were communists – so even to say he is a Republican “sticks in my throat”. But he is a conservative because “I would like to conserve those things I grew up with: the love of family, the love of the country, love of service, love of God, love of community.” And love of the American constitution too. “For those who say the constitution is over 200 years old and can’t still be relevant, I say, ‘Well, what about the Ten Commandments?’ What’s going to rule in its place? Savagery.”
Mamet became a vocal Trump supporter during his presidency, which can’t have been easy in the Democratic stronghold of California. “Well, he did a great job as a president.” Really? “Well, if you put everything you see on these little screens aside and look at what happened during the Trump presidency. We told China to knock it off. We told Nato to start paying their fair share. We moved the Embassy of the United States to Jerusalem in Israel . . . Gas prices were down. There was the lowest black unemployment in history …”
There was also Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged. Does Mamet believe America’s democratic process to be flawed too? “It’s an interesting question. I grew up in Chicago, which was run as a mob’s fiefdom by Mayor Richard J Daley. So all elections were rigged. The idea that people are not going to steal elections is ignorance because people steal elections all the time. The question is: ‘What was the extent of the election rigging?’ I don’t know. But was it questionable? Yes.”
This article was amended on 24 February 2022, removing an assertion that the US embassy move to Jerusalem “[fixed] the only instance in history of a country that didn’t have an embassy in its capital city”. The Netherlands is a current example, with embassies in The Hague while the capital is Amsterdam.
The Woods is at the Southwark Playhouse, London, 24 February to 26 March. David Mamet’s Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch is published in the US in April (HarperCollins).
