All About Jewish Theatre - Unravelling the woolly Mamet

David Mamet is America's answer to Harold Pinter (who happens to be Mamet's friend). Using scabrous, demotic language, seemingly inconsequential anecdote and real or vague physical danger, he is able to pound away at U.S. capitalism, deception and crime. Where Pinter is a master of ambiguous pause and silence within a carefully orchestrated verbal score, Mamet excels at a certain type of speech: hot jazz or low blues, with riffs of coarse, monosyllabic, idiomatic language.

Like Pinter, Mamet can be darkly comic, with just enough sharp edge or scalding wit to be sinisterly dangerous, and like Pinter, he usually encloses his situations of menace or chaos within tight or restricted physical spaces: a junk shop (American Buffalo), a booth in a Chinese restaurant (Glengarry Glen Ross) or various small offices (Speed the Plow, Oleanna). His latest play, November, now playing on Broadway with Nathan Lane as a fictional U.S. president, seems to be a departure from his norm. However, despite its comic surface, it detonates the U.S. myth of equality, presenting a leader who is a bombastic, bullying idiot and a context in which to fire off an attack on the barbarity of capitalism.

Where does Mamet's voice come from? It's rooted chiefly in his Jewish ancestry and his native Chicago, according to biographer Ira Nadel, a University of British Columbia English professor whose previous biographies include studies of Tom Stoppard and Leonard Cohen. Nadel explores these roots with mixed results, offering more of an explanation of "Mametspeak" than a biography of the subject. His probing of family matters is not particularly deep, uncovering things that it leaves half-explored.

Mamet was the first-born son of two highly intelligent, upwardly mobile, first-generation Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors were from Russia and Poland. He and his sister Lynn had to comfort each other while their parents quarrelled chronically. Mamet had deep disagreements with his father (a tough labour lawyer who cultivated an elegant persona despite his violent temper), and sometimes the pair wouldn't speak to each other for months. Only toward the end of Bernie Mamet's life did the two reconcile. Nadel is correct in linking "Mametspeak" to the father's sharp, vicious tongue and his advocacy of aggressively challenging the system.

Nadel is equally correct in making a second link, with the seedy side of South Chicago, where Mamet learned the strategic importance of the "con" or deception in life and art, but he leaves large holes in Mamet's biography in the process. The basic facts of Mamet's schooling, college in Vermont, and theatre training and experience (including a show at Montreal's Expo) are covered, as well as his pastimes (poker, guns and knives), his early style of fractured cadences and overlapping dialogue (derived partially from acting teacher Sanford Meisner's language games) and the development of his controversial theory of unadorned, minimalist acting - you can't act words or emotions; you can only act actions - which seems to have been derived from his exposure to the ideas of Brecht and Richard Boleslavsky. (Mamet himself was reportedly a second-rate actor.)

Nadel is particularly good on Mamet's style of directing, his screenplays (The Verdict, Wag the Dog, Hoffa, Lansky, Lolita, House of Games etc.) and his essays (Three Uses of the Knife), but he skims over Mamet's first marriage to actress Lindsay Crouse (their divorce comes as a sudden development), his subsequent marriage to Scottish actress Rebecca Pidgeon and his relationship with his children.

Nor is he especially vivid in his evocation of David Mamet's personality. Critic John Lahr painted a much better personal portrait of Mamet in a New Yorker profile, showing us Mamet's "many fustian public disguises": a Che Guevara guerrilla look in the early 1970s (fatigues, combat boots, beret); then a Brechtian swagger (cigar, clear plastic eyeglass frames, open collar); and a rural gent in his middle years (work boots, blue jeans, Pendleton shirt, trimmed beard).

In Nadel's defence, of course, it can be argued that his book is a theatre biography. Its subtitle comes from Mamet's play of the same name, and the book concerns itself more with Mamet's life in the theatre than with his very guarded, private self. Nadel recognizes that "Mamet acknowledges the past fully - when it's not his own."

The biographer has done considerable research, and by drawing upon recollections of actors and directors who worked with Mamet, he has been able to examine the entire career to date. However, while this makes for a solid introduction to Mamet's oeuvre, it also accounts for a somewhat flabby text: Every play, every film script, every adaptation and every essay appears to merit equal attention.

Not to say that there is a lack of compelling material, for Nadel skillfully uses the plays and other texts as windows on Mamet's street-smart style, machismo and Judaism. It is the Judaic theme that proves to be one of the most robust and interesting elements in the book, though Nadel doesn't interrogate it with real critical rigour. What he does, instead, is marshal the data in order to advance his claim of Mamet's Jewish identity. Nadel points to the plays of the 1980s which reflect "the new bloom of Judaism" - or (as Nadel also calls it) the "trauma of nostalgia" - and then explores Mamet's works in the 1990s to show how the playwright deals with anti-Semitism, racism and extremes of Jewish activism.

Nadel also turns to Mamet's second marriage (where his wife converted to Judaism) in order to show his new freedom and confidence to confront Jewish issues that had hitherto remained unsettled for him. However, Mamet's Jewishness, while a form of virility in its truculence, becomes a virtual paranoia about the non-Jewish world. The crucial question - whether Mamet's Jewish bias has turned him from major dramatist to minor polemicist or jingoist - is left unanswered in this valuable introduction to Mamet's life and career.
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DAVID MAMET -A Life in the Theatre

By Ira Nadel

Macmillan, 278 pages, $29.95
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