From the Editor’s Desk: In Conversation with Playwright David Mamet

A few weeks ago, The Commentator had the distinct privilege of interviewing Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Mamet. Mamet is notorious for his witty, fast-paced writing style. As Torah Umadda adherents, we began by asking him about how Judaism plays a role in his work. 

“It plays a role in my work because it plays a role in my life. I am a Jew so if I lost sight of it, there are a lot of people out there who will remind me of it. First, I am a Jew and simultaneously, I am an American.”

During the course of our interview, Mamet — out of his own volition — brought up that week’s parsha, Parshat Beshalach. We asked if he reads parsha every week and if it influences his life, he responded, “All of it. I read it all every week. But what else am I going to do? I am an old Jew.”

He enthusiastically added, “The wonderful thing about the Torah is that every year you get a new favorite book or you get a new favorite story. Every year you look back and say ‘my god!’ how could I have missed that?”

As it turned out, Mamet, who received a Pulitzer Prize and Tony nominations for his plays “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Speed-the-Plow,” began his career in playwriting accidentally. 

“I was raised to be a failure. I mean that’s what everyone expected of me because that’s what I performed … I never opened a schoolbook in my life. I was raised to be a failure because that’s what everyone told me I was.” Everyone “told me I was stupid so I said ‘OK, obviously I’m stupid because they said that. That being so, wouldn’t it be my responsibility to fail at everything?’ So I did.” 

In college, Mamet did some work in theatre, and after graduating, spent a year at the Maplewood Playhouse in New York. “I didn’t have any contacts and I didn’t have any money; I went to work as a cab driver.” He performed many menial jobs, which he said he was “very happy to have”. Eventually, he became a busboy at The Second City and he saw all the shows night after night. He started reading Chekhov and Pinter, and said, “Wow! If this is playwriting, I want to do that!” He started writing sketches and putting them on and eventually, started a theatre in Chicago with Billy Macy and a couple of friends.

Mamet described his belief that in this world, “everybody thinks that they are a mindreader.” He tells a story — an analogy, almost — of all these people who go line up by this “mind-reader check-in place” to see if they are a mind reader or not. But, standing above them and looking through a one-way mirror, are actual mind readers and the actual mind readers are looking at hundreds of people in line and saying, “If you can hear me, at your left, there is a door that says “No Admittance” — go through that door.” Once in a long while, someone looks around like ‘Where is this coming from?’ Tentatively, they look at a door marked “No Admittance” and go through that door. 

“That’s what it means to be an artist,” Mamet told The Commentator. According to him, “Everybody thinks they can go to film school and enter horizontally or they can go to acting school and enter horizontally and all these things are a waste of time. But, there are some people who [are] just like some people who hit the fastball, right? ... There are some people who are spiritually or genetically different, which is very close to being damaged — or very, very lucky. And I’m one of those.” 

Professor Robert Russell, who joined us for this interview, further explained, “A true artist isn’t one because they ‘applied’ for it through an application. Either you’re an artist or you’re not. In the moshol (parable), the real mind readers don’t need to apply or go to school. They know intuitively to walk through that ‘No Admittance’ door.”

Mamet then added, “I said to myself ‘You know Dave, you know, although you have failed, although you’re a chicken, Hashem gave you a gift — you can do this — and if you **** this up, you deserve everything that’s going to happen to you.’” Mamet concluded, “I still feel this way until this day.”

“When you write a play, you are keeping the audience’s attention moment to moment. Why? Because if you lose it for one moment, it’s not the same audience coming back. They’ve lost their trust in you. You’ve said ‘I want you to give me your trust and I’m gonna tell you a story.’” Mamet compares this to telling a joke. “If you tell a joke and you put two extra words, you’ve just lost the audience. So, you learn to write a play by watching what the audience requires — not what your philosophy requires. Because nobody cares.”

It is clear that Mamet took this calling very seriously and sees his audience as the most important part of the play — something that cannot be lost sight of for even a second. While some artists view their work as imparting a certain lesson upon the audience, Mamet is skeptical of subtext and does not view his art as moral and political counsel.

“I don’t want them to take anything out of the play. It’s not my job. I want them to have a good time. Listen, if they had a good time and they’ve kept their attention for an hour or two and they said, ‘You know, that’s a good idea, let me give you some money for that.’” Mamet then knows that he has done his job. 

Nevertheless, he still makes a distinction between art and pure entertainment.

“Well, c’mon, there is a difference between art and entertainment and there are places which they meet. Entertainment is the step down from art which is a step down from religion because all art was originally religious observance.” Unlike mindless TV and videos, art compels an audience to think about and discuss what they just saw. According to Mamet, “The best thing you can do — the greatest compliment — is to have the audience leave the theatre talking about what they just saw.”

“When I put out a play, I’ve done the best job I can and it may be insufficient, and then it’s my job to learn from its failures how to do better next time. But the real reward is to finish the project … I’ve been writing for 50 years — some of the things were great successes and some of the things were horrible failures but I got to do them.”

He strongly believes “the worst thing you can do is say, ‘Stay in your seats and you can explain to me what you thought, and we and the cast will explain to you what we meant.’” 

“The question is not to change people’s thinking, but to get them talking about what they just saw because they had a good time… It’s meant to seek their attention and give them what they signed up for.”

Mamet told The Commentator that “A moral decision, which my rabbi taught me, is not a decision between good and evil, right? … A moral decision is between two evils. What is the lesser of the two evils? And we get a chance to choose.”

Mamet has also written numerous articles in the Wall Street Journal that have garnered many responses. We asked him if he is happy about receiving responses and questions from his opinions expressed in his WSJ editorials. He said, “My wife said something very interesting to me the other day. She said ‘Dave, you know you really don’t care what people think of you, do you?’ And to me, there is some truth in that. I disagree with a lot of people. They are free to disagree with me.” Mamet quoted Woodrow Wilson saying “It’s real easy to get the mob to agree with you. All you have to do is scream with them.”

And perhaps that is precisely what makes his work so special.

Liev Markovich contributed to this article.

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Photo Caption: David Mamet

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons / David Shankbone