The Plays, Screenplays and Films of David Mamet

Steven Price

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780230555358
• eBook ISBN: 9781350310131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

David Mamet is arguably the most important living American playwright. This Guide provides an up-to-date study of the key criticism on the full range of Mamet's work. It engages with his work in film as well as in the theatre, offering a synoptic overview of, and critical commentary on, the scholarly criticism of each play, screenplay or film.

CHAPTER ONE

Early Plays: Lakeboat (1970), The Duck Variations (1972), Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974)

David Mamet has always been a prolific writer; he was also a precocious one. Between 1965 and 1969 he was a student at Goddard College in Vermont, spending his junior year of 1968–69 studying acting under the tutelage of Sanford Meisner (1905–97) at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. Goddard staged the first production of a Mamet play, a satirical revue called Camel, written by the 20-year-old undergraduate in 1968 to fulfil the requirements of his senior thesis. After taking up a post the following year to teach drama at Marlboro College, also in Vermont, Mamet wrote another play, Lakeboat (1970), for his students to perform. He returned to Goddard in 1971 as artist in residence, and formed the St. Nicholas Theater Company with students William H. Macy (born 1950) and Steven Schachter, staging the first productions of The Duck Variations and Reunion; the St. Nicholas would continue to perform Mamet’s work after he returned to Chicago in 1972.

Lakeboat

Although most surveys of Mamet’s work begin with Lakeboat, criticism of this play usually refers to the revised version produced by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in 1979 and published by Grove Press in 1981.¹ The revision added little that was strictly new; instead it was condensed and restructured to produce a play of 28 scenes, set aboard a merchant marine ship travelling from port to port in the Great Lakes of North America. The two thin storylines anticipate much of Mamet’s later work. The first concerns the rapport that develops between Joe, the middle-aged loser who has spent more than 20 years on the boats, and Dale, the young student of English literature who is working to earn money during his summer vacation. It is an example of the teacher–pupil relationship common in Mamet’s work, and Carla J. McDonough argues that here it is bound up with the transmission of masculine values.² As she points out, Joe’s mentorship of Dale is relatively successful, because Joe has a more rounded and sophisticated understanding of manhood than is found among his fellow workers. For this very reason, however, Lakeboat, like Sexual Perversity in Chicago, does not elsewhere display the ideal masculine community about which Mamet has written in essays, but that seems to be a chimera in the world of the plays.

The second storyline concerns Guiliani, the missing cook whose absence provokes many lurid fantasies but who appears merely to have overslept. As Bigsby notes, the cook’s disappearance allows the sailors to invoke a talent for the mock-heroic, self-delusional storytelling that Mamet would soon develop more fully in Sexual Perversity in Chicago, but he also observes that the sailors’ tales occasionally touch on an apparently real desperation – there are references to divorce and other personal tragedies, and even suggestions that Joe is contemplating suicide. All these qualities provide the perfect starting-point for Bigsby’s influential construction of an absurdist Mamet. The work of Samuel Beckett (1906–89) is recalled, perhaps, in the repeated and circular voyage that gives a kind of aimless structure to the sailors’ existence, while there is enough in the play for Bigsby to maintain his parallel argument that Mamet is also a kind of social critic. Indeed, for Bigsby, these two strands are largely inseparable: Mamet addresses alienation, discontinuity, fragmentation and loss as both social fact and ‘absurdist image’.³

Although Carroll at least implicitly acknowledges much of this, his account is in many ways diametrically opposed.⁴ He notes that in production the single set of the whole boat means that apparently discontinuous scenes in fact flow readily into one another, so that in this sense the fragmentation is illusory. Moreover, Carroll thinks the lakeshoremen accept and are relatively content with a working life that many of them regard as easy, in which competition is ritualised rather than threatening, and which affords them regular outlets for the drinking and extramarital sex that are their principal preoccupations. Most significantly, Carroll regards this as one of Mamet’s plays about ‘learning’. Dale’s temporary position on board ship gives him the status of both outsider and catalyst, and although Fred is unable fully to let go of his self-defensive illusions, Joe finally lets the mask drop, letting Dale see into his vulnerability. In this sense the play has a certain narrative as well as thematic progression; more importantly, Dale has prompted a positive change for the better in the older man while he himself has undergone a significant rite of passage.

Michael Hinden casts Dale as a ‘liminal’ (threshold or marginal) figure who brings about change in the other men but remains unchanged himself. Hinden also introduces a useful distinction between ‘community as an idealized nexus of human relationships’, and the merely ‘physical setting’ that includes the political, legal and social organisation of a particular society.⁵ The former is of greater interest to Mamet: for example, the story about the cook becomes a kind of communal effort, modified in each retelling so that it becomes a collectively produced myth. Hinden notes that the 1983 version published by Samuel French includes an additional scene in which Stan briefly discusses Robin Hood, a myth that introduces the idea of rebellion against the exploitative rich. The sailors never develop this insight, however, and instead channel their energies into an anger directed against the very few people below them in social status: impoverished women.

