”It`s been a great year for me,” David Mamet says, and, indeed, for one of America`s top playwrights it has been a prolific, varied and quality year of work.
In 1992, Mamet made extraordinary impressions with his writing in four separate fields of communication.
On television, his 1977 play ”The Water Engine,” first produced in Chicago at the old St. Nicholas Theatre, was transformed into a made-for-cable TV movie last summer under the direction of an old Mamet friend and colleague, Steven Schachter.
In print, ”The Cabin,” a new collection of ”reminiscence and diversions,” was released in December. The essays, some of them originally published in the Chicago Tribune Magazine, are for the most part focused on Mamet`s childhood and young manhood and reveal some painful facts about his youth in the Chicago area.
On film, ”Glengarry Glen Ross,” Mamet`s adaptation of his 1984 Pulitzer Prize drama, was a well-praised production of the summer, and the big-budget biopic ”Hoffa,” from Mamet`s original script about the late Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, was released amid a flurry of controversy on Christmas Day.
On stage, another storm of dispute centered on Mamet`s phenomenally successful off-Broadway production of ”Oleanna,” his tight, taut two-character drama on a male-female power struggle set in academia.
He even managed to sneak in a cameo appearance as an actor in ”The Water Engine,” appearing briefly with J. J. Johnson, one of his favorite actor pals, as a mysterious figure in the back of a bus who carried on a whispered conversation of pauses and puzzlements.
As the year drew to a close, Mamet was (as he notes in one of his pet phrases) ”happy as a clam” about this activity, and not at all concerned about the angry reaction some of it has engendered.
Well, that is not entirely true. The increasing chorus of accusastion that he is a misogynist, fueled by the rough-and-tumble battle of the sexes in ”Oleanna,” produces a note of frustration and irritation.
”I don`t get it,” he says. ”I got a letter from a woman who complained that, in my piece in `The Cabin` on the Iwan Ries tobacco shop on Wabash Avenue, I complimented only the pipe salesmen there. She said I should have said nice things about the saleswomen, too.
”I wrote back as nicely as I could that, in the 1960s, women did not sell pipes on Wabash Avenue.”
(This may be a sign of mellowing with Mamet, who recently turned 45. In the old days, when he was a young playwright in Chicago, he used to answer such complaints by sending the correspondent a form letter that said, simply, ”Too bad, you big crybaby.”)
The serious complaint leveled against ”Oleanna” has been that it is a diatribe against women, since its female character is a student (portrayed by Mamet`s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon) who, seemingly inarticulate and mentally ill-equipped in the first act, is transformed in the second act into a
determined, aggressive feminist mouthpiece who ruins the career of her male professor (William H. Macy, a skilled veteran of Mamet plays) by accusing him of sexual harassment and attempted rape.
But, according to its author, the play, which was written before the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas affair brought the issue of sexual harassment into new prominence, is basically not about man vs. woman, or hero vs. villain.
”And even if it was,” Mamet says, ”what does this mean? That you can`t portray a woman as a villain?”
In the end, Mamet believes, the play is a tragedy in which both characters wind up exhausted and ruined as a result of the warped educational system in which they labor.
For Mamet, ”Oleanna”-which gets its title from a satirical song about a Utopian community founded in 19th Century Pennsylvania by Ole Bull, a Norwegian artist and nationalist-is Academia, a supposedly idyllic site of learning and art which is foundering in a morass of political and personal prejudices.
Both combatants in the polemic, Mamet says, believe they are on the side of right. The woman demands something for herself, at any price, out of an elitist educational system that the professor represents; and the man, luxuriating in the spoils of the system while sneering at its flaws, refuses to allow her to question its authority.
Originally staged early in the year by American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., in the heart of academia, ”Oleanna” opened at the off-Broadway Orpheum Theatre this fall and has become a cause celebre of the New York season. ”You can`t talk about it unless you`ve seen it,” states its newspaper ads, and partly as a result of that get-with-it pitch, the play has become a runaway success at the box office. It is due to have its Chicago premiere next spring in a production that is to feature William Petersen, another prominent Mamet actor/pal, as the professor, and Harold Pinter is to stage the play in 1993 at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
An equally volatile controversy appears ready for ”Hoffa,” in which the labor boss (portrayed with bravado by Jack Nicholson), who disappeared mysteriously in 1975, emerges as a rough-and-ready folk hero, one who is not afraid to get his hands dirty or bloody in the cause of the working man.
The author`s father, the late Bernard Mamet, was a labor lawyer, and, his son says, ”I meant the script to be a paean to my dad, may he rest in peace. I talked with my dad a lot about this, and he told me that the most important thing Hoffa did was to bring American labor into the middle class.”
