David Mamet -- Political Conservative

What it means that this seems to matter.

Next year, Broadway will host a revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross with a great looking cast at a theater to be named later. The idea is catnip for me, a Gen X theatre-lover, educated by Boomers to seek thrills and truths from machismo-oozing playwrights like Mamet and Sam Shepherd.

Few mentions of Mamet these days go without somebody noting his right wing politics. In 2022, he identified as a Republican, and a pro-Trump one at that. You can’t expect a writer behind an entire speech built on the phrase “fuckin’ Ruthie,” to be in the Mitt Romney camp of American conservatism. But a big question is: “who cares?” Mamet isn’t pulling strings in political theater — he doesn’t host mega donor events or help the Republicans choose kings and queens in back rooms. His plays are more about society than politics. None of his characters are role models. If Hollywood producer Bobby Gould from Mamet’s hilarious Speed the Plow announced he was voting for Reagan, it’d probably register to the audience as exactly what not to do.

I can kind of always watch this movie. Just put it on and I’ll stop whatever else I am doing and watch it. It’s so Rebecca Pidgeony.

The interest in Mamet’s politics is largely because he’s an oddball in the community. To the extent that we worry about the politics of playwrights at all, we tend to think of right wing as something measured against liberal activist and ACT Up founder Larry Kramer as the center.

American theatre has traditionally been a place where marginalized people have first told their stories, learned they are universal and then seen them spread to movies and television. For a long time, Hollywood has played catch-up to what happens on stages at universities, regional non-profits and even the commercial houses on Broadway and London’s West End. When you’re spending a gazillion dollars to adapt a comic book to screen, you just can’t take the kind of chances you can take with $1,000, a trio of unpaid actors and some cubes in a black box space behind a burrito hut.

But, of course, this is the contemporary scene. Classical theatre had all sorts of conservative elements in it. We might celebrate Lysistrata as a feminist, antiwar play from antiquity, but there were also plenty of plays about why it would be a good thing for Athens to conquer Sparta or the other way around. Shakespeare wrote for the monarchy and sometimes the patriarchy and sometimes about why it’s a good thing to attack the French.

The roots of Mamet’s conservatism lie in his own contrarianism. In Glengarry, his star sales person, Ricky Roma, connects with clients by pitting them against society. We see Ricky meeting with a prospect on a day so hot that, as Ricky puts it, people are begging police officers to arrest them. Then Roma points out that “they” say it’s not safe to drink alcohol during a heat wave because it is dehydrating. But they are drinking and, as Roma puts it, his philosophy is always to do the opposite of what most people do. It is this independence, Roma tells his mark, that should allow him to buy a parcel of Arizona real estate without consulting his wife. Whether or not Mamet explicitly endorses Roma’s world view, he does present it as effect.

Then, we see it in Mamet’s later works. In 1992, after Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination hearings, the topic of workplace sexual harassment by men against women had just taken prominence and Mamet immediately turned it on its head in his two character play Oleanna, where a student named Carol files a sexual harassment complaint against he professor John for touching her shoulder, making sexist remarks during class and teaching “pornographic” subjects. John is innocent, the playwright makes clear. Carol is not very smart and has been manipulated by other forces on campus. Still, John’s explosive reaction to the false accusation ruins his life but his anger is understandable even if his actions are criminal.

So, there we are, 30 years before Mamet would identify as a Republican — by his account, he was a liberal back then, but one who always questioned, like Ricky Roma, the dominant wisdom. Too hot for alcohol? Pour me a bourbon. Women are being mistreated by bosses and professors? Well, let’s look at what happens when good men are falsely accused.

Even Mamet’s ideas about how to make theatre fly in the face of orthodoxy (not to be confused with Bertolt Brecht). He believes everything you need to perform a play is on the page already. He thinks that actors who make up elaborate backstories for their characters and search for hidden psychological motivations are at best wasting time and at worst subverting the intention of the writer. Even though Mamet’s approach was endorsed by The Atlantic Theatre Company back in the 1980s it remains heretical to actors who remain loyal to Konstantin Stanislavsky as the Sigmund Freud of theatre.

So, Mamet is always a contrarian and being a conservative in theatre is kind of what you do if you’re not the type to follow the crowd. It’s also the case that a lot of creative writers are holding up a mirror to society and don’t necessarily like what they see, and they’re reacting against that. David Foster Wallace, to bring in another Dave I know (I know, these are the Daves I know…) critiques our need for constant entertainment in Infinite Jest in a way that matches up tightly with conservative scholar Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I don’t know what’s irking Mamet, but I can certainly understand taking opposition with a theatre world where people acknowledge their facilities sit on former tribal lands before the show starts but then don’t share any of the box office with tribes. Or a theatre where people casually accuse Israel of colonialism and genocide without understanding the history of the region or the motivations of all its political actors.

But mostly, Mamet is conservative because he’s different and that is, at least, interesting.