David Mamet Has Left the Building | Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

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, weathering the ‘emotional hurricane’ of his childhood in Chicago, and how the drama of those early years materialized in his 1994 play The Cryptogram and beyond.

In Act II, Mamet talks writing dialogue for the stage and screen, his disdain for psychoanalysis and the Actors Studio, and the philosophy that guided both his first theatre company and subsequent plays.

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

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

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