Mamet, David Books

Speed-the-Plow

David Mamet

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Intoxicating prose, uncertain structure 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 10 people found this review helpful.

Mamet gives us blinding pace in this spare play, a mere 82 pages in print. It can easily be read in an hour. The rapid-fire exchanges between characters put the reader in the position of a rubber-necked viewer at a tennis match between serve-and-volley powerhouses. If merely keeping the reader/viewer engaged is the goal of good theater, Mamet succeeds, in spades.

But truly great theater resonates after the reader has laid the play aside or exited the playhouse. In this regard, "Speed-the-Plow," superior work though it may be, falls just a bit short for me, although I confess I have not seen it performed on stage, and would jump at the chance to do so. In any event, as a piece of reading, the play is too slight in its ideas for me to classify it as top-notch.

The play is built on a simple idea. Two movie execs, Charlie Fox and Bobby Gould, meet in Gould's office. Fox has brought Gould, his superior, a sure-fire hit, which from all we can gather will be a typical piece of Hollywood pap sure to please the masses. Fox has sold the script idea to a big-time Hollywood performer who has given them a short-time to put the deal together.

Enter Karen, Gould's temporary office assistant. Gould has been giving an obtuse, esoteric novel a "courtesy read," and as a ploy to seduce her, Gould asks Karen to read the novel and give him a report on it. Fox offers Gould a friendly bet that he won't succeed with Karen. Somehow -- and this is a key weakness in the play -- Karen manages in the second act to convince the hard-boiled Gould to produce the film of the novel, at the expense of Fox's project. When Fox learns of this, the following day, he is of course outraged and manages in the end to convince Gould that the seemingly idealistic Karen is in fact no different than either of them and has used Gould sexually in return for the promise to produce the "art" film.

Much of the play's power derives from Mamet's undeniable gift with language. Fox and Gould sound absolutely real as Hollywood types: borderline slimeball, jaded, absolutely devoid of idealism, but very funny, precisely because of all these things.

Language, however, is only one element of successful theater. The motivations of Karen are obscure, but more importantly one is hard-pressed to believe that Gould, who spends much of the play developing in different ways the idea that he's not paid to produce art, would even momentarily be convinced to dump a sure box office smash and endure the humiliation that Fox heaps on him. All I could think of was, That Karen must have been some dame. Trouble is, I didn't get enough of her through Mamet's development to buy that.

I'm a big Mamet fan, and even work that is not his best is for me worth reading. "Speed-the-Plow" was, simply put, intoxicating the first time I read it because of its rhythmic intensity. Even if its intoxication fades a bit in the aftermath of reading, enough of a glow lingers to make the time spent worthwhile.

Editorial Review:

Speed-the-Plow's Broadway run is the most recent triumph of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's astonishingly productive career. "By turns hilarious and chilling....the culmination of this playwright's work to date....Riveting theater."-Frank Rich, New York Times; "A brilliant black comedy, a dazzling dissection of Hollywood cupidity and another tone poem by our foremost master of the language of moral epilepsy... On its deepest level it belongs with the darker disclosures of movie-biz pathology like Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon. In a sense Speed-the-Plow distills all of these to a stark quintessence: there's hardly a line in it that isn't somehow insanely funny or scarily insane... [It is a] scathingly comic play."-Jack Kroll, Newsweek

Glengarry Glen Ross: A Play

David Mamet

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Chicago Dog 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

There are only a few truly perfect things on this earth. A Chicago dog is one of them. There is nothing quite like it. This play is another little piece of perfection. Loved the movie, oh yes, but the play is just as good, which is a rare thing indeed. Often the movie version is superior to the original and vice versa. Here there is perfection on both sides. A glorious script is brought to the screen intact. No doubt much credit belongs to the director and cast, but I suspect that Mamet had something to do with it, too. It's hard not to love this sweet taste of poison. Levine is a character to adore and despise and then back into when he isn't looking. Wouldn't you just love to sleep with him, stab him and then leave him for dead? The writing is superb. Mamet's got the one-act tragedy down cold. Will he ever write a full-length play?

