“I suppose my plays are about the individual’s inner spirit. I think that’s what it’s about. The purpose of the theatre, to me, is to examine the paradox between the fact that everyone tries to do well but that few, if any, succeed. The theatre concerns metaphysics, our relationship to God; and ethics or our relationships to each other.”
-David Mamet, episode 424 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
David Mamet is one of the most celebrated American playwrights of the last century: Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, and Glengarry Glen Ross— which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1983 and remains timely today. Our conversation unfolds, fittingly, in three acts.
Act I: the inspiration behind his new novel about education, Some Recollections of St. Ives (5:38), weathering the ‘emotional hurricane’ of his childhood in Chicago (18:22), and how the drama of those early years materialized in his 1994 play The Cryptogram and beyond (27:00).
In Act II, Mamet talks writing dialogue for the stage and screen (29:16), his disdain for psychoanalysis and the Actors Studio (32:32), and the philosophy that guided both his first theatre company (33:24) and subsequent plays (38:01).
In the closing act, we wrestle with Mamet’s rightward shift: his views on DEI (41:48), late-stage capitalism (51:33), ‘Constitutional Conservatism’ as it relates to the 2020 election (1:01:48), his latest book The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment (1:07:06), and what he believes a ‘peaceful and patriotic’ protest should look like (1:10:12).
Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at mail@talkeasypod.com.
Watch this conversation on YouTube:
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Show-notes:
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- David’s latests books, Some Recollections of St. Ives and The Disenlightenment, are now out in bookstores.
- Read his 1997 profile in The New Yorker by John Lahr.
- Plays referenced in this episode include: Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo, and Speed-the-Plow.
- The passage performed by Sam and Dave [Mamet] comes from 1994’s The Cryptogram.
- Films mentioned in this episode include: The Verdict, House of Games, Glengarry Glen Ross, Heist, and State and Main.
- His appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher can be found here.
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Illustrations by Krishna Shenoi.
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