New Releases by David Mamet

Award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and director David Mamet shares scandalous and laugh-out-loud tales from his four decades in Hollywood where he worked with some of the biggest names in movies. David Mamet went to Hollywood on top—a super successful playwright summoned west in 1980 to write a vehicle for Jack Nicholson. He arrived just in time to meet the luminaries of old Hollywood and revel in the friendship of giants like Paul Newman, Mike Nichols, Bob Evans, and Sue Mengers. Over the next forty years, Mamet wrote dozens of scripts, was fired off dozens of movies, and directed eleven himself. In Everywhere an Oink Oink, he revels of the taut and gag-filled professionalism of the film set. He depicts the ever-fickle studios and producers who piece by piece eat the artist alive. And he ponders the art of filmmaking and the genius of those who made our finest movies. With the bravado and flair of Mamet’s best theatrical work, this memoir describes a world gone by, some of our most beloved film stars with their hair down, and how it all got washed away by digital media and the woke brigade. The book is illustrated throughout with three-dozen of Mamet’s pungent cartoons and caricatures.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! “Savagery appeased can only grow. Once you give in to it, it must escalate, like a fire searching for air.” The man who won the Pulitzer Prize for GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, who wrote the classic films THE VERDICT and WAG THE DOG sounds his alarm about the Visigoths at our gates. In RECESSIONAL he calls out, skewers, mocks, and, most importantly, dissects the virus of conformity which is now an existential threat to the West. A broad-ranging journey through history, the Bible, and literature, RECESSIONAL examines how politics and cultural attitudes about rebellion have shifted in the United States in the last generation. By screaming down freedom of thought and expression, Mamet explains, we kill invention and democracy – the foundations of security and growth. A wickedly funny, wistful and wry appeal to the free-thinking citizen, RECESSIONAL is a vital warning that if we don’t confront the cultural thuggery now, the commissars and their dupes will transform the Land of the Free into the dictatorship at which they aim.

Spanning centuries and continents, Mamet uses war and its players to explore, among other themes, redemption and forgiveness as they unfold in the context of conflict in the form of three novellas. In The Redwing, the first of the three novellas, a 19th-century Secret Service naval officer turned prisoner, then novelist, and finally memoirist recounts his own transformations during the course of his service and imprisonment. The protagonist in Notes on Plain Warfare examines religion through the prism of the American Indian wars. Finally, The Handle and the Hold is a vivid, dialogue-driven tale of two ex-military men who steal a plane in the month before the Israeli War of Independence.

"The finest American playwright of his generation" (Sunday Times) Glen Garry Glen Ross (also made in to a film starring Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino) "his superb play about real estate salesmen in a cut-throat sales competition" (New Society); in Prairie du Chien a railway carriage speeding through the Wisconsin night is the setting for a violent story of obsessive jealousy, murder and suicide, told within shooting distance of a card-hustler and his victim. "A short poignant study in violence and the twin drives of love and money, told with hypnotic power thorugh a travelling raconteur" (City Limits); The Shawl shows a clairvoyant wondering whether to cheat a bereaved woman of her inheritance and "confirms Mamet''s place as about the best living writer of vivid American dialogue" (Daily Telegraph). Set in the cut-throat world of Hollywood, Speed-the-Plow sees two old-time movie collaborators manipulate the aspirations of a young woman who will do anything to attain her dream of success "a brilliant black comedy, a dazzling dissection of Hollywood cupidity." (Newsweek)

A major new work from the revered playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross.

David Mamet shows us one evening, night and morning in the life of a couple, Nick and Ruth, who are spending some time in a summerhouse. As they pass the time, sharing stories and arguments, the mechanics of their relationship - and by implication, the relationships between women and men generally - come into focus.

A railway carriage speeding through the Wisconsin night is the setting for a violent story of obsessive jealousy, murder and suicide, told within shooting distance of a card-hustler and his victim.