Editorial Review:

Winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, David Mamet's scalding comedy is about small-time, cutthroat real esate salesmen trying to grind out a living by pushing plots of land on reluctant buyers in a never-ending scramble for their fair share of the American dream. Here is Mamet at his very best, writing with brutal power about the tough life of tough characters who cajole, connive, wheedle, and wheel and deal for a piece of the action -- where closing a sale can mean a brand new cadillac but losing one can mean losing it all. This masterpiece of American drama is now a major motion picture starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alan Arkin, Alex Baldwain, Jonathan Pryce, Ed Harris, and Kevin Spacey.

Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama

David Mamet

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Playwright David Mamet's three lectures at Columbia University are ostensibly about issues of dramatic structure, but as they unfold, and Mamet continually explores the relationship between dramatic structure and the lives we live, much broader concerns are revealed. Here, for example, is Mamet on political propaganda:

It is ... essential to the healthy political campaign that the issues be largely or perhaps totally symbolic--i.e., non-quantifiable. Peace With Honor, Communists in the State Department, Supply Side Economics, Recapture the Dream, Bring Back the Pride--these are the stuff of pageant. They are not social goals; they are, as Alfred Hitchcock told us, the MacGuffin.... The less specific the qualities of the MacGuffin are, the more interested the audience will be.... A loose abstraction allows audience members to project their own desires onto an essentially featureless goal.

Although occasionally academic, the overall tone of the lectures is consistent with Mamet's no-nonsense manner of speech. He has no time for obfuscation and little time for repetition, save when he must absolutely employ it for emphasis. He is passionate about good theater, and passionate about the truth. 3 Uses of the Knife makes an excellent companion piece to his True and False, which addressed similar philosophical matters in the form of advice on the actor's craft.

Twelve Angry Men (Penguin Classics)

Reginald Rose

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

an amazing dramatic experience 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Based on Reginald rose's teleplay, which then became an Academy Award nominated film, TWELVE ANGRY MEN is dynamite listening. The cast is stellar, including Dan Castellaneta (remembered for the voice of Homer Simpson); Jeffrey Donovan (to be seen in Sundance's Come Early Morning); Hector Elizondo (Pretty Woman and the Princess Diaries); Robert Foxworth (who played juror #3 on Broadway); James Gleason (The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd); Kevin Kilner (Shopgirl); Richard Kind (Spin City, Curb Your Enthusiasm); Armin Shimerman (Star Voyager); and Joe Spano (Hill Street Blues).

As they've shown in the past, LA Theatre works presents the best in audio drama, always offering award worthy performances by gifted actors before a live audience. Twelve Angry Men is one more amazing dramatic experience.

As most know, the Twelve Angry Men comprise a jury that is charged with determining the fate of a 19-year-old boy who stands accused of murdering his father. The action takes place during one afternoon as their deliberations reveal the biases and character of each man. This is a drama that has stood the test of time, speaking to us as eloquently today as it did some 50 years ago.

Riveting listening!

- Gail Cooke

Editorial Review:

The Penguin Classics debut that inspired a classic film and a current Broadway revival

Reginald Rose’s landmark American drama was a critically acclaimed teleplay, and went on to become a cinematic masterpiece in 1957 starring Henry Fonda, for which Rose wrote the adaptation. A blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, Twelve Angry Men holds at its core a deeply patriotic belief in the U.S. legal system. The story’s focal point, known only as Juror Eight, is at first the sole holdout in an 11-1 guilty vote. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not affected by their personal biases. Rose deliberately and carefully peels away the layers of artifice from the men and allows a fuller picture of America, at its best and worst, to form.

Oleanna

David Mamet

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Oleanna - Mean and Frustrating 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 6 people found this review helpful.

"Oleanna" was a very, very frustrating read for me. First of all, a lot of it probably has to do with the fact that it is meant to be seen and heard, not read. Nonetheless, I'm convinced that a lot of the frustration is intentional. Everything the characters say is mixed up, incompleted, and confusing. The author, or playwright, Mamet, seems to have a very condescending opinion, almost disgust, for the English language. The confusion and misunderstanding is written in a way that makes our language appear almost pointless. I can't help but thinking to myself that anything can be put in a bad light, and shown to be a source of evil and violence, but why make a point of it (at least when its fundamentally unchangeable, like our basic language)? From my reading, I took the conclusion of the story to be something like "Language is futile, and fails us when we need it most." Of all the things I've read in my college literature course, "Oleanna" has been the only thing to leave a distinctly sour taste in my mouth.

