David Mamet is one of the most celebrated American playwrights of the last century: Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, and Glengarry Glen Ross— which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1983 and remains timely today. Our conversation unfolds, fittingly, in three acts. 

Act I: the inspiration behind his new novel about education, Some Recollections of St. Ives(6:00), weathering the ‘emotional hurricane’ of his childhood in Chicago (15:00), and how the drama of those early years materialized in his 1994 play The Cryptogram and beyond (27:00).

In Act II, Mamet talks writing dialogue for the stage and screen (30:00), his disdain for psychoanalysis and the Actors Studio (33:00), and the philosophy that guided both his first theatre company (34:00) and subsequent plays (37:00).

In the closing act, we wrestle with Mamet’s rightward shift: his views on DEI (40:00), late-stage capitalism (48:00), ‘Constitutional Conservatism’ as it relates to the 2020 election (55:00), his latest book The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment (59:00), and what he believes a ‘peaceful and patriotic’ protest should look like (1:07:00).

Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at mail@talkeasypod.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.