It is 1934, and Charles Lang has invented an engine that runs solely on water. Attorneys Morton Gross and Lawrence Oberman see an opportunity to make themselves rich off the back of Lang''s ingenuity, blackmailing him into handing over the patent for his invention. When his sister Rita urges him not to give in to the bullies, Lang''s quest for justice ends in tragedy.

In these two moving early plays, David Mamet displays the humor, sensitivity, and ear for language that have made him one of the most celebrated playwrights in American theater today. Reunion depicts the awkward, tender meeting between a father and a daughter drawn together by their loneliness after twenty years of separation. Their cautious small talk, filled with evasion and cliché, gradually exposes the terrifying isolation in which they live, and ultimately, their great need for each other. In the short vignette Dark Pony, a father tells a favorite bedtime story to comfort his young daughter as they drive home late at night. A foray into the realm of legend, the story of a young Indian brave and his trusty horse, Dark Pony has been called “a lovely, tiny moment of a play” by Julius Novick of The Village Voice.

David Mamet is one of America’s most celebrated playwrights. The author of plays, screenplays, poetry, essays, and children’s books, he has won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross. The Obie award-winning Sexual Perversity in Chicago is about two office workers, Danny and Bernie, on the make in the swinging singles scene of the early 1970s. Danny meets Deborah in a library and soon they are not only lovers but roommates, and their story quickly evolves into a modern romance in all its sticky details. The Duck Variations is a dialogue between two old men sitting on a park bench. The conversation turns to the mating habits of ducks, but soon begins to reveal their feelings about natural law, friendship, and death. New York magazine has called The Duck Variations “a gorgeously written, wonderfully observant piece whose timing and atmosphere are close to flawless.”

With this screenplay David Mamet gives the traditional prison-break story his special blend of gripping suspense, slapdash buffoonery, and ingenious plotting. Bob, a vicious killer, cheats the electric chair by shooting his way out of the penitentiary, forcing two reluctant convicts to come along. Desperately dodging the cops, Ned and Jim reach a river that runs along the Canadian border. The bridge across it becomes their only hope of reaching safety, but a checkpoint guards the crossing. Mamet builds the tension to the breaking point with a series of sizzling surprises as time and again the escaped jailbirds fail by a hairsbreadth to slip past the guards. Disguised as priests, Ned and Jim are mistaken for two famous theologians attending the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows at a local monastery. The wickedly funny Mamet takes his two heroes down a dizzying course of serpentine adventures, demonstrating once again his peerless masu00adtery of the art of cinematic suspense.

Speed-the-Plow is an exhilaratingly sharp, comical, disturbing play about the power of money and sex in Hollywood, and how they corrupt two movie producers. Speed-the-Plow opened at Lincoln Center to sold-out seats, rave reviews and much fanfare in March 1988—staring Madonna, Joe Mantegna, and Ron Silver—and later moved to and had a long-standing run on Broadway.

There is nothing. A white person. Can say to a black person. About Race . . . Race. Is the most incendiary topic in our history. And the moment it comes out, you cannot close the lid on that box. Sparks fly when three lawyers and a defendant clash over the issue of race and the American judicial system. As they prepare for a court case, they must face the fundamental questions that everyone fears to ask. What is race? What is guilt? What happens when the crimes of the past collide with the transgressions of the present? Drawing on one of the most highly-charged issues of American history, David Mamet forces us to confront deep-seated prejudices and barely-healed wounds in this unflinching examination of the lies we tell ourselves and the truths we unwillingly reveal to others. Race was first seen in New York at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on December 6, 2009, directed by David Mamet. It receives its UK premiere at the Hampstead Theatre on 23 May 2013.