Perhaps I'm missing the beauty of the writing, or the composition, or something... but overall this seemed to be a very mean spirited and ultimately pointless read.

Editorial Review:

"An ear for reproducing everyday language has long been David Mamet's hallmark and he has now employed it to skewer the dogmatic, puritannical streak which has become commonplace on and off the campus. With Oleanna he continues an exploration of male-female conflicts begun with Sexual Perversity in Chicago in 1974. Oleanna cogently demonstrates that when free thought and dialogue are imperilled, nobody wins." (Michael Wise, Independent) In Oleanna "John and Carol go to it with hand-to hand combat that amounts to a primal struggle for power. As usual with Mamet, the vehicle for that combat is crackling, highly distilled dialogue unencumbered by literary frills or phony theatrical ones." (Frank Rich, International Herald Tribune)

American Buffalo

David Mamet

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Painted into a Corner 2 out of 5 stars.
13 of 23 people found this review helpful.

In this play about three low life thugs, Mamet was trying to take a shot at America and its business ethics. The Indian associations of the title was a loose attempt to suggest the fundamental chicanery of a society whose founding act was the dispossession of the former owners of the land. But the problem with this play is that BOB, DON, and TEACH are so 'dumbed down' and their dialogue so impoverished that all Mamet can do is create a moral fog.

America may well be founded on the crime of dispossession and the genocide of the Indians, but a buffalo's head on a coin in a play hardly suggests any of this and is certainly incapable of presenting the rights and wrongs of the case. The logical extension of capitalist drives may indeed be a criminal society, but a few petty criminals mouthing off phrases of capitalist jargon, obviously detached from the comprehensive arguments of capitalist ideology, hardly proves this inherent criminality or reveals the complex processes by which capitalism encourages crime.

In the play TEACH defines 'free enterprise' as: "The freedom of the individual to embark on any course that he sees fit." In dialogue like this Mamet is apparently hoping to link the amoral self-interest of his characters to the principles of the American Revolution.

But the characters' relevance is limited by a number of factors. First, their ignorance and inability to express themselves severely limits any exposition and critique of society. Also, because Mamet is attempting a particularly bleak and stark form of realist drama. There is no opportunity, as with, say, the early plays of Eugene O'Neill, to present us with archetypal characters embodying whole race or class positions. Who does TEACH stand for besides himself?

Because of the 'literalness' of his form, if we want to find a critique of society, we must look for it more directly in the evident relations of the characters to the broader society. Such an avenue, however, remains firmly blocked as the characters are isolated from society. Indeed, they seem to belong to an almost self-contained little universe, centering around "Don's Resale Shop."

If Mamet is attempting in this play to present us with a 'reductio ad absurdum' showing the inherent criminality of American business ethics, then, he has painted himself into a corner. His characters lack consciousness, social relevance, and symbolism, all factors that allow a playwright to tackle social and moral problems. "American Buffalo" is extremely limited in the extent to which it can refer outwards to the greater society. All he can give us, in effect, is the 'absurdum' without the 'reductio', the criminality detached from the social forces that create it.

This play is a failure, but Mamet was able to return more successfully to these themes in "Glengarry Glen Ross." where the greater eloquence of his characters, dishonest land salesmen, allowed him to express more coherently the amorality of American business imperatives.

Editorial Review:

"The finest American playwright of his generation" (Sunday Times) A junk shop. Three small-time crooks plot to carry out the midnight robbery of a coin collection. In the hours leading up to the heist, friendship becomes the victim in a conflict between loyalty and business. "This play is a parable about the US - not in the journalistic way but quietly, stealthily, with all the rich interior organisation of a true work of art" (Observer)

November (Vintage)

David Mamet

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Mamet Doing Some Bottom Fishing 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 7 people found this review helpful.