In retrospect, the most significant moment in Lakeboat occurs when Stan refers to such women as ‘soft things with a hole in the middle’,⁶ words that a remarkable number of critics have used to frame their general arguments about Mamet. Guido Almansi returns almost obsessively to the line in what is less a critical analysis than a thought-piece that celebrates the playwright as ‘a virtuoso of invective’. While noting that there is something celebratory and even poetic about Mamet’s use of such language, he observes that at the same time as the character says the line, ‘someone somewhere thinks that it is a rather eccentric definition of women’.⁷ This seemingly obvious point about irony would sometimes get lost in the invective later directed against the playwright from critics such as Jeanne-Andrée Nelson, who used the same line as an epigraph to her essay, almost as if to imply that it represented the actual views of the playwright himself.⁸ Other, more sympathetic critics have consequently found it necessary to confront the line head-on to explain why ‘David Mamet had been on a collision course with feminist criticism since 1970’.⁹ Almansi’s piece provides a worthwhile corrective to the many early critics who either damn Mamet for the language or assume that he is a moralist who expects his audiences automatically to take a dim view of its obscenity; instead, he is a ‘poet of swearwords, artist of invectives, and virtuoso of obscene expressions’.¹⁰ Nevertheless, although Almansi is surely right to insist that those who value Mamet’s work must at some level cherish this kind of language, his tone is ill-judged, as when he states that such speech is often directed against women ‘or that more forward, buxom, and aggressive woman, America, who has bestowed upon them a dream, the Great American Dream, only to prove a prick-teaser’.¹¹

Although in some respects rudimentary, Lakeboat, at once a bleak dramatisation of masculine self-exclusion from the company of women, a celebration of the linguistic resources of all-male dialogue, and a jeremiad for the working man, is a calling card for the plays, and the criticism, that would follow.

The Duck Variations

The Duck Variations is a sequence of 14 short dialogues in which two old men, Emil and George, sit on a park bench, passing the time by watching the birds and drawing sometimes unintentionally comic connections to the human condition. A familiar verdict is encapsulated in the words of Henry I. Schvey, who suggests that it ‘betrays all too obviously the influence of [Harold] Pinter [born 1930] and Beckett in its static plotlessness, and attempts to fill the time with meaningless banter’.¹² More subtle readings detect a certain philosophy of language in that banter. In an early interview, Mamet made the oft-quoted remark that ‘the language we use, its rhythm, actually determines the way we behave, more than the other way around’.¹³ In one of the most impressive early analyses of Mamet’s work, Robert Storey suggests that ‘The Duck Variations dramatizes the comic aspiration of attitudes from the melting-pot of speech’, as the men regurgitate phrases and attitudes derived from newspapers, popular culture, half-remembered biblical allusions and the storehouse of everyday sentiment; in their comic attempts to forge meaningful argument from such sources ‘the balance of power between the characters shift[s] with their shifts in verbal perspective’.¹⁴

Bigsby’s is much the most eloquent and discriminating reading along these lines. He observes that the setting resembles Zoo Story (1959) by Edward Albee (born 1928), while the comically ironic contrast between the banality of the men’s observations and the inflated register in which they espouse them recalls Pinter. A more central influence, in Bigsby’s eyes, is Beckett, to whom he routinely compares the American writer, nowhere more consistently than in his analysis of this play. The men have a fear of mortality which they cannot bring themselves to discuss; whenever the conversation about the ducks brings them too close to this fear they change the subject, which, however, perpetually re-emerges in their cogitations on the ducks’ lives. Like the characters of Lakeboat, George and Emil incessantly tell stories, but here too they fall victim to a paradox: narrative gives a shape and meaning to lives that might otherwise appear to be empty, and indeed ending, but ‘all true stories if continued far enough end in death’, a remark Bigsby borrows from Ernest Hemingway (1898–1961).¹⁵ It’s either habit or the grave, and their attempts to find something better – the survival of the species, for example, or the consolations of storytelling – are mere evasions. This is a world in which community is meaningless, in which personal mortality is the trump card, and in which the environment (a recurrent concern of the play, in the startling images of dying birds and ducks addicted to nicotine) is a personal context but not a site for sustained engagement with anything outside the self.

