Finding solace and success in theater

DAVID MAMET may be the most famous playwright in America, but what does that mean, really? When he emerged from the Chicago theater scene in the early ‘70s, Mamet brought forth an entirely new vernacular, those chewed-off sentence fragments that have curdled into sketch comedy cliches. His worldview was just as savage; in plays like “Edmond,” “American Buffalo” and “Glengarry Glen Ross,” Mamet articulated a country’s lapse of faith -- its morals in the toilet, every human interaction a confidence scheme, its lust for money a kind of irrational mania.

Having crossed the Rubicon into screenwriting and filmmaking -- which, as this biography points out, was something that the young purist vowed he would never do -- Mamet has polished his brutal mannerisms of action and speech, the O. Henry-like twist at the end of a twisty story, the machismo of men too weak to admit their own shortcomings.

A biography that wants to reclaim Mamet as a great artist of the stage is not entirely premature. Unfortunately Ira Nadel, an English professor at the University of British Columbia whose other books include biographies of Tom Stoppard and Leonard Cohen, has not delivered. Relying almost exclusively on secondary sources, Nadel has constructed a very shaky edifice upon which to discuss Mamet’s singular career.

Mamet’s childhood was predictably rough. His father, Bernie, was a tough labor lawyer, and young David was privy to the milieu of the unionized working class -- material that would come in handy later on. Bernard Mamet also instilled in his son the persuasive power of language; the importance, for example, of expressing “a negative concept in a positive form: ‘not meaningful’ rather than ‘meaningless.’ ”

But there was constant domestic friction, which manifested itself in a running commentary on young David’s shortcomings. And so Mamet found refuge in Chicago Public Library’s third-floor reading room, often cutting class to pore over a wide swath of literature and journalism. He was especially drawn to the flinty, hard-nosed writing of favorite sons such as Theodore Dreiser. Mamet would just as frequently walk around the city and observe; Chicago, Nadel points out, was his laboratory. In one of many awkwardly phrased sentences in the book, Nadel writes that the city was a place that “united the populist and the intellectual, a union that Mamet still praises.”

Mamet’s parents were divorced in 1959, and his mother, Lee, married Bernard Kleiman, another character in the future writer’s living theater of cruelty. This time, there were severe beatings for Mamet’s sister and numerous trips to the hospital supervised by her brother. It was theater that saved Mamet. After moving out of the house to live with his father, Mamet attended the Francis W. Parker progressive school, which cultivated his love for language, reading and live performance. Soon, he was working odd jobs at Hull House Theatre, a wing of Jane Addams’ famous settlement house (though Nadel unaccountably fails to mention this connection). Mamet also talked his way into a job as a factotum at Second City, playing piano for kids’ shows on weekends, among other things.

From there, it was a smooth trajectory upward, marked by a rock-ribbed work ethic and a desire to forge a theatrical path that could confront the prejudices of audiences with an unprecedented frankness. The overall notion was to find poetry in the venality and ugliness of American life, presented without blinkers.

Mamet became an integral player in Chicago’s theater culture of the early ‘70s, writing “Lakeboat” and “The Duck Variations” -- plays marked by their dramatic indirection and a Brechtian commitment to ideas rather than emotional engagement -- and later co-founding the Atlantic Theater Company.

Mamet’s body of work since then has been the richest and most compelling in American theater, yet Nadel does little to illuminate our understanding of the plays beyond the cursory facts. There is much space devoted to the plot points of the plays, which, in Mamet’s case, are beside the point. Nadel also seems to have dug up every review ever written about Mamet’s work. What’s missing is Nadel’s own critical analysis.

Sure, we know that the confidence game is a major leitmotif in Mamet’s work -- a point that Nadel repeatedly drives home -- but what of it? Nadel never takes a step back to examine the work as a whole, to place Mamet within the social and cultural context of his times. The result is a severely undernourished book, certainly not the biography that this giant of American art deserves. Perhaps we’ll have to wait a few more years for that.

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Marc Weingarten is the author of “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote & the New Journalism Revolution.”