Introduction
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NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. David Mamet,“Hearing the Notes that Aren’t Played,” New York Times, July 15, 2002: E1. 2. David Mamet, telegram of April 28, 1977, to the St. Nicholas Theatre Company, Theatre Collection, Chicago Public Library; WR 20, 14. For his essay on A Life in the Theatre,see WR 103–106. 3. Joe Mantegna in Leslie Kane, “Interview with Joe Mantegna,” David Mamet: A Casebook , ed. Leslie Kane (New York: Garland, 1992), 264, 251. Hereafter “Man.” 4. Mamet in Susan Bullington Katz, “A Conversation with...David Mamet,” Conversations with Screenwriters (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), 196. 5. Mamet in Christopher Porterfield, “David Mamet’s Bond of Futility,” Time, February 28, 1977: 54ϩ.Review ofAmerican Buffalo. JAF xiii. Jafsie was a shadow figure in the Lindbergh kidnapping who volunteered to act as a go-between but may, in fact, have been part of the crime. 6. David Mamet in Chris Jones, “Mamet talks Mamet during rare visit home,” Chicago Tribune, March 29, 2006: Section 5:1. Mamet was participating in a question-and- answer session with retired Chicago Tribune drama critic Richard Christiansen at the Goodman Theatre on March 27, 2006, part of a month-long Mamet Festival. He repeats his formula in BVG 86–7. 7. John Heilpern, for example, titles his 1995 review of Cryptogram “Mametspeak,” which he identifies as an “oblique, disjointed” dialogue. See Heilpern, “Mametspeak,” How Good is David Mamet, Anyway? (New York: Routledge, 2000), 220. 8. David Mamet in Brian Case, “Hard and Fast,” Time Out, January 5, 1989: 29. Hereafter “Case.” Sherwood Anderson, Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook (1926. Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P.Appel, 1970), 195. 9. The structural features of the con function as a means to express, through deception, plot changes and unexpected surprises, a feature in Chekhov as much as in Mamet. His early love of poker (Chekhov also enjoyed gambling) was the practical expression of this pleasure with the con, bluffing a favorite posture. “If I had money to spare, I would spend the whole year gambling” Chekhov wrote in 1891. Chekhov in Philip Callow, Chekhov, The Hidden Ground (London: Constable, 1998), 166. It is no surprise that one of his closest and long-time friends is the master “con” and magician Ricky Jay. Mamet directed two of Jay’s most successful Broadway entertain- ments, Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants and On the Stem. 268 Notes 10. David W. Mauer, The Big Con, The Story of the Confidence Man. Intr. Luc Sante (1940; New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 2. Confidence men are dramatists, Mauer empha- sizes, and in the Big Con always perform theatre. See also Luc Sante, Low Life, Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991). 11. Gregory Mosher in Leslie Kane, “Interview,” David Mamet, A Casebook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), 233. 12. Romance satirically represents this theme. At one point the defendant, the exact charge against whom we never learn, in the midst of firing his attorney largely because of an anti-Semitic slur, exclaims, “God forgive me, what have I done? I hired a Goy lawyer! It’s like going to a straight hairdresser.” Rejecting the lawyer’s plea to submit to the court, he unleashes his own insults: “You fucken, brain-dead, white socks, country club, plaid pants, Campbell’s soup fucken sheigetz Goy. Submit. That’s fine. Take the example of Your Lord” (ROM 43). Judaism, Mamet has said, is “not a religion or a cul- ture built on faith. You don’t have to have faith. You don’t have to believe anything; you just have to do it” (AOT 74–5). 13. Mamet in Josh Kun, “Carry the Weight,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 18, 2004. Hereafter Kun. 14. See Heilpern, How Good is David Mamet, Anyway? Writings on Theatre and Why it Matters (London: Routledge, 2000), 220–28 and, for a contrasting view, Leslie Kane, Weasels and Wisemen, Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet (New York: Palgrave, 1999) Hereafter W&W. 15. Mamet in Rick Groen, “The Interview,” Globe and Mail, June 11, 1999: C3. 16. Mamet in Esther Harriott, “Interview” (August 1984), American Voices: Five Contemporary Playwrights in Essays and Interviews (Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland, 1988), 79. 17. Robert Falls in Chris Jones,“The Truth about Mamet,”Chicago Tribune, February 26, 2006. 18. Mamet is also echoing Beckett’s minimalist practice. To his biographer in 1989, Beckett explained that Joyce’s style was about adding material and that his was about taking it out. Beckett in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 319. CHAPTER 1 CITY OF FACT 1. Mamet was born at 12.31 A.M. at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago on November 30, 1947. In an interview held at the Chicago Public Library on October 13, 2006, Mamet refers to Fifty-third and Dorchester as his birthplace. However, the Chicago phone directory lists Bernard Mamet at 928 East Hyde Park Boulevard that year. By 1949, the family would move to Park Forest. 