David Mamet

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David Mamet American Literature Analysis

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In Mamet’s dialogue, the American language of informal discourse becomes a tool for combat and defense, a song of near meanings, and a sanctuary in slang for the dangerous exposure to true feeling. He has perhaps caught the rhythms of the spoken language as no one has since William Shakespeare, and his characters are true to their speech. He is often compared to Eugene O’Neill, and some critics believe that he surpasses that great American playwright in his ability to make believable the speech patterns of common street life. Several observers of Mamet’s canon have used a musical analogy, calling his dialogue “Chicago jazz” or “a fugue” otherwise underlining the sense of rhythm that his speeches seem to evoke.

Some critics, while noting the strength of the dialogue, interpret the talking scenes as static or undramatic. While it is true that “action” in its basic sense is often missing or concentrated at the end of the plays, the “action” inside the dialogue is complex and multilayered. All speech is, in fact, “speech-act,” the establishing of relational strategies by means of speech. The dialogue in a Mamet play, then, is a series of defenses, justifications, explanations, probing into opinions, and establishing common ground; and underneath all the talk is action as dramatic as any more obvious or physical action. Mamet’s characters admit, deny, offer, accept, deceive, sell, plead, reveal, and conceal in their language. Many times, as critics have noted, the dialogue conceals the emotional content of the scene, as though (in Voltaire’s words) “words conceal meaning.” In this respect, Mamet, more than any other contemporary playwright, finds his true genre in stage writing in which the action is carried almost exclusively in the character dialogue.

Mamet’s views of personal relationships, a theme important to his work, are easily revealed in the content and the mise-en-scène of his plays: Love is treated not as a gentle or honest relationship but as a hard-fought conclusion. Usually love is seen as it collapses, as a relationship breaks apart. In Sexual Perversity in Chicago, for example, the getting together of Dan and Deborah takes place briefly and almost offstage; their break-up, however, is open and on the stage. Even the scene in which Deborah moves in with Dan is not placed in a neutral or happy setting but in her former apartment, with her former roommate Joan angrily concealing her own bitterness and unhappiness with a series of smart-aleck rejoinders. In every play, love is shown in off-handed, negatively connoted scenes.

Where Mamet stands in terms of business and enterprise is not so easily revealed in a single examination of one play or scene. While it is certainly true that the shoddy, “grifter” side of business takes center stage, the question remains whether Mamet applauds that attitude or finds fault with it. In one sense, the dynamics of a business transaction are like drama, but in another sense, the phoniness and false intentions of business dealings are antithetical to true communication. Mamet has chosen to dramatize the inability or reluctance of the characters to enter into an honest negotiation and at the same time their willingness to join in friendships and bonds that transcend simple business dealings.

In the play Glengarry Glen Ross, Roma’s best scene is a brutally honest rephrasing of the principles of existentialism, and for a moment the audience thinks that this is Mamet himself speaking. When Roma turns salesman, however, the audience realizes that his apparent frankness was only the warm-up to the duplicitous business of selling Florida property to an unwilling restaurant owner. The Water Engine dramatizes...

(This entire section contains 4470 words.)

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the inventor’s dilemma of finding financial security without selling out to the free enterprise system; both this idea and the theme ofSpeed-the-Plow are reminiscent of some themes of playwright Sam Shepard in this respect, showing the artist at odds with the world of enterprise.

More viscerally important than either love or business is Mamet’s prevailing theme of language as defense, as shield against encroachment by honest emotion. In American Buffalo, the affection between Donny and Bobby is never spoken of outright, but it is there in Donny’s long-suffering patience, in his attempt to include Bobby in the scheme (against Teach’s wishes), and his defense of Bobby when Teach hurts him in the final scene. Teach is all alone in the world, with no friends; even Ruthie, an offstage presence, hurts his feelings when he asks for a piece of her toast. Bobby and Donny, however, have developed an awkward, unspoken father/son relationship in the dingy setting of the junk store. Bobby’s devotion to Donny (as witnessed by his attempts to buy the coin) is an example of how simple, less articulate people show their affection. Donny, on the other hand, a bridge between the world of business and deceit and the world of human interaction, has none of the verbal brittleness of Teach. Teach is all words; he is adept at using talking as a shield, a defense, and an aggressive agent.

