A Double Shot of David Mamet

He’s been a child actor, busboy, porn magazine editor, office manager, film director and more, but Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet found his niche when he put pen to paper in the 1970s. The prolific Mamet reinvented American playwriting while legitimizing the F-word as a dramatic device, and if you’ve any doubt this is true, look no further than Broadway this fall, where the proud Chicago native is receiving two star-studded revivals: the biting satire Speed-the-Plow, opening October 23 with Jeremy Piven, Raul Esparza and Elisabeth Moss; and his breakthrough drama, American Buffalo, beginning previews October 31 and starring John Leguizamo, Cedric the Entertainer and Haley Joel Osment. How does a living playwright, represented last season on the Great White Way with November, generate so much buzz for plays written 20 and 30 years ago? Broadway.com recounts how Mamet left a lasting mark on the stage.

Breaking In
It began in 1974 with sex…or Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Emerging playwright David Mamet, a former busboy at the famed Second City Theater and caption writer for the titillating magazine Oui, had written about what he knew: sex and friends. As explicit as it was shameless though now a period piece in this post-AIDS, post-Girls Gone Wild era, the comic one-act shocked initial audiences during its debut at Chicago’s Organic Theater with its depiction of twentysomethings run amok."I was in the cast at Second City when he used to work there,” recalls actor David Rasche, a frequent Mamet player now on Broadway in To Be or Not To Be. “He would hang around and say ‘Hi, I’m David Mamet. I write plays.’ And we’d all say ‘Right. Great, Dave. I’m sure you do.’ Next I heard he had written this brilliant one-act.”

Rasche took over one of the roles during Sexual Perversity's first attention-grabbing run. “I did one scene where I was completely naked! Lines like ‘That pisses me off, that pisses the fuck outta me.’ Nobody EVER said stuff like that in plays before.” The show made it to New York’s St. Clement’s Theatre in 1975, where it won an Obie for Best New Play. It would be the springboard Mamet needed.

Coin Toss
The same year, David Mamet presented a script to Gregory Mosher, director at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre Stage 2, not asking, but explaining it was for Mosher’s upcoming season. “Tell you what,” Mamet said. “I’ll put five grand in escrow, and if the play doesn’t win the Pulitzer, keep the money.” Auditions for the premiere of American Buffalo, a play about three losers planning to heist a rare coin, began just weeks later.

J.J. Johnston and Mamet buddy William H. Macy were quickly cast as American Buffalo’s Donny and Bobby, respectively. In his introduction to the published play, Mosher recalls the unlikely delivery of the final cast member: “At a 10:20AM audition a fellow came in, covered in blood. I asked if he was all right. ‘I fell out of the car, okay?’ he said. ‘Let’s just do the fucking audition.’ We cast him.” The fellow was Bernard Erhard, who joined the cast as Teach for what became a rocky rehearsal process.

Mamet’s dialogue, a highly stylized and cadenced presentation of American street vernacular, was unlike anything anyone had ever heard, and extremely difficult to memorize so difficult that Mosher recalls Dustin Hoffman, working on the film version of the play 20 years later, being driven to exhaustion by it: “Is it ‘Fuck you. Pause. Fuck. Pause. Fuck you’? or ‘Fuck you. Fuck. Pause. Fuck…’ Aaagh, fuck me, what’s the line!?” Hoffman would yell off-camera. The actors struggled. Mamet, present at rehearsals, tore entire pages from the script. After one particularly frustrating night during which Erhard almost knocked out Mosher, the playwright suggested they cancel. 

Regardless, opening night at Stage 2 was a success. After just 12 performances, the production transferred to Chicago’s St. Nicholas Theatre, with actor Mike Nussbaum in the role of Teach. By 1976, the play was being showcased at St. Clement’s in New York, winning the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play and transferring again to the Cherry Lane Theater. All the while, the theater community was buzzing about the brash new Chicago playwright with the golden albeit stinging pen.

A Broadway transfer of American Buffalo opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on February 16, 1977, starring John Savage as Bobby, Robert Duvall as Teach and Kenneth McMillan as Donny. It ran for just 122 performances, but the play attracted the attention of a host of actors eager to take on one of the three juicy parts. The play was revived in 1983 at Broadway’s Booth Theater starring Al Pacino as Teach, James Hayden as Bobby and J.J. Johnston at Donny, and off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theatre Company NYC home of Mamet and Macy in 2000 with Macy stepping up to play Teach alongside Philip Baker Hall as Donny and Mark Webber as Bobby. 

