Lemonada

Lemonada

This is Talk Easy. I'm San Francisco.

Welcome to the show.

Today, writer, director, playwright, David Mamet.

Mamet is one of the most celebrated American playwrights of the last century.

There's sexual perversity in Chicago, Speed the Plow, American Buffalo,

Glengarry, Glenn Ross, which won the pull of surprise for drama

and remains as timely today as it did back in 1983. In fact, a new production of Glenn Gary,

starring Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Kieran Culkin was recently mounted on Broadway at the Palace

Theater. Its final performance was on June 28th.

And it's not just Mamet's stage plays that remain in circulation. It's his films, too.

They're the ones he wrote and directed, House of Games, a Spanish prisoner, State and Maine,

and the ones he wrote for hire, The Verdict, The Untouchouchables, wag the dog, each of which displays,

to varying degrees, his ear for dialogue, or what Mamet has called a poetic impression of the

working class. People don't always talk the way my characters do in real life, he said in

1984. Although they may use some of the same words,

it's not an attempt to capture language as much as it is an attempt to create language. It's an

illusion. But behind that illusion, as a man whose work often circles similar themes, alienation, distrust of authority and feelings,

and of course the importance of independent thinking.

And yet what was one subtext in Mamet's work has in recent years become the text of Mamet's life.

In 2008, in the Village Voice, he published an essay outlining why he's no longer, quote,

...