While the harsh language of virtually all the characters suggests that Mamet is always coarse in his treatment of relationships, it is a mistake to see Mamet’s plays as devoid of warmth. The play A Life in the Theatre is touching in many instances, and at base is a pas-de-deux of two like souls. Told poignantly and sensitively, it is a graceful work. While not entirely devoid of the rough language of Mamet’s other plays, the dialogue moves through a more sophisticated vocabulary, because the characters are educated actors in the midst of the world of theater rather than people in a working-class environment.

The Woods is a love story as well, despite the harshness of its conclusion. Sexual Perversity in Chicago, on the surface about the coming together and breaking apart of the couples, is also a story of male bonding, however crude and insensitive Bernie is to Dan’s problems. It is a play about the inability to love, and as such shows the influence of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and other absurdists, showing characters caught in the dilemma of a need for love and a world that sees love as a weakness. In the big city life that pervades Mamet’s work, love has no permanent place. In fact, business is not so much a subject as a metaphor for all human relationships: intimate contact for personal gain, duplicity and deceit for protection. The love stories are always concerned with implied and stated contracts, with the unspoken rules with an ineffable morality that transcends the gutter talk of the dialogue itself.

Storytelling is an art both for Mamet’s characters and for Mamet himself. In every play, at least one long monologue is devoted to telling a story of the past, both as protective device and as a form of bravado on the part of the speaker, to hide or to reveal his inner self. It is as though the speaker tells his story to avoid revealing himself, yet reveals himself at the same time accidentally. Whether that can be said of Mamet himself is open to question. An open, talkative, witty, and accessible personality, Mamet often appears with a large cigar, a “prop” behind which he successfully hides his personal life.

American Buffalo

First produced: 1975 (first published, 1976)

Type of work: Play

Three petty thieves try to steal back a possibly valuable buffalo nickel from the man who purchased it.

The scene is a sleazy junk store, run by Donny, in a run-down urban setting. Donny runs the shop in a low key, using Bobby to run errands for him. The world of the shop is cluttered and arbitrary, an organic construction rather than a carefully designed one. The financial stakes are low here; an occasional sale to a passerby is enough to sustain the two men in their unambitious lives.

Into this mix comes Teach—angry, “wired,” full of venomous energy—with a plan, a scheme, a project of the will (to use Henrik Ibsen’s term). It is not enough for Teach to plan and carry out the crime; his innate secretiveness, paranoia, and distrust must extend to his partners, Donny and an offstage figure (Fletch) who eventually deserts the project. Teach brings an anger with him that has become emblematic of the kind of vicious energy that drives Mamet’s plays forward. One sees the same kind of energy in Bernie (Sexual Perversity in Chicago) and in Roma (Glengarry Glen Ross), although Roma is closer to a hero than other destructive Mamet characters.

Driving the minor-key greed of the two more passive characters (Bobby is slightly simple, helpful, and, in a scheme of his own, determined to please Donny) is the possibility of stealing back a coin Donny sold to a customer some time previously. Apparently the coin, a buffalo-head nickel, has some value, because the customer paid fifty dollars for it. Rather than taking delight in Donny’s windfall, Teach sees the customer as a cheat who probably knows the coin was worth even more. Thus, as a kind of angry revenge, they can steal the coin back with a clear conscience—the customer has somehow turned into the villain, and the trio become, in their own minds, the Robin Hood-like righters of wrongs.

What goes wrong with the burglary is distrust and lack of sophistication. First, the victim is not away from the house; the thieves have been misinformed by Bobby, because he left his observation post. Also, their silent partner has not shown up, and they suspect that he has preceded them in the theft and betrayed them. In fact, he is in the hospital, but they do not believe the story. At the end of the play, Donny shows that he is not another Teach but a friend of a more compassionate order.

The play is not exactly an indictment of all business. The question of trust, of partnership, is examined, and the conclusion is double-sided. The agreements between Donny and Teach are suspect because they are based on distrust; however, the relationship between Donny and Bobby is more genuine. In the opening scene, when Bobby is sent to get food for Donny, there is a sense that the way business works best is by trust—Donny tells Bobby to buy some food for himself as well and does not quibble about the money.

When Teach enters, his first lament is about an incident that occurred in the same restaurant—an argument over half a piece of toast. While the scenes are immediate and dynamic, on reflection they represent two ways of “doing business” (which for Mamet means joining in any relationship). Either the business arrangement is the only connection between partners, in which case duplicity and trickery are parts of the agreement, or else the business arrangement is part of a larger relationship, one of affection and mutual trust, in which case the automatic self-serving attitudes of the business person have no place.

Now widely done on the regional stage, this play is often the center of controversy regarding appropriate stage language for more conservative audiences. Its success as drama has invariably won the argument in favor of language verisimilitude, and the rest of Mamet’s works have subsequently been widely accepted.

Glengarry Glen Ross

First produced: 1983 (first published, 1983)

Type of work: Play

High-pressure Florida real estate salesmen fight for leads to promising clients, losing their own principles and values in the process.

In this play, Mamet has found his strongest metaphor for the complexity of human relationships. A group of salesmen, vying for “leads” to hot prospects for a Florida land scheme, make use of language not only to “close” their prospects but also to obfuscate their actual intentions, which include robbing the “leads” from the real estate office. On the surface, every salesman is a man for himself, and the last emotion one would expect is friendship and loyalty among them. They can only judge their success by the sales they make, and the “board” of the contest is the measurement of that success. The best leads get the best closes, and if a man is too far down on the list of persons getting leads, he never has a chance to catch up. In this respect, the play is reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), because the American Dream of success is separated from the method, from the moral premise behind success.

The first-act scenes in the restaurant are hard-edged dialogues, almost monologues with a responding listener. Moss and Aaronow, whom the audience originally suspects for the office break-ins, are an example of the intimidation relationship in which Mamet excels. Aaronow is drawn into the robbery by dint of Moss’s ability to “sell” his guilt to him. As in American Buffalo, the criminal turns his crime around into a sort of revenge against someone who did not play by the rules—here it is Moss, showing Aaranow that to steal the leads is a just punishment for Williamson, whose job is to give the leads out. Williamson, it is noted, has never closed a sale, has never been out there in the field, but is a pawn of the offstage owners, Mitch and Murray.

In a sense, there is something besides Florida real estate being sold: reputation, one’s place on the sales board, even one’s loyalty to the police, are all for sale. At the center of the play is Roma’s and Levene’s friendship, despite their competition for the Cadillac. When they are both winners, when the sales are closing, they share a frenetic energy and understanding of the almost sexual exaltation of success. When Levene defends Roma to Williamson, the audience sees a side of him that is soft and more likeable; however, the revealing of that very softness is the undoing of Levene, when he accidentally lets Williamson know that he was the actual burglar in the previous night’s incident. Williamson immediately pounces on the flaw, and Levene is discovered as the crook. In the meantime, Roma does not even realize what his friend has done for him, as he pursues a lost sale.

The fast-talking world of Florida (and Arizona) real estate sales is a world where the men function only in direct proportion to their ability to hide themselves, to seek the fast buck. It is a hollow relationship but one with certain unspoken rules. The three-day rule, in which a customer has three days to cancel his deal, is a rule imposed from outside. The customers who are never serious, such as the Indians and the Nyborg family (famous for writing bad checks), are looked down on by the salesmen as unfair players, as wastes of time. Stealing the leads and selling them to a competitor is a way of breaking the rules of the business they are in, but more importantly, it confuses the order of success among the men.

Mamet found inspiration from his own brief work in such a sales office and from “those guys you see on planes” who are the businessmen at work, artificial in their own relationships, competing daily, either directly or indirectly, for the same dollar. Very little daydreaming is actually done about spending the money, about eventually relaxing and enjoying the fruits of their labors. At the moment, like racehorses, they are in the race, and every bit of energy must go into winning it.

Events such as Levene’s triumphant entrance and depiction of his grand sale to Bruce and Harriet Nyborg (underscored by Aaranow’s disgruntled “I had them on River Glen”) are the highlights of these men’s lives—the moments when they can announce their successes to one another. The fact that the Nyborg deal will fall through when the check is shown to be fraudulent caps the deadly day of deceit and hopelessness in the ruined office. The other deal gone sour, the sale to Lingk, occurs at the office itself, when Lingk, prompted by his less gullible wife, demands a retraction of the deal. The support character of the detective, Baylen, the only one not involved in the real estate scheme as seller or buyer, is not fully developed—he represents a “finding out,” a revealing not of who broke the law but who broke the unwritten code by which these men work.

