David Mamet has been a celebrated playwright for half a century, and there are so many themes and obsessions and modes and rhythms and tics running through his work that it’s easy to survey it all and simply categorize it as “Mametesque.” The continuity is there.
Yet when I look at the chronology of Mamet’s career, I’m struck by a huge and overwhelming schism — one that’s tonal, philosophical, stylistic and defining of his identity. In the plays that put him on the map, like “American Buffalo” and “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” he was trying to approximate the ways ordinary people talk, which is why the words came out
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