On Sunday, January 13, 2008, I saw the Broadway production of "November" with Nathan Lane. He was very funny in the role of a wisecracking President about to lose an election. The play was hilarious, but it was a slight Mamet effort, marred, I think, by the extreme overuse of a four letter expletive in all of its forms. After a while I saw the audience cringing at the use of the word, not because they were prudes but because its repetitive use became boring, annoying, grating, abrasive. One of our leading playwrights surely could have used his wide vocabulary to put in some other words. The play is a farce, a satire, a gag festival, but it is not great. Without Nathan Lane I believe it would have soon perished. As of this date it has twenty more performances to run.
The script does not read particularly well, and had I not seen it, I think I would like it even less. I haven't seen a recent play in which so much time is spent in telephone conversations with unseen, unheard "characters." It was an old convention of Broadway comedies that happily disappeared. "Get me Joe on the phone" etc, etc. The structure of the play is out of the nineteen twenties and thirties comedy cliché genre, and let's hope it's not resurrected too often.
Any excuse is made for a gag, a laugh line. Elements of the plot: The President is supposed to pardon the Thanksgiving turkey, President Charles Smith will do anything to garner money for his campaign, his presidential library and himself, his lesbian speechwriter has returned from China with her partner after adopting a baby, an Indian tribe wants a casino on Martha's Vineyard, bird flu may have been brought back from China, the President has a team of secret agents who can render his enemies to Bulgaria, and so on.
It's low grade Mamet by way of Neil Simon and Sid Caesar. It's comic; it's crude; it's over the top. It's a cynical look at presidential politics with yuks, but little intelligent wit or irony. One of our finest playwrights is doing bottom fishing when he should be deep fishing. While England's Tom Stoppard is regaling us with epic achievement of "The Coast of Utopia," Mamet is serving up schlock.
Nine Lives Too Many
The Daemon in Our Dreams
The Rice Queen Spy
Clawed Back from the Dead

Editorial Review:

David Mamet's new Oval Office satire depicts one day in the life of a beleaguered American commander-in-chief.

It's November in a Presidential election year, and incumbent Charles Smith's chances for reelection are looking grim. Approval ratings are down, his money's running out, and nuclear war might be imminent. Though his staff has thrown in the towel and his wife has begun to prepare for her post-White House life, Chuck isn't ready to give up just yet. Amidst the biggest fight of his political career, the President has to find time to pardon a couple of turkeys — saving them from the slaughter before Thanksgiving — and this simple PR event inspires Smith to risk it all in attempt to win back public support. With Mamet's characteristic no-holds-barred style, November is a scathingly hilarious take on the state of America today and the lengths to which people will go to win.

Writing in Restaurants

David Mamet

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Eat and Write A Novel 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 20 people found this review helpful.

David Mamets "Writing In Restaraunts" is a perfect execution of playwriting technique guidance and education. When Mamet, the pulitzer prize winning author, combines his know how of writing business and his suave writing style, you get "the goods". Do yourself a favor, and purchase this book.

Inspiring one to be better 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This book's strength was that it made me challenge my own beliefs. As a filmmaker and writer, I have developed a sense for writing crap that appeals to the lowest common denominator. Mamet made me re-evaluate what made me become a writer, and the importance of the theater. I find his writing very interesting from the standpoint that he is very much of the theater, and an elitist as a result, but he is very favorable when discussing Hollywood. I think everyone should read his section on the Oscars in this book. Overall, I was very pleased I read the book, and would have to ultimately recommend it to others.

Good stuff here 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

There are some really great essays in this book, especially if you're a person who loves the theater. Much like "True and False", this book takes aim at problems plaguing America's theater. His best essays in here are for actors - they inspire and reclaim some of the art's dignity.

Also, if you're like me, you can appreciate his essay in here on pool halls. I've never seen anyone nail why they're such great places to visit like he does in this book.

This isn't his best work. But it's a pleasant read nonetheless. Worth the time.

Sexual Perversity in Chicago and the Duck Variations: Two Plays

David Mamet

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Whoroscope and the Fowl Permutations 4 out of 5 stars.
12 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Forget *Swingers*, forget *High Fidelity*, forget Tarantino's trash-talking hoods, David Mamet got there way before these belated young Turks. *Sexual Perversity in Chicago* is a brilliant, in-your-face series of vignettes sloshing through the muck of modern relationships. Two men and two women lock horns in a lewd scrimmage of blackly funny narcissistic power-plays, a despairing search for flitting, short-lived solace and pleasure, blasted by cruelty, impatience, tooth-and-claw feral soliloquy on why the opposite gender is one-part vampire, one-part Machiavel, can't live with them, can't sell them for parts (tee-hee).