A new drama by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Two comic short plays by one of the theatre''s most celebrated and compelling writers: Keep Your Pantheon is a rousing farce that follows the fortunes and misfortunes of an impoverished acting troupe in ancient Rome. Featuring an over-the-hill acting guru who lusts after both his toga-clad protégé and a spot in the Sicilian Cork Festival, Mamet’s play returns to the roots of comedy, paying homage to the Roman playwright Plautus, whose works also inspired Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. “With Keep Your Pantheon, David Mamet, who’s been crowned the heavyweight playwriting champion of trash-talking masculinity, showcases what is perhaps his most underrated gift: his Houdini-like ability to slip out of pigeonholes. Mamet, one of the undeniably great playwrights of the baby boomer generation, is a literary conglomerate all his own, a writer too street-smart to let artistic success suffocate him. Give him a genre—in any medium—and he’ll be more than happy to show you what he can do. Mamet is like a shark shooting through the ocean, his very survival dependent on moving forward.” –Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times Also included in this volume, School is a crackling curtain-raiser in which two teachers shoot back-and-forth on topics ranging from pedophilia to recycling. “School offers a textbook example of the style that made its author famous. This merry little sketch moves with the show-off alacrity of a calculus prodigy whizzing through equations at the blackboard. The characters’ words bounce and click like the soles of virtuoso tap dances, riffing with their feet. This is verbal vaudeville as only Mr. Mamet can deliver it.” –Ben Brantley, New York Times

In this gripping short play, David Mamet combines mercurial intelligence with genuinely Hitchcockian menace. The Cryptogram is a journey back into childhood and the moment of its vanishing—the moment when the sheltering world is suddenly revealed as a place full of dangers. On a night in 1959 a boy is waiting to go on a camping trip with his father. His mother wants him to go to sleep. A family friend is trying to entertain them—or perhaps distract them. Because in the dark corners of this domestic scene, there are rustlings that none of the players want to hear. And out of things as innocuous as a shattered teapot and a ripped blanket, Mamet re-creates a child terrifying discovery that the grownups are speaking in code, and that that code may never be breakable.

One of our most brilliantly iconoclastic playwrights takes on the art of profession of acting with these words: invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school. Acting schools, “interpretation,” “sense memory,” “The Method”—David Mamet takes a jackhammer to the idols of contemporary acting, while revealing the true heroism and nobility of the craft. He shows actors how to undertake auditions and rehearsals, deal with agents and directors, engage audiences, and stay faithful to the script, while rejecting the temptations that seduce so many of their colleagues. Bracing in its clarity, exhilarating in its common sense, True and False is as shocking as it is practical, as witty as it is instructive, and as irreverent as it is inspiring.

Compared to some of its New England neighbors, Vermont has seemed to long-time resident David Mamet a place of intrinsic energy and progressiveness, love and commonality. It has lived up to the old story that settlers came up the Connecticut River and turned right to get to New Hampshire and left to get to Vermont. Is Vermont''s tradition of live and let live an accident of geography, the happy by-product of 200 years of national neglect, an emanation of its Scots-Irish regional character? Exploring the ways in which his decades in Vermont have shaped his character and his work, Mamet examines each of these strands and how the state''s free-thinking tradition can survive in an age of increasing conglomeration. The result is a highly personal and compelling portrait of a truly unique place.

David Mamet has been a controversial, defining force in nearly every creative endeavor-now he turns his attention to politics. In recent years, David Mamet realized that the so-called mainstream media outlets he relied on were irredeemably biased, peddling a hypocritical and deeply flawed worldview. In 2008 Mamet wrote a hugely controversial op-ed for the Village Voice, "Why I Am No Longer a ''Brain-Dead Liberal''", in which he methodically attacked liberal beliefs, eviscerating them as efficiently as he did Method acting in his bestselling book True and False. Now Mamet employs his trademark intellectual force and vigor to take on all the key political issues of our times, from religion to political correctness to global warming. The legendary playwright, author, director, and filmmaker pulls no punches in his art or in his politics. And as a former liberal who woke up, Mamet will win over an entirely new audience of others who have grown irate over America''s current direction.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Oleanna and Glengarry Glen Ross: an elegant collection of essays that reveal an autobiography of an internationally acclaimed dramatist that is both mysterious and revealing. The pieces in The Cabin are about places and things: the suburbs of Chicago, where as a boy David Mamet helplessly watched his stepfather terrorize his sister; New York City, where as a young man he had to eat his way through a mountain of fried matzoh to earn a night of sexual bliss. They are about guns, campaign buttons, and a cabin in the Vermont woods that stinks of wood smoke and kerosene—and about their associations of pleasure, menace, and regret. The resulting volume may be compared to the plays that have made Mamet famous: it is finely crafted and deftly timed, and its precise language carries an enormous weight of feeling.