2. According to Ellis Island records,“Mamets” began to arrive as early as 1892 with a larger influx in 1902/1903 and then 1909 through 1922. Itzik Mamet from Ostiluk, Russia, and Mattule Mamet from Grubiczow, Russia, both arrived in 1909. Later Mamets came from Luck, Poland, Lyon, France, and Paris. 3. Mamet in Hannah Brown,“Schmoozing with David Mamet,” Jerusalem Post Magazine, July 26, 2002: 16. Notes 269 4. Mamet in Kenan Heise, “Bernard Mamet, lawyer for many labor unions,”“Chicagoland,” Chicago Tribune ( July 4, 1991): 8. This is Bernie Mamet’s obituary. 5. For Mamet’s early piano experiences, see Mamet, “Hearing the Notes that Aren’t Played,” New York Times, July 15, 2002 E1. Years later, he would compose songs for Rebecca Pidgeon, his second wife, on her 1996 album, New York Girl’s Club. In a 1987 interview, he acknowledged the importance of his piano lessons and his father’s obses- sion with semantics as sources for his ear and for his combative language (IOW 132). 6. Lynn Mamet in Samuel G. Freedman, “The Gritty Eloquence of David Mamet,” New York Times Magazine (21 April 1985: 46) Hereafter Freedman. 7. It went “If a duckling could say ‘what a beautiful day’ he wouldn’t mean sunny and fair, ‘cause a duck looks at things in a different way; he would mean it was wet every- where.’” Citing this in a 1977 interview, Mamet joked that he would put it on his tombstone. His attentiveness to language, however, led the writer Jack Kroll to remark that “Mamet’s ear is turned to an American frequency.” Mamet in Jack Kroll, “The Muzak Man,” Newsweek (February 28, 1977): 79. 8. Lynn Mamet, “The Lost Years,”unpublished. 6. Hereafter LY. 9. Lynn Mamet in “David Mamet,” www.filmakers.com/artists/mamet/biography/ page2.htm 10. Mamet, in an interview with Rick Kogan, Chicago Public Library, October 13, 2006, WBEZ Chicago Public Radio Amplified series, repeated his love of Riverview. Hereafter Kogan CPL. Mamet writes about the amusement park in “A Party for Mickey Mouse,”SF 78–9. 11. For Howells and Mencken, see the Chicago writer Richard Stern’s “The Chicago Writer’s City,” What Is What Was, Essays, Stories Poems (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), 99. Stern links the novelists to the rise of journalism and Chicago colum- nists like George Ade, Ben Hecht, Mike Royko, and Studs Terkel, whose heroes were “the abused and the abusive” (100). Stern provides an incisive “reading” of Chicago in this essay. Hereafter Stern. 12. Mamet in Minty Clinch,“Mamet Plots His Revenge,” Observer (January 24, 1989). 13. Freedman, “The Gritty Eloquence of David Mamet,” New York Times Magazine (21 April 1985: 46). 14. Court documents filed with the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, dated January 12, 1959, January 13, 1959 and January 19, 1959. 15. David Mamet in Clinch, “Mamet Plots His Revenge,” Observer (24 January 1989). 16. Macy in “The Man Behind the Curtain, David Mamet,” On Stage (Chicago: Goodman Theatre, March 2006), 12; Schachter in Freedman, 50. 17. David Mamet on the Charlie Rose Show in 1994, in Leslie Kane, “‘It’s the Way That You are with your children:’ The Matriarchal figure in Mamet’s late Work,” Gender and Genre, Essays on David Mamet, ed. Christopher C. Hudgins and Leslie Kane (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 151. 18. Willa Cather, “Lucy Gayheart” in Lucy Gayheart & My Mortal Enemy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1938), 24–5. Hereafter LG. For later changes in mood and the city, see LG 119, 127. 19. Uncle Henry was also supposedly an actor who had a bit part in Panic in the Streets with Richard Widmark, although scrutiny of the film did not turn him up. Uncle 270 Notes Henry also did some modeling; Mamet remembers a photo of a snappily dressed fig- ure standing next to a 1941 Packard (DMC 95). 20. From 1922 to 1956, groups like the Yiddishe Dramatishe Gezelschaft performed plays relating to Jewish life at the Jewish Peoples Institute on Douglas Boulevard. Among early and important Yiddish actors were Muni Weisenfreund, who began acting as a teenager in his family’s Pavilion Theatre on Twelfth near Halsted but by the 1930s was in Hollywood winning an Oscar for The Story of Louis Pasteur as the better-known Paul Muni. He would also star in the 1932 Chicago gangster film Scarface, written by another Jewish Chicagoan, Ben Hecht. Bernard Schwartz played Yiddish theatre for many years in Chicago before moving on to the movies as Tony Curtis.A measure of this awareness of Jewish drama was the 3,500 singers, dancers, and actors organized by the Jewish Community for Romance of the People performed on July 3, 1933, at Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition.