Reprinted from The New York Times On-Line Edition: November 16, 1997.
BOSTON -- The rehearsal took place on a recent Sunday in an obscure, cellar-like space in this city's South End. The room was spare. Two actors, Peter Riegert and Vincent Guastaferro, sat on folding chairs against the backdrop of a brick wall, observed by only a few others. One was the playwright, David Mamet, who sat directly in front of them, a familiar, stocky figure with a bluntly trimmed beard, round glasses and a baseball cap.
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| David Mamet rehearses "The Old Neighborhood," which stars Peter Riegert and Patti LuPone and opens Wednesday, November 19, at the Booth Theater. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times) |
That's more information than Mr. Mamet would supply about the setting for one of his plays. But of course the thing about Mr. Mamet is there's a lot that isn't made explicit. For all the rage and anguish that gets communicated in his work, much of it is hidden, repressed, roiling but invisible.
Indeed, in the rehearsal, which was for "The Old Neighborhood," Mr. Mamet's play that opens at the Booth Theater on Wednesday, it wasn't the lines giving the actors trouble so much as what was between them: the pauses and the language-less utterances that Mr. Mamet meticulously includes, to give rhythm and emphasis to the actual words.
"Tolstoy said a great thing," Mr. Mamet told the actors as they struggled to communicate the friendship between their characters in a scene in which the lines seemed disjointed and obscure. "You can tell that a marriage is on the rocks when they speak to each other rationally."
Clever, referential, oblique and biting, it was a remark typical of Mr. Mamet, who turns 50 at the end of the month.
Perhaps alone among American writers in his embrace of both serious and popular culture, he is in a period of remarkable productivity, even by his own prolific standards.
He has just published two books, "True and False," a prickly and exhortatory treatise for young actors about the trials of their chosen profession; and a novel, "The Old Religion," which purports to trace the thoughts of Leo Frank -- the Jewish factory manager in Georgia, who in 1915 was wrongly convicted of and executed for the rape and murder of one of his employees -- as he waited out his torment in prison.
And then there are the movies, which seem to pour out of him.
He wrote the screenplay for the Anthony Hopkins-Alec Baldwin film, "The Edge," now in theaters; he has finished "The Spanish Prisoner," an independent film about an elaborate con game that stars Steve Martin and Campbell Scott and that he wrote and directed; "Wag the Dog," a political satire he wrote for the director Barry Levinson, is to be released next month, and he has completed several new screenplays, including a remake of "The Cincinnati Kid" for Al Pacino.
I had to give him an award recently," said Ricky Jay, the writer and prestidigitator who is a close friend of the playwright and who appears in "The Spanish Prisoner." "And as I was making my introduction speech, I looked down along the podium and I saw Dave was making notes. I thought he had finished another couple of screenplays while I was talking."
But beyond the sheer volume, the work, particularly his stage dramas, has begun to take on a reflective, personal cast. It is as if Mr. Mamet -- whose angry male characters in plays like "Glengarry Glen Ross," "American Buffalo" and "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" made his reputation as an iconoclastic bard of rage -- has softened enough to let the world in on some of his secrets.
It was in "The Rake," a short, autobiographical essay published in 1992, that Mr. Mamet first revealed in print what was apparently a childhood spent in torment, the chief villain being a stepfather. In the essay, he recounts an incident in which the stepfather threw his younger sister, Lynn, across the room, cracking a vertebra in her back. His last play, "The Cryptogram," depicts the life of a young boy living in a fractured home, where the parents lie to each other and manipulate him, and concludes with the image of the silent child ascending a staircase to an attic, holding a knife and apparently bent on self-destruction.
Now there is "The Old Neighborhood," which consists of three previously written one-acts that have been revised and knitted together into one, and which, even as it is among Mr. Mamet's most oblique and stylistically spare plays, resonates as his most openly autobiographical. The play had its world premiere last April in a separate production at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., directed then, as now, by Scott Zigler.
In it, Bobby Gould, whose name recurs in Mr. Mamet's work and who in this case he acknowledges to be his alter ego, makes a midlife visit to his hometown. There, he confronts, in separate painful conversations, a childhood friend (Mr. Guastaferro), his sister (played by Patti LuPone) and a past lover, played by Mr. Mamet's wife, Rebecca Pidgeon. The events that inform their shared pain are never made specific; it is only evident that it still stirs them.
"In many ways it's an old-fashioned play, of the kind you would see in the 50's," Mr. Mamet said, "a kitchen play, a reflective, family-oriented play." And that may be so, though in the traditional family play, the events that cause the conflict are dramatized on stage. In "The Old Neighborhood," the conflicts are old: the strife-causing events are being kept alive by the characters' memories. Can the same be said of the playwright? Is it fair for a theatergoer to see David Mamet in Bobby Gould?
"If you want," Mr. Mamet said. "But it seems to me that that happens only if the play isn't any good."
In a midday interview at his favorite luncheonette, near his home in West Newton ("A big plate of crunchy bacon," he told the waiter, "yum, yum, yum, yum, yum"), Mr. Mamet glanced off a number of subjects, among them his burgeoning predilection for minimalism ("Doing more with less, that's what art is about, juggling with one ball") and the evils of the movie business (and how much fun it is, which would explain why he tolerates the grinding Hollywood system he lambastes in his new acting book).
"Why deal with Hollywood?" he said. "It's screaming good fun. It pays very, very well. And in certain ways, it's the big table, and as a gambler I always wanted to play at the big table. I'm not an ascetic. I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else."
And he spoke, with enthusiasm, about a production of "Hamlet" he has been directing in fitful rehearsals over the last two years. His friend William H. Macy is in the title role, and the cast has included such Hollywood luminaries as Michael J. Fox (Laertes) and Whoopi Goldberg (the Player King).
"I'm trying to talk Steve Martin into playing Claudius," he said. He plans to stage it in Manhattan, at the tiny Atlantic Theater, the home of the company he and Mr. Macy helped found in the 1980's. With such a cast, why not Broadway?
"I want to see people clawing each other to death outside the theater," he said.
And he also showed off his predilection, within the context of ordinary discourse, to cite the wisdom of others. Within a couple of hours, he managed to quote, or paraphrase, Mike Nichols, Stanislavsky, Paul Newman, Groucho Marx, Ethel Merman and the Greek philosopher Epictetus ("Keep your principles few and simple so you may refer to them at a moment's notice").
On the subjects of his productivity ("What else is there to do?") and his advancing age, he is inclined to glibness. "Probably," he said, asked if turning 50 meant anything to him, though he was a bit more revealing in summing up the theme of "The Edge," in which Anthony Hopkins bests Alec Baldwin in a survival test that is also a symbolic battle over a woman.
"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance," he said.
What he was most reluctant to discuss was the provenance of the new play. He admitted that the old neighborhood of the title is in Chicago, where he grew up, though it never says so in the play, and that Bobby is his stand-in. But he wouldn't acknowledge much else. "You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?'" he said. "And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'"
Asked what Bobby does for a living, he said he didn't know, it didn't matter.
"In Hollywood they always want to know about a character's back-story, which is the stupidest damn idea. It's like asking what kind of underwear the guy in the painting is wearing." Pressed about the specific events the play comes from, he got a little testy, though he did so with a smile.
"Us writers, we're even bigger whores than journalists," he said. "Because journalists, once in a while think, 'Well, Jesus Christ, maybe it might be a good idea to consider using a fact.' We don't even do that."
Nonetheless, perhaps the most telling of the three one-acts is "Jolly," in which Bobby and his sister commiserate about their torturous upbringing.
"I read it," said Lynn Mamet, a writer herself now living in southern California. "It was as if David had replayed six or eight of our phone conversations."
This was not meant critically, or with a sense of betrayal, but by way of illustrating the complexity of the family dynamic. In the real-life tale, Lenore Mamet left her husband, a labor lawyer, for one of his colleagues, and the two children lived with their mother and stepfather until young David had had enough and moved in with his father. In no household, however, did there seem to be respite from the burden of trying to appease the apparently unappeasable adults.
"Suffice it to say we are not the victims of a happy childhood," Ms. Mamet said. "There was a lot of violence, but the greatest violence was emotional. It was emotional terrorism. In my estimation, we are survivors of a travel route that included a 1950's version of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, and that we both still bear the numbers on our arms. In that sense, when he writes, he wears short sleeves."
The rage in all his plays, she said, originates there. "They're all familial," she said.
Tightly connected as the two are -- "I would take a bullet for him" Ms. Mamet said -- their experience was not the same. Whereas her brother grew up admiring their real father, Bernard, who died five years ago, she always hated him. She, on the other hand, has forgiven her stepfather; her brother has not. Ms. Mamet said she would provide her stepfather's phone number only if her brother agreed to it; he wouldn't.
Ms. Mamet's own new play is called "The Lost Years," in which a man is caught among the women in his life: his wife, his sister and his remembered mother.
"It's basically about the breakup of David's marriage to Lindsay," she said, referring to Lindsay Crouse, the actress who was Mr. Mamet's first wife, with whom he had two daughters, Willa and Zosia. Now teen-agers, they live with their mother in California. Judging from the play, it would be an understatement to say the marriage did not bring Mr. Mamet much solace.
"In dealing with our demons, we have identified different people as the devil," Ms. Mamet said. "My response to that is it doesn't matter who we single out; there was a devil, and as a result we will never run out of stories. The very thing that could have destroyed us and driven us to silence ultimately led us to open our veins on white bond and make a living."
Ms. Mamet said her brother -- "the angriest man who was ever born" -- has clearly softened with age, and indeed, the signs are there. Several years ago, he embraced Judaism with a fervor, which, he acknowledged, had something to do with growing older.
His second marriage, to Ms. Pidgeon (who converted to Judaism) has, by all accounts, had a calming effect on him; so has the birth of their daughter, Clara, who is now 3. And his other family, a widening professional circle of actors, writers and directors who are exceedingly loyal to him, is clearly a source of enormous solace. Almost everyone he works with now has worked with him before.
"Life has gotten a bit easier for him lately, I think," Ms. Pidgeon said, though asked why, she retreated into a characteristic Mametian cocoon. "I can't go into the reason," she said. In "The Old Neighborhood," she is placed in the odd position of portraying the woman who loved Bobby Gould and lost him.
"Do I feel like I'm on stage with my husband?" she said. "I do, in a way. But it's a different part of Dave." What's on stage isn't real; it isn't what actually happened. The work, she said, represents "the dream life of the writer."
"When the little boy goes up the stairs with the knife, presumably to end his life, in 'The Cryptogram,'" she said, "that's not exactly what Dave did, is it?"
No, obviously not. And apparently he has now lived long enough to tell the tale. At one point in the Sunday rehearsal, progress stalled as Mr. Guastaferro, as Joey, struggled with the speech in which he admits to his old pal Bobby that he has recurring fantasies about killing his family. Mr. Guastaferro had been rushing things, plunging into his awful confession as though he couldn't keep it inside him. He didn't hold onto it long enough and so the speech had a false, comic ring to it. He didn't seem terribly tortured.
"'Sometimes, I think,' and stop, just stop until you're ready to say it," Mr. Mamet instructed him. "It'll hold forever."
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