Metropolitan swingers circling the drain of mean-streets cynicism and tough-talking bachelorhood, trawling the muddy waters of singles bars and yuppie night spots, searching for that ephemeral ounce of pleasure in a world of subterfuge and delay, mind-games and cruel deception, an odium of broken expectations and buried dreams.... Funny as the play is, it's distressing to have our noses rubbed in this point-blank opprobrium of our own basest impulses, the Spirit of Revenge which contaminates many of our frantic attempts to love and be loved.

Refreshingly, the women in Mamet's play seem much more interesting than the men, if only because their cynicism is more richly varied, more intellectually pungent. As shellshocked veterans of the gender war, it remains difficult to decide whether Mamet's scenarios are A: exaggerated worst-case aberrations, or B: (gulp) true-to-life tableaux on how perversely we are prone to behave toward one another, a vicious circle of paranoid self-hatred razing the purlieus of conventional "happiness" (or post-coital afterglow, once the bar is dropped).

Mamet suggests that at the outer limits of cynical self-abasement, human beings will "experiment" with cruelty the same way an S&M enthusiast would assay with handcuffs and bullwhip, the minds and hearts of anonymous lovers beaten like a Teletubbie pinata with the broomstick of our own wounded narcissism.

*The Duck Variations* is a classic low-budget scenario about two post-Beckettian bumps on a log pontificating on life, death, and the migratory patterns of Midwestern fowl. In the mind's eye theater I was forced to cast Jack Lemmon and the late Walter Mathau as Emil and George, two grumpy old men shadow-boxing in the dusklands of existential twilight. Mamet seemed still unable (or unwilling) at this point to write a full-length, tightly plotted drama, but the fragmentary dialogue presented here is brilliantly caustic, evocative, piercing and droll. Emil's and George's sedentary anxiety over the park wildlife that play out and exemplify the human condition, their ability to sublimate the necrophobic terrors of old-fogeyhood with caustic wit and good-natured foreboding, is presented with dashing brilliance and aplomb, a wonderfully true friendship between two men skirting the edges of karmic inquiry. Written in Mamet's early twenties, *The Duck Variations* exemplifies the brash virtuoso cunning that would go on to contribute *Glengarry Glen Ross* and *Speed-the-Plow*, amongst other masterworks, and is still worth reading a quarter-century later. (Also recommended for young actors as an exercise in brevity, timing, precision, and economy of affect.)

All in all, this book represents Mamet-in-embryo, the birth of a playwright, another fine anthology of one-liners and intellectual jousts to make the reader's anxieties seem a little less peerless and unparalleled, a little less alone in the world.

Editorial Review:

The Duck Variations is a dialogue between two old men sitting on a park bench. The conversation turns to the mating habits of ducks, but soon begins to reveal their feelings about natural law, friendship, and death. New York magazine has called The Duck Variations “a gorgeously written, wonderfully observant piece whose timing and atmosphere are close to flawless.”

The Three Sisters

Anton Chekhov

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Masterful 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I recently went to a reading of this play by a theatre group here in Philadelphia that I really enjoy. Although I could write a very positive review of their reading, I'll try and focus on the writing itself. This play presents a masterful peek into societal life for three sisters living in a relatively small Russian city of 100,000 people. The theme of living in your memories or living in your hopes is a major theme that is magnificently played out across the play's long four acts. Each of the main characters has a catch phrase or speech that they deliver a variant of in each act, the first time full of hope and happiness and with each passing act with more and more despair and hopelessness. The three sister's arcs into unhappiness and depression weave together to create a very cohesive whole. I thought the contrast between the three sisters and their one brother played perfectly into the development of the sisters' characters. In fact, the contrast between the male characters and the female characters was very interesting all around. The transformation of Natasha's character was also an interesting shift. I found the character of Solyony to be one of the only male characters that compared to the three sisters, but I can't put my finger on why. Watching the town fall apart through the lives of the sisters made for a great play. If you can stand some slow plot development and lengthy dialog (ie, it is a Russian story), you should really check this play out!

Editorial Review:

In this, his third adaptation of a Chekhov play, Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Mamet offers a contemporary, highly accessible version of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Working from a literal translation by Vlada Chernomordik, Mamet has rediscovered the characteristically modern chords in this powerful play and breathes new life into a timeless classic. This is Chekhov rendered in direct, colloquial language marked by Mamet’s finely tuned ear for dialogue.