Not everyone sees The Duck Variations in these terms. Carroll notes that Mamet is here developing his approach to dialogue as music, an analogy present in both the title and the stage directions, and detects a greater degree of social realism or verisimilitude in the play, placing greater emphasis on the environmental references and carefully distinguishing between the two characters. George is more authoritative, the major storyteller, and a man prone to lose himself in generalisations; Emil is more logical, though this is counteracted by sentimentality and fear, so that in different ways the characters are equally liable to take refuge in platitudes. Carroll also sees the relationship in less static terms; notably, tension between the pair erupts in scene 11 in Emil’s short-lived challenge to George’s authority, while the play moves towards a climax of sorts in the penultimate variation, where both characters are finally willing to confront and accept images of death. In contrast to Bigsby, then, Carroll sees this as a ‘positive’ play, with the relationship between George and Emil unfolding ‘in a dynamic bond of friendship’,¹⁶ well brought out in William Herman’s observation that the pair show ‘immensely moving courtesy toward each other’, finishing one another’s sentences so that each ‘act[s] as a kind of amen chorus’ for the other.¹⁷

Although Carroll’s detailed dissection of this relationship provides a valuable alternative to Bigsby’s absurdism, less convincing is his placement of The Duck Variations in a ‘group’ of plays about ‘learning’; as he concedes, there is little here of the mentor–protégé relationship. Both Bigsby and Carroll treat with a certain solemnity a play that is marked throughout by a comic sensibility that is obvious on the page and on the stage, yet rarely receives its due in critical discussion. For this reason, Philip C. Kolin’s analysis of the play as a parody of a Socratic dialogue seems, in this respect, closer to the mark.¹⁸ Kolin sees the resemblance both formally, in the dialogic structure of a dialectic or a question-and-answer debate, and in the construction of a dominant metaphor via which George and Emil consider the typically Socratic topics of history, procreation, evil, friendship, government, transience, death and fate. It is a parody, however, because instead of tending towards knowledge the dialogues repeatedly and comically undercut the philosophical pretensions of the characters, whose debating style depends on spurious analogies, unverifiable sources, and an ultimate determination not to connect the mortality of the ancient Greeks to their own situation. Pascale Hubert-Liebler identifies a similarly ‘Socratic’ method in the ‘interactive’ mode of teaching in many of Mamet’s mentor-and-pupil relationships, such as that between Don and Bobby in American Buffalo.¹⁹ Also valuable to an understanding of the play’s form is Deborah R. Geis’s observation that while George and Emil resemble the choric figures in a Greek drama, the play has no protagonist, producing ‘a void or absence’ that generates a ‘comic desperation’ in the dialogue.²⁰

Sexual Perversity in Chicago

In the most substantial of these early plays, Mamet for the first time creates female characters in an uproariously comic if finally dark and alienating dissection of the relentlessly predatory environment of the 1970s singles bar. It begins with Bernie expounding a bizarre sexual fantasy in what the audience soon realises is his destructive role as self-appointed sexual mentor to his friend Dan; this relationship is paralleled by that between two women, Joan and Deb. Dan and Deb begin a sexual affair which collapses, partly, it seems, due to the machinations of the older figures; the play ends with Bernie and Dan on the beach, ogling women from whom they are now more completely alienated than ever.

Although most critics regard the fragmented form of the play as a direct comment on the contemporary urban environment, two essays find in Sexual Perversity not so much a modern form as a variation on some very old ones. David Skeele compares it to the medieval homiletic tragedy, which presented alongside the redeemed Everyman figure of the morality play tradition a second, unrepentant sinner who is finally damned. Sexual Perversity enacts this split: the opening scene shows Danny to be a blank, ‘bear[ing] an uncanny resemblance to the Humanum Genus figure’, and ‘completely subordinate’ to Bernie, the Vice, who is amusing but, through his attempted corruption of Danny, increasingly dark and sinister.²¹ The strains in S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Early Plays: Lakeboat (1970), The Duck Variations (1972), Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974)
• Chapter Two: American Buffalo (1975)
• Chapter Three: A Life in the Theatre (1977), The Water Engine (1977), Mr. Happiness (1977)
• Chapter Four: Other 1970s Plays: The Woods (1977), Reunion (1976), Dark Pony (1977), Children’s Plays, Squirrels (1974), Marranos (1975), Lone Canoe (1979)
• Chapter Five: The Screenplays, 1981–9: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), The Verdict (1982), The Untouchables (1987), We’re No Angels (1989)
• Chapter Six: Edmond (1982)
• Chapter Seven: Glengarry Glen Ross (1983)
• Chapter Eight: Prairie du Chien (1978), The Shawl (1985)
• Chapter Nine: House of Games (1987)
• Chapter Ten: Speed-the-Plow (1988)
• Chapter Eleven: Things Change (1988)
• Chapter Twelve: The ‘Bobby Gould’ Plays (c.1989)
• Chapter Thirteen: Homicide (1991)
• Chapter Fourteen: Oleanna (1992)
• Chapter Fifteen: The Cryptogram (1994)
• Chapter Sixteen: The Spanish Prisoner (1997), The Edge (1997), Wag the Dog (1997)
• Chapter Seventeen: The Winslow Boy (1999) and after: State and Main (2000), Heist (2001), Spartan (2004), Boston Marriage (1999)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index