The storytelling abilities of Mamet’s characters, especially the salesmen, are a reflection of Mamet’s own ability to tell a good story. The quick-talking defense mechanism of the salesman prevents real contact. As in American Buffalo, where the physical object of the buffalo nickel is a carefully chosen symbol (of the lost American West, perhaps, as one critic notes), so the valueless Florida real estate the men are hawking is a symbol of the uselessness at base of the efforts of the men and their world. What they have to sell is worthless; their lives are made worthless as a result.

Speed-the-Plow

First produced: 1988 (first published, 1988)

Type of work: Play

A pair of motion picture producers decide whether to make a sure-fire hit or a high-risk but thematically valuable script recommended by their temporary secretary.

In this play, the question of the worth of a commodity is made the center of the conflict. Far from being useless, worthless property, as in Glengarry Glen Ross, here the “product” is a film script more or less guaranteed to make money versus a very questionable project that has no real value but is valuable to the spirit of the men involved.

Bobby Gould, a newly promoted production executive, is visited by an old “friend and associate,” Charlie Fox. Gould has “a new deal” with the money man, Ross (offstage). In a power position, Gould is constantly “promoted” by other producers who want him to approve their film deals. He is wary of being “promoted,” but Fox, an old friend and business associate, brings him a perfect project—a name actor has agreed to “cross the street.” Fox does not “go through channels”—a metaphor for the disguises, the safeguards between people and their emotions—not because he trusts his friendship with Gould, but because he is sure that his film opportunity will appeal to Gould on a business level.

Money versus people is the theme, as Gould and Fox themselves agree: When the “deal” starts to slip away, what are the real values? The question of loyalty and friendship versus the world of business, as in Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo, comes up again. “It’s only words unless they’re true,” says Fox. Another property, by an Eastern philosopher, has taken the fancy of Karen, a temporary secretary, who visits Gould and sleeps with him in exchange for consideration of the new project.

The audience must consider whether Gould was truly converted to the new book or was tricked into believing in the ideas of the book. The theme that concerns Mamet once again is the interface of business (by which he means cold, distrustful relationships with unwritten rules) and friendship (by which he means trust without boundaries). Two scripts compete for one “green light” from the head of the studio. One script, clearly a moneymaker, is trite and exploitive and imitative. The other script is a large idea from an Eastern author, purveying a notion that radiation was sent by God to change the world. Its value as box-office revenue is very questionable, but Karen’s explanation of it, coupled with her offer of sexual gratification, is too much for Gould, and he changes his mind in favor of the radiation book. When his friendship with Fox, a friendship bordering on “old boy” camaraderie, is threatened, Fox shows Gould that Karen was simply using him for her own ambitions.

When Gould sends Karen away and goes to the meeting with Fox, the audience realizes that Gould has abandoned his soul and his only chance for true greatness. On the other hand, the duplicity and confused nature of love is also in question: If Karen had been clearly the good influence, the play would have been melodramatic, but with Karen’s motives under question, the play becomes much more insightful and complex. This sense of possible betrayal, coupled with a swing in power from one person to another, is at the base of the play’s drama.

Karen is an unusual character for Mamet—an attractive woman who presents the idea of noble principles to an otherwise superficially insensitive businessman. Usually the women in Mamet’s plays are impediments to a man’s business, asking for personal commitment (as in The Woods) in place of the retreat of the emotions that Mamet sees as a masculine trait. Here, again, the woman is asking the man to be himself, to go against the rules of business (including the first rule of guarding himself from damage in friendship), to project himself outside the safe business deal into a film based on belief. Where Mamet stands on the question of real value is not immediately clear, as the radiation text in question is at once profound and nonsensical. As in all of his plays to date, Mamet stays neutral regarding the nature of truly principled action.

Oleanna

First produced: 1992 (first published, 1993)

Type of work: Play

This play examines the sociopolitical ambiguity and explosiveness of an academic relationship between a female student and a male professor.

In this play, sexual harassment is at the epicenter, but the harassment is dubious, interpreted, skewed, absurdly subliminal if even present, as each of the two characters—John, a professor about to take tenure, and Carol, a student struggling with more than grades—defend their interpretations of the language of the student-professor dynamic.

Confused and at the end of her academic rope, Carol comes to John’s office to express concerns about failing his course. A male arm around female shoulders, a bargain to come to the office to learn all she can from all he knows, and the grade will become an A, and a tension is established that carries the play. Yet all is not quite so simple as an offer to show that she can study hard and prove herself deserving of the almighty A. With each well-intended appointment, Carol arrives, but John is on the phone, or takes a phone call, or makes a phone call. In the middle of Carol’s sentences, the phone will ring. John will put her off at key intellectual moments to talk to his wife about the new house that they plan to buy (once he is tenured). John makes Carol wait while he finishes phone discussions regarding logistics of the house. John stops their study sessions to answer the questions that the caller has about the house.

So the phone—clearly the symbol of the power of language and the power to interrupt, intercept, interject, or mute the language of the less important student—ushers in the true themes of Oleanna, themes of language, restrictions of language, power, and power through language. Nowhere in the play while the curtain is up does John sexually harass Carol. Yet his impervious position of power and his manner of espousing antiacademia, lecturing the attentive note-taking Carol, and interrupting repeatedly her attempts to take power by using the language from which she is distanced from the start, impel the student to challenge John in the only way that she can to turn the desks: She uses language, that which she has claimed is inaccessible to her, to bring him down. She accuses him of raping her, maligns his direction, and seethes venom about being a former victim and about having the power to take the case to the cutting place—the tenure committee—in a manner that elicits the basest of unnatural and natural responses at once: John resorts to violence, to lifting his office chair over his head, at the ready to bring it crashing down over her head.

The Old Neighborhood

First produced: 1997 (first published, 1998; includes The Disappearance of the Jews, 1983, Jolly, 1989, and Deeny, 1989)

Type of work: Play

A penetrating study of reconciliation—of geographical place, of family members, and of attempts at self-identity.

That David Mamet is a master of language is once again utterly apparent in this play, but what is also clear is Mamet is a linguophile. The redemption comes by way of Bobby returning to his old neighborhood, by way of the communing and commiserating of a family culture, and ultimately by way of dialogue that hums, spits, stutters, and stalls. Intentional and realistic, the spoken words are as evocative as the pauses to express the ineffable.

Bobby Gould has come home, returning to his old Chicago neighborhood (“to get Comfort”), where he converses with his boyhood buddy Joey in act 1 (“The Disappearance of the Jews”), with sister Jolly and her husband Carl in act 2 (“Jolly”), and with a past lover, perhaps still loved, in act 3 (“Deeny”). While the present points toward the question of the future, the past is the focus.

In act 1, a dolorous exchange of “woulda-coulda-shoulda” is the bonding agent. Bobby would love to have been in Hollywood in the 1920’s. Joey would have loved living in the shtetl. Joey would lose his wife to old age, and the people of town would bake for him. They would have been smart Jews. They would have been free. However, the characters are not free. The true freedom is only in the words, in the essence of their epic and allusive storytelling and in their heroic plans for a future trip, which surely will release them into a pleasant memory.

In act 2, brother and sister futz with the tethers of their childhoods, reminiscing about a Christmas that they are still tied up in by an overbearing mother who controlled them with gifts that they did not want or need, with words that they can never forget, with actions that control their todays, bastardizing even the most idyllic of childhood moments.

In act 3, the past is revisited, again in the keenest of dialogue—Bob’s subtle and uttering agreements and Deeny’s thoughtful, philosophical pleasantries. There is a suspension of agony, finally, in conversation that, controlled by Deeny, is more visionary than revisionary. Though that is the precise effect. While Joey of act 1 has claimed they “have no connection,” denying even that of what could have been or what could still be, Deeny brings a connectedness—by way of truth and dreamy possibility of truth, by way of well-founded and solid love (which she desires and Bobby is capable of providing), and by way of, essentially, the connection made by talk, by words, by realistic speech between humans, whatever their dilemma or despair.

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David Mamet Drama Analysis

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