One hundred years after the first publication of The Voysey Inheritance, David Mamet resurrects Harley Granville-Barker’s classic investigation into the capitalist soul in this brilliant adaptation. For generations, the Voysey family business has been secretly skimming money from its clients’ accounts. When Edward, designated to take over the firm from his aging father, discovers the embezzlement that has been keeping his relatives in a life of luxury, he must weigh the trappings of wealth and the imperative to preserve his family’s good name against the better principles of his conscience. But moral righteousness turns to self-protection when he comes to understand fully the consequences of his “inheritance.”

If theatre were a religion, explains David Mamet in his opening chapter, "many of the observations and suggestions in this book might be heretical." As always, Mamet delivers on his promise: in Theatre, the acclaimed author of Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed the Plow calls for nothing less than the death of the director and the end of acting theory. For Mamet, either actors are good or they are non-actors, and good actors generally work best without the interference of a director, however well-intentioned. Issue plays, political correctness, method actors, impossible directions, Stanislavksy, and elitists all fall under Mamet''s critical gaze. To students, teachers, and directors who crave a blast of fresh air in a world that can be insular and fearful of change, Theatre throws down a gauntlet that challenges everyone to do better, including Mamet himself.

One of America''s most provocative dramatists conquers new territory with this droll comedy of errors set in a Victorian drawing room. Anna and Claire are two bantering, scheming "women of fashion" who live together on the fringes of society. Anna has just become the mistress of a wealthy man, from whom she has received an enormous emerald. Claire, meanwhile, is infatuated with a young girl and wants to enlist the jealous Anna''s help for an assignation. As the two women exchange barbs and taunt their hapless maid, Claire''s inamorata arrives and sets off a crisis that puts both the valuable emerald and the women''s future at risk. Mamet brings his trademark tart dialogue and impeccable plotting, spiced with Wildean wit, to this wickedly funny comedy.

It''s November in a Presidential election year, and incumbent Charles Smith''s chances for reelection are looking grim. Approval ratings are down, his money''s running out, and nuclear war might be imminent. Though his staff has thrown in the towel and his wife has begun to prepare for her post-White House life, Chuck isn''t ready to give up just yet. Amidst the biggest fight of his political career, the President has to find time to pardon a couple of turkeys ¿ saving them from the slaughter before Thanksgiving ¿ and this simple PR event inspires Smith to risk it all in attempt to win back public support. With Mamet''s characteristic no-holds-barred style, November is a scathingly hilarious take on the state of America today and the lengths to which people will go to win.

Follows the adventures of the human ant, Roderick Spode, as he hangs out with his friend Cocky Cockroach, encounters Chaos the turtle, and fights his nemesis.

