Confessions Of A Former David Mamet Admirer

by Alex Kulak

Alex Kulak is an actor, playwright, and screenwriter currently based in Chicago. @AlexKulak2  

David Mamet is the reason I became a writer.

I don’t want to tell you that, but it’s true. And I didn’t become a writer so I could lie to people.

In college, I discovered his work and devoured every Mamet play I could get my hands on. This was easy, as the well-stocked library at Illinois State University had nearly all of his published plays on hand. I chose a scene from Speed-The-Plow for an assignment in acting class. I wrote a senior thesis paper on the changing critical perception of his work. I had plans of directing a production of Oleanna which never materialized (the student-run theatre group I was a part of finally did the play last spring, two years after I had graduated).

I quickly became aware of the political beliefs Mamet held, of how he became a staunch conservative around the premiere of his political satire November. Between this and the perceived misogyny of his writing, there weren’t very many classmates who shared my appreciation for his writing. But I remained steadfast in my beliefs that his early work was golden, one of the highlights of twentieth-century American theatre.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that ‘cancel culture’ is destroying the entertainment industry and unjustly casting out innocent people. If the Chad Kimballs and Gina Caranos of the world want to tweet their way out of a career, that’s their own fault. But I do believe, to an extent, in the idea of separating the art from the artist. If you look deep enough into any writer’s personal life, you have a good chance of finding something distasteful. Writers are humans, and humans are capable of doing abhorrent things. It’s one of the few times in my life I considered ignorance to be bliss, that you have the opportunity to consider a play as the author-less, made thing that it is, devoid of what its creator believes outside of it.

It seems that David Mamet would agree with me. Despite his outspoken views on politics, he’s gone on the record countless times to say that theatre shouldn’t be political, that its only obligation is to be entertaining.

Of course, this spurns the fact that there are countless plays by other writers that are political and entertaining or the fact that Mamet himself has written plays explicitly about sexual harassment, misogyny, homosexuality, racism, and the MeToo Movement, all deeply politicized topics.

At this point, you’re probably wondering, what is it about Mamet that’s worth all these mental gymnastics? If you have to ignore his personal beliefs and put up with the weird practices that he doesn’t even follow himself half the time, what is it all for?

To me, it was his writing. I loved his plays. I loved the dialogue, the plots, the minimalism, the characters, the one-liners, and the lightning-quick pacing. Most of all, I loved that they reminded me of home.

My first experience with his work was reading American Buffalo during my freshman year of college. It made me believe that my talents might be better suited as a playwright than the acting trade I was training for at the time. Growing up in a working-class suburb of Chicago, I saw the people I grew up around in that play. The shop owners and the mechanics my father was friends with, the old hustlers with the mouths of sailors I’d work with during summer jobs. It was the first time I’d seen them represented on stage. And they weren’t portrayed as crooks or punchlines. Their lives were ennobled, and their language was ennobled. His plays made me think that I didn’t have to bury that part of my identity if I wanted a life in the theatre.

We all know about the latest time Mamet has made headlines. During an appearance on Fox News last April, where he talked about supporting Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill, he said male teachers were inclined to pedophilia. When I watched that news clip, all of that admiration I had for his writing didn’t save him in my eyes. It just made the betrayal hurt that much more.      

How does the man who wrote Oleanna, a play about a teacher facing a possibly unsubstantiated sexual harassment accusation, appear on television thirty years later to hurl those same kinds of baseless insults at hundreds of thousands of people? Was I still just a fan because my demographic hadn’t been in his crosshairs yet?

It’s been a while since I’ve read one of his plays, and it’ll likely be a long time before I do it again. If you ask Mamet, I’m the product of a coddled, entitled generation who can’t handle sampling the wares of a person I have ideological differences with. If you ask me, I’m a writer who was made into what I am by David Mamet’s writing, someone who knows that the way I see and appreciate theatre for the rest of my life will be shaped by his work, being disappointed in his idol giving into a shameless grift. He’s an artist who has lost the favor of his original industry,  one based on innovation and boundary-pushing that he was a healthy beneficiary of. All he can do now is spew right-wing talking points for the niche audience that consumes media based on political affiliation.

I didn’t want to tell you that David Mamet’s the reason I’m a writer, but I’ll gladly tell you that he is not the reason I’m still a writer.