The script also continues the playwright`s long-held anger against the darker machinations of American capitalism.
In ”The Water Engine,” for example, an idealistic young inventor is victimized by the Machiavellian manipulations of a greedy capitalist system, and in ”Hoffa,” the union movement is opposed by a corrupt capitalism that uses brutish goons and twisted laws to suppress the tide of working man`s demands.
Today, according to Mamet, the strong union movement that Hoffa personified has been fatally weakened and co-opted by ”the culture of contentment” fostered by the anti-labor Reagan administration. ”Jobs are being whittled away, management sets up shops in Mexico, and the unions are unable to do anything about it,” he argues.
”The movie shows all the bad things Hoffa did,” Mamet says, ”but it also shows the terrible things management did, too. It was a bloody struggle on both sides. The difference is that the union tactics were called `vicious` and the management strategy was just `unfortunate.`
”Before Hoffa, the government`s attitude toward labor often was brutal-stand a few union men up against the wall and shoot them to teach them a lesson. But Hoffa stood up against President (Franklin D.) Roosevelt in the early days, showed him that the United States was not a monarchy. He wouldn`t back down.”
How carefully did Mamet research his subject? ”I read a couple books, but then I talked to Shel (Silverstein, a fellow author and longtime Mamet friend), and he said, `Don`t do too much research, because eventually you`re going to make it up anyway.`
The scenes in which Hoffa appears before a hostile Senate committee and its counsel, Robert Kennedy, use direct transcripts, but other Hoffa-Kennedy encounters, in which Kennedy (portrayed by Kevin Anderson of Steppenwolf Theatre) appears as a spoiled, self-indulgent smart aleck, were fictionalized by Mamet.
”Hoffa associated with the Mafia,” Mamet says. ”Sure, and so did
(President) Kennedy associate with the Mafia.”
”Glengarry Glen Ross” is another Mamet script, based in part on his own brief stint as a salesman, in which a relentless capitalist juggernaut squeezes the humanity out of the labor force, in this case a group of real estate pitchmen trying desperately to meet their sales quota.
In adapting the play for the screen, Mamet says the only problem he faced was ”making everything a little clearer.” He opened up the early part of the play to show the salesmen at work, and, to dramatize the terror of failure and possible job loss that they faced every day, he introduced a new character, played by Alec Baldwin, a demonic executive from ”downtown” who gives them a frightening pep talk.
As with ”Hoffa,” Mamet believes ”Glengarry Glen Ross” is ”just great” and ”absolutely brilliant,” with ”one performance better than the other.” And again, as with ”Hoffa,” once he had turned in his script, he did not show up on the movie set. ”It`s little like the airplane designer showing up on board the plane,” he says. ”By then, he`s irrelevant.”
(As a director of his own scripts, which have had critical but not box-office success, Mamet meanwhile is trying to get a new project going in 1993.)
Whatever the controversy over his writings, Mamet appears to have made some kind of peace with himself in the last year.
His marriage to Pidgeon, his second wife, is a most happy one, and, as demonstrated by key essays in ”The Cabin,” he is trying to bring what he calls ”a little psychic order” to some of his turbulent past.
This is shown most startlingly in ”The Rake,” in which he describes with simple detail, the chilling, bloody events associated with his mother, stepfather and sister around the family dinner table.
One fall day, when he and his sister were grooming the lawn, Mamet writes, he hit her with a rake in a moment of anger.
”We ran into the kitchen, where my mother was cooking dinner,” Mamet writes, ”and my mother asked what happened.
”Neither of us-myself out of guilt, of course, and my sister out of a desire to avert the terrible punishment she knew I would receive-would say what had occurred.
”My mother pressed us, and neither of us would answer. She said that until one or the other answered, we would not go to the hospital; and so the family sat down to dinner, where my sister clutched a napkin to her face and the blood soaked the napkin and ran down onto her food, which she had to eat; and I also ate my food, and we cleared the table and went to the hospital.”
The reminiscence, Mamet says, ”came out of the blue” one day while he was writing in his cabin in Vermont. After he finished it, he showed it to several friends, hoping, he says, ”that it wasn`t too much like kvetching.” Finally, he let it go into print, because, ”I didn`t want to be like a lot of people who had a rough time of it growing up and then kid themselves by saying, `Aah, it really wasn`t that bad.` ”
For 1993, Mamet has still more plans and projects. ”The Old Neighborhood,” a triptych of three short plays, may be produced at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, possibly with Schachter directing. There are a few film scripts he would like to direct, if he can get financing for them.
And ineveitably, with this prolific American man of letters, there will be another book of essays or reminiscences or stories.
”My wife,” Mamet says, with a smile, ”tells me I should just call it
`Another Book by David Mamet.` ”