In the ancient Jewish practice of the kavannah (a meditation designed to focus one’s heart on its spiritual goal), Lawrence Kushner and David Mamet offer their own reactions to key verses from each week’s Torah portion, opening the biblical text to new layers of understanding. Here is a fascinating glimpse into two great minds, as each author approaches the text from his unique perspective, each seeking an understanding of the Bible’s personalities and commandments, paradoxes and ambiguities. Kushner offers his words of Torah with a conversational enthusiasm that ranges from family dynamics to the Kabbalah; Mamet challenges the reader, often beginning his comment far afield—with Freud or the American judiciary—before returning to a text now wholly reinterpreted. In the tradition of Israel as a people who wrestle with God, Kushner and Mamet grapple with the biblical text, succumbing neither to apologetics nor parochialism, asking questions without fear of the answers they may find. Over the course of a year of weekly readings, they comment on all aspects of the Bible: its richness of theme and language, its contradictions, its commandments, and its often unfathomable demands. If you are already familiar with the Bible, this book will draw you back to the text for a deeper look. If you have not yet explored the Bible in depth, Kushner and Mamet are guides of unparalleled wisdom and discernment. Five Cities of Refuge is easily accessible yet powerfully illuminating. Each week’s comments can be read in a few minutes, but they will give you something to think about all week long. Lawrence Kushner teaches and writes as the Emanu-El Scholar at The Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco. He has taught at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City and served for twenty-eight years as rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts. A frequent lecturer, he is also the author of more than a dozen books on Jewish spirituality and mysticism. He lives in San Francisco. David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright. He is the author of Glengarry Glen Ross, The Cryptogram, and Boston Marriage, among other plays. He has also published three novels and many screenplays, children''s books, and essay collections.

Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet ranks among the century''s most influential writers for stage and screen. His dialogue--abrasive, rhythmic--illuminates a modern aesthetic evocative of Samuel Beckett. His plots--surprising, comic, topical--have evoked comparisons to masters from Alfred Hitchcock to Arthur Miller. Here are two screenplays demonstrating the astounding range of Mamet''s talents. The Spanish Prisoner, a neo-noir thriller about a research-and-development cog hoodwinked out of his own brilliant discovery, demonstrates Mamet''s incomparable use of character in a dizzying tale of twists and mistaken identity. The Winslow Boy, Mamet''s revisitation of Terence Rattigan''s classic 1946 play, tells of a thirteen-year-old boy accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order and the tug of war for truth that ensues between his middle-class family and the Royal Navy. Crackling with wit, intelligent and surprising, The Spanish Prisoner and The Winslow Boy celebrate Mamet''s unique genius and our eternal fascination with the extraordinary predicaments of the common man.

Pulitzer Prize—winning playwright David Mamet’s Romance is an uproarious, take-no-prisoners courtroom comedy that gleefully lampoons everyone from lawyers and judges, to Arabs and Jews, to gays and chiropractors. It’s hay fever season, and in a courtroom a judge is popping antihistamines. He listens to the testimony of a Jewish chiropractor, who’s a liar, according to his anti-Semitic defense attorney. The prosecutor, a homosexual, is having a domestic squabble with his lover, who shows up in court in a leopard-print thong. And all the while, a Middle East peace conference is taking place. Masterfully wielding the argot of the courtroom, David Mamet creates a world in microcosm in which shameless fawning, petty prejudices, and sheer caprice hold sway, and the noble apparatus of law and order degenerates into riotous profanity.

Part of the Jewish Encounter series As might be expected from this fiercely provocative writer, David Mamet’s interest in anti-Semitism is not limited to the modern face of an ancient hatred but encompasses as well the ways in which many Jews have themselves internalized that hatred. Using the metaphor of the Wicked Son at the Passover seder—the child who asks, “What does this story mean to you?”—Mamet confronts what he sees as an insidious predilection among some Jews to seek truth and meaning anywhere—in other religions, in political movements, in mindless entertainment—but in Judaism itself. At the same time, he explores the ways in which the Jewish tradition has long been and still remains the Wicked Son in the eyes of the world. Written with the searing honesty and verbal brilliance that is the hallmark of Mamet’s work, The Wicked Son is a scathing look at one of the most destructive and tenacious forces in contemporary life, a powerfully thought-provoking and important book.

From the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and playwright: an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from a filmmaker who’s always played by his own rules. Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what on earth do those producers do anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and refreshingly forthright answers to these and other questions about every aspect of filmmaking from concept to script to screen. A bracing, no-holds-barred examination of the strange contradictions of Tinseltown, Bambi vs. Godzilla dissects the movies with Mamet’s signature style and wit.