The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet (review)

This collection of twelve scholarly articles covers the scope of Mamet's plays, essays, films, and fiction. Christopher Bigsby, the editor of this work and author of a seminal book on the playwright, brings out skillfully the unity of Mamet's whole body of work in his introductory essay and in his essay on the novels. Three chapters look at the writer's drama from 1970 to 2000, three more focus on his best-known plays, and one focuses on his films. There are also two essays on the playwright's directing technique and a final reinterpretation of published articles and reviews.

Bigsby studies Mamet's work through its biographical, social, and cultural context. He makes the point that the tension between the world of deceitful appearances and the quest for integrity is a constant in Mamet's work. While Mamet's characters use language for malfeasance, the playwright rejects all types of artifice in play acting and in his personal life. He reclaimed his Jewish identity during the 1980s, realizing that he had been seeking entry into a corrupt culture devoid of spiritual values. Bigsby suggests that Mamet, who was victimized by an irascible stepfather, sought refuge in play acting and later found that society at large glorified and rewarded callousness and selfishness. Bigsby sees a parallel between the ingenious lies of the characters hypnotizing their prey in Mamet's drama and the captive audience of the theatre.

Johan Callens looks at six plays written in the 1970s in which characters use language to veil their inadequacies and to captivate their listeners. He compares Lakeboat to O'Neil's The Iceman Cometh. The male characters are directionless and resort to storytelling as a divertissement. The episodic structure and the clipped dialogues of the early plays echo the fragile and intermittent nature of the human relationships.

For Matthew Roudané, the dynamics that define the relations between individuals in American Buffalo are reminiscent of a Darwinian struggle. Roudané's study is eloquent but depends heavily on Mamet's pronouncements on the evils of capitalism. The playwright, influenced by Veblen, singled out greed as the force perverting personal and social values. Roudané is more interesting when he argues that the characters' conflicts are not entirely generated by monetary gain but by inner rivalries between the male characters.

Alain Piette explores the intersections between the social and political contexts of the 1980s and Mamet's major plays during this period. To him, the predatory practices of the real estate salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross are emblematic of the "Reagan–Bush" era. In Edmund, The Shawl, and Speed the Plow, Piette detects an unspoken yearning for human contact on the part of characters afflicted by moral decay, self-deception, and raw greed.

It is the linguistic aspect of Glengarry Glen Ross that Benedict Nightingale emphasizes. Calling Mamet "the bard of streetwise barbarism," whose language is closer to poetry than prose, he concludes, like Bigsby, that the audience shares Mamet's fascination with tricksters. Nightingale's argument regarding the moral underpinnings of the play, however, is not yet fully developed. In the end, he suggests that the characters' inventiveness would help them flourish in a better society. Some readers may disagree with this conclusion and may find it difficult to sympathize with scoundrels instead of their victims.

While Mamet was busy writing novels, screenplays, and essays in the 1990s, he also explored new topics, such as sexual harassment and Jewish identity, in his drama. Heather Braun highlights these two key issues in Oleanna and The Old Neighborhood. She applauds the presence of strong female characters but believes that the reduced plots and inconclusive endings might baffle an audience. Brenda Murphy mentions the similarity between Oleanna and Ionesco's The Lesson but, in fact, in Oleanna the student refuses to be victimized, assigning her own meaning to the dialogue. Murphy also notes that feminist critics have found the play misogynistic, while she sees in it two people failing "to meet as human...