Over the years, critical reaction to American Buffalo has varied, though everyone acknowledges the play’s influence on an entire generation of dramatists and actors. As Ben Brantley of The New York Times quipped after seeing the 2000 revival, “The status of American Buffalo as one of the most eloquently inarticulate plays ever written remains secure.” Critic Howard Kissel declared, “Mamet’s play is to actors what a jam session is to jazz musicians—it invites the most experienced kind of playfulness and risk taking.”

Mamet himself explained the personal origins of the play in a 1997 interview with journalist John Lahr: “[William H.] Macy and I were in Chicago, and he was living in this wretched hovel—we’d both become screamingly poor—and I came over to talk to him about something…I opened the refrigerator, and there was this big piece of cheese. I hadn’t had anything to eat in a long time. I picked it up, cut off a big chunk, and started eating. And Macy said [accusatorily], “Hey, help yourself.” I was really hurt. I went away and fumed about that for several days. Then I just started writing, and out of that came this [now famous ‘Fuckin Ruthie’] scene, which was the start of the play: Teach comes in furious because someone had just said to him, “Help yourself.”  The playwright also clarified that the show was about the potential harm that the myth of the American Dream can inflict on average citizens.

Ultimately, American Buffalo did not win the Pulitzer, as Mamet promised Mosher did not demand the $5,000 playfully suggested by the playwright during their first meeting. But it did pave the way for the thriving career to come…and that Pulitzer. 

Taking on Hollywood
A decade later, the naive artist was gone and a film director House of Games, Oscar-nominated screenwriter for The Verdict and, yes, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright was now on the scene. Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, a searing examination of how men do business in a shady real estate office, had taken Broadway by storm in 1984, nabbing three Tony nominations and the Pulitzer. In response to his big win, Mamet said, “I really feel very warm and gushy. It beats the hell out of an ignominious failure”. 

On a roll, Mamet continued writing scripts for films like The Untouchables, House of Games and Things Change and took a bit role in the film Black Widow. Along the way, he apparently took notes. In 1988, he crafted a tight, rapid-fire satire on big Hollywood business about two sharky film producers and their art vs. commerce battle. Then Mamet took the script where it belonged: the stage.

Speed-the-Plow opened at the Royale Theatre on March 3, 1988. Directed by longtime collaborator Gregory Mosher, it starred Glengarry Tony winner Joe Mantegna as film producer Bobby Gould, Ron Silver as his longtime colleague, Charlie Fox, and Madonna, in her Broadway debut, as Karen, a secretary with her own ambitions. 

“I was just so struck by it,” Neil Pepe, director of the current revival, recalls of the opening night performance. “It was so compelling, not just in what it was saying about the state of Hollywood and the system, but also loyalty and the pain of truth. It was timely, provocative and one of the funniest stories I had ever seen.” The critics largely agreed, praising Mamet’s comedic chops, the facetiousness of his moral lesson, his two male leads and their verbal pyrotechnics. 

Madonna drew mixed reviews, and her presence almost turned the production into a tabloid spectacle. But the overall impression left by the play was unmistakable: Mamet still had it, and business was still his main target. And as he told Playboy in 1995, the play was indeed based on his Hollywood experiences of which there would be many more. Asked if “some personal malice” was reflected in Speed-the-Plow, the always succinct Mamet responded, “Not nearly enough.”

Speed-the-Plays
Now American Buffalo and Speed-the-Plow are poised for same-season Broadway revivals. In a Mametian twist of fate, the two not only will compete for ticket sales and awards, but also fought for the same Broadway theater, the Ethel Barrymore, where American Buffalo debuted and November ran last season. Speed-the-Plow won, sending Buffalo to the Belasco. 

Why revive both now? You could say the plays work in tandem to comment on the current state of the world—the responsibility of big business, the state of the American Dream, the desperation of Joe the Plumber, all favorite Mamet subjects. They also juxtapose nicely, showing different sides of the playwright: One is a classically formatted tragedy, the other a satirical comedy; one is set amidst the upper class, the other the working class. But most importantly, both have remained timeless and relevant: You can set them in a 70s junkyard, 80s boardroom, a modern stage or even the lobby of Lehman Brothers and neither will seem out of place—no easy feat for a single play, let alone two.

“All of his plays have a fundamental human element, which is why [they] can be revived so easily,” says Mary McCann, a Mamet colleague and member of the Atlantic Theater Company. “What’s underneath is friendship and the betrayal of the friendship. That’s always relevant. Always.”