David Mamet

Comic Drama 7 male2 interior setsThis scalding comedy took Broadway and London by storm and won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize. Here is Mamet at his very best, writing about small-time, cutthroat real estate salesmen trying to grind out a living by pushing plots of land on reluctant buyers in a never-ending scramble for their share of the American dream. Revived on Broadway in 200

Part of the Jewish Encounter seriesAs 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 mea

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

The purpose of theater, like magic like religion… is to inspire cleansing awe. With bracing directness and aphoristic authority, one of our greatest living playwrights addresses the questions: What makes good drama? And why does drama matter in an age that is awash in information and entertainment? David Mamet believes that the tendency to dramatize is essential to human nature, that we create dra

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 male office workers, Danny and Bernie, on the make in the swinging singles scene of the early 1970's.

Having put his personal stamp on the contemporary theater, David Mamet now performs the supremely audacious feat of reinventing the theater of the past. He does so by telling his own ingenious and eerily moving version of the tragedy of Dr. Faustus.Mamet’s Faustus—like Marlowe’s and Goethe’s before him—is a philosopher whose life’s work has been the pursuit of “the secret engine of the

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross , here is a collection of thirty-two one-act plays and short dramatic pieces that David Mamet himself considers to be some of the best writing he has ever done. In this single volume are all seven plays that makeup Vermont Sketches , which Frank Rich of The New York Times has called ‘remarkable . . . as terrifying as a stranglehold.” He

The investigation focused on the Jewish manager of the factory, Leo Frank, who was subsequently forced to stand trial for the crime he didn't commit and railroaded to a life sentence in prison. Shortly after being incarcerated, he was abducted from his cell and lynched in front of a gleeful mob. In vividly re-imagining these horrifying events, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Mamet inhabits the conscio

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Oleanna and Glengarry Glen 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 the suburbs of Chicago, where as a boy David Mamet helplessly watched his stepfather terrorize his sister; New York City, where as

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.

Playwright David Mamet’s brilliant debut as a film director, House of Games is a psychological thriller in which a young woman psychiatrist falls prey to an elaborate and ingenious con game by one of her patients, who entraps her—with her own subconscious connivance—in a series of criminal escapades. It is a breathless roller-coaster ride of a movie that keeps springing one bizarre surprise after

The first single-volume edition of this stunning early Mamet playYou know how much of our life we're alive, you and me? Nothing. Two minutes out of the year. When we meet someone new, when we get married, when, when, when, when we're in difficulties. . . once in our life at the death of someone that we love. That's. . . in a carcrash. . . and that's it. You know, you know,

Speed-the-Plow's Broadway run is the most recent triumph of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's astonishingly productive career. "By turns hilarious and chilling....the culmination of this playwright's work to date....Riveting theater."-Frank Rich, New York Times; "A brilliant black comedy, a dazzling dissection of Hollywood cupidity and another tone poem by our foremost master of the language of

Presents a comedy of errors set in a Victorian drawing room featuring the banter and scheming of Anna and Claire.

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 s

Plays, Drama, Theatre, Performing Arts

In David Mamet’s two-character play, a male college instructor and his female student sit down to discuss her grades and in a terrifyingly short time become the participants in a modern reprise of the Inquisition. Innocuous remarks suddenly turn damning. Socratic dialogue gives way to heated assault. And the relationship between a somewhat fatuous teacher and his seemingly hapless pupil turns into

In Bambi vs. Godzilla , David Mamet, the award-winning playwright and screenwriter, gives us an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from the perspective of a filmmaker who has always played the game his own way.Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Whose opinion matters when revising a screenplay? Why are there so many

David Mamet's Oval Office satire depicts one day in the life of a beleaguered American commander-in-chief.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 fo

The Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, director and teacher has written a blunt, unsparingly honest guide to acting. In True and False David Mamet overturns conventional opinion and tells aspiring actors what they really need to know. He leaves no aspect of acting untouched: how to judge the role, approach the part, work with the playwright; the right way to undertake auditions and the proper appr

"Essays in direct line from Stanislavsky, Chekhov, Shaw, and Brecht"—Mike NicholsA collection of essays from Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Mamet adressing many issues in contemporary American theaterTemporarily putting aside his role as playwright, director, and screen-writer, David Mamet digs deep and delivers thirty outrageously diverse vignettes. On subje

David Mamet is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of such seminal plays of our time as Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, Oleanna, and Speed-the-Plow. His A Life in the Theatre takes us into the lives of two actors: one young and rising into the first full flush of his success; the other older, anxious and beginning to wane. In a series of short, spare, and increasingly raw exchanges, we see th

According to David Mamet, a film director must, above all things, think visually. Most of this instructive and funny book is written in dialogue form and based on film classes Mamet taught at Columbia University. He encourages his students to tell their stories not with words, but through the juxtaposition of uninflected images. The best films, Mamet argues, are composed of simple shots. The great

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 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,

“Intellectually salacious…Deep in its gut, Mamet’s gripping play argues everything in America is still about race.” –Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune“Tasty dialogue, spiky confrontations and more than occasionally biting observations… RACE riffs artfully on the subtleties of discrimination and guilt, resentment and shame, and its ambiguities appear designed to stir audiences into testy deb

"My interest in politics began when I noticed that I acted differently than I spoke, that I had seen 'the government' commit sixty years of fairly unrelieved and catastrophic error nationally and internationally, that I not only hated every wasted hard-earned cent I spent in taxes, but the trauma and misery they produced..."For the past thirty years, David Mamet has been a controversia

Jackie Weiss, Mike Hodge wrote, had died of a broken heart, it being broken by several slugs from a .45... .From his perch at the Chicago Tribune, Mike Hodge—scarred veteran of the Great War—had gotten to know the underbelly of the metropolis like few others. Politicians, gangsters, prostitutes, bootleggers, opium addicts, jazz musicians and con artists— he’d observed

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 call

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

One of America's greatest living literary legends invites you think for yourself in this compelling narrative of manipulation, power, and the human condition."Government, like Circe, turns men into swine," David Mamet writes in his latest political tour de force. Prepare to be challenged, enlightened, and entertained by The Disenlightenment as Mamet dissects t