David Mamet

Like crocuses, things to do with kids are popping up all over. Live performances are everywhere, it seems. Kamotion, children's record stars, will arrive at the Temple Beth Hillel/ Beth El synagogue direct from a White House Easter performance. "Believe in Yourself" is the theme, and the concert's goal is to raise money for the temple's preschool. Co-founder Kathy Hirsh-Pasek says with more than a little pride that Kamotion has roots at the temple: "My partner, Mona Goldman Zakheim, and I went into Beth Hillel/Beth El classrooms singing songs and playing our guitars.

Did you ever have one of those days when waking up was the best of it? When you and your sweetie had it all together, and then someone said something, and someone took offense, and before you knew it, matters had gotten so out of hand that you were embroiled in one god-awful mess - and you couldn't even figure out what had happened? Yeah, I thought you had. Now: Do you really want to replay it all? That's more or less what you do in The Woods, the 1977 David Mamet play that the Philadelphia Theatre Company opened Wednesday night at the Plays & Players Theatre.

'There is no situation you cannot turn to your advantage," says Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a jujitsu master with a Zen attitude and a bankrupt business. In Redbelt , a David Mamet-job full of tough patter, repetitive queries and poker-face actors walking in and out of rooms, Mike tries to practice what he preaches: turning a series of unlucky events to his favor. But Mamet, whose writing here isn't as crackling nor as colorful as it has been in films such as The Spanish Prisoner or The Winslow Boy , surrounds Ejiofor's insistently honorable Mike with two-dimensional charlatans and shills: a shifty loan shark (David Paymer)

This was a double-feature day, starting with the matinee of a new play imported from Dublin's Abbey Theatre as part of the Public Theatre's "Under the Radar" Festival. Terminus, by Mark O'Rowe, is terrific, full of crazy violence and wild language (it's all in rhyme, kind of like Irish rap without music). It's inventive, risky, and completely engrossing. I mention this because those are the kind of things people used to say about David Mamet - back when he was writing American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross.

Like the mythical Chinese meal in reverse, David Mamet's 1975 play about three small-time losers plotting an act of petty larceny doesn't go anyplace at all but lingers in the mind long after the performance. One school of theaterlorists commonly fingers this play as a reliable road map of the blue-collar mentality - a concept barely worthy of a barf bag. Some go on to suggest - Mamet among them - that it is about language itself, and how the crude vocabulary of the lower classes limits their ability to act and thus immures them to the mean streets of society.

After absorbing the first scene of Boston Marriage, seasoned theatergoers may be forgiven for sneaking a look at their programs to double-check the name of the author. Can this really be the work of David Mamet? On a drawing room set out of The Importance of Being Earnest, two ladies toss off poised epigrams with posh words and impeccable grammar. To fans who cherish Mamet as a brilliant playwright and our nation's leading man of four letters, the transformation from sleazeballs and losers and the staccato of the streets is quite a shock.

The salesmen David Mamet presents in Glengarry Glen Ross are guys you hope you never meet except on the stage, and these cynical, do-anything-to-close-a-deal real estate hucksters are difficult to take even there. Mamet makes it clear that you can't help but have as much contempt for these salesmen from hell as they have for you. It is significant, and deliberate, that the one you think you could like is pretty much a complete failure at getting people to buy the land these guys are selling out of a Chicago office.

In Boston Marriage, David Mamet combines his distinctive, fast-talk dialogue with the light, witty breeziness of Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest and the florid descriptiveness of Henry James. Forsaking his usual contemporary, often male-dominated milieu, Mamet sets the piece in a late-19th-century upper-class drawing room with an all-women cast. It's a curious mixture of playwright, styles, place and gender - and not a particularly successful one. Dialogue and characters don't appear persuasive in the writing, and certainly are not in a Theatre Catalyst Project production that doesn't get a firm hold on either.

David Mamet, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and emerging filmmaker, hopes to add a new title to his growing list of credits soon: television series creator. Mamet has submitted a pilot script to CBS for a show tentatively titled "Bradford," which is set in the Vermont hamlet where the and his wife, actress Lindsay Crouse, have a summer home. The show involves a small-town police chief, but unlike other cop shows, this one will be about keeping the peace rather than gunning down the bad guys, said John Romano of MTM, who would serve as executive producer if the network gives the all-clear sign.

David Mamet was in the audience on opening night of Squirrels. He liked the production but felt the play needed a little something more. Specifically, a tag line. On the spot, the Pulitzer Prize laureate made one up: "Or words to that effect. " In the context of the one-act comedy, the line is funny because the play is a mad tap dance on the theme of writing. Words have a great effect. Mamet gave the line to director W.H. Macy, who passed it along to actress Natalia Nogulich, who spoke it at the very next performance and has been speaking it ever since to audiences in the Annenberg Center's Harold Prince Theater.

" 'Cause there's business and there's friendship . . . and what you got to do is keep clear who your friends are. . . . Or else the rest is garbage. . . . " There is plenty of garbage in David Mamet's fierce and funny play American Buffalo, currently at Theatre Exile. Set in a junk shop that is clearly a metaphor for America, three bunglers try to plan a stupid heist that involves a valuable buffalo nickel. The American buffalo - coin and animal - is long gone, along with the delusive values of that home on the range.

"Now we Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. " David Mamet wrote that in his 1986 essay "A Playwright in Hollywood," a year after he wrote Speed-the-Plow, his viciously entertaining indictment of the movie industry. Theater loves to hate Hollywood, and nobody can hate it better than a playwright who's been seduced by the big-money-beautiful-women blandishments of moviemaking, as Mamet was, and so many others before and after him. But, hey, due respect.

'There is no situation you cannot turn to your advantage," says Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a jujitsu master with a Zen attitude and a bankrupt business. In Redbelt , a David Mamet-job full of tough patter, repetitive queries and poker-face actors walking in and out of rooms, Mike tries to practice what he preaches: turning a series of unlucky events to his favor. But Mamet, whose writing here isn't as crackling nor as colorful as it has been in films such as The Spanish Prisoner or The Winslow Boy , surrounds Ejiofor's insistently honorable Mike with two-dimensional charlatans and shills: a shifty loan shark (David Paymer)

Not so many years ago, "Redbelt" would have been a boxing movie. Certainly, boxing buffs will recognize this story - bruised fighters hewing to some kind of warrior code in a sleazy business where the dirtiest fighting is done by men in suits - the only guys who always get paid. But boxing, as someone says in "Redbelt," is as "dead as Woodrow Wilson. " Mixed Martial Arts has captured the fancy of a new generation, kids who know Kimbo Slice from YouTube but couldn't name the WBC heavyweight champ to save their Wii. MMA is where the money is, and that, says "Redbelt" writer/director David Mamet, means MMA will be subject to the same moral metrics as boxing, to wit: Any time two men fight for money, the fix is in. At least that's how it goes in "Redbelt," a neo-noir, MMA movie featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mike Terry, a jujitsu instructor so absorbed in its concepts of honor that he won't sully the purity of his discipline by fighting in competitions (fight only to prevail, he says, never to merely compete)

This was a double-feature day, starting with the matinee of a new play imported from Dublin's Abbey Theatre as part of the Public Theatre's "Under the Radar" Festival. Terminus, by Mark O'Rowe, is terrific, full of crazy violence and wild language (it's all in rhyme, kind of like Irish rap without music). It's inventive, risky, and completely engrossing. I mention this because those are the kind of things people used to say about David Mamet - back when he was writing American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross.

On your way out of Glengarry Glen Ross, you might feel an overwhelming urge to make sure that your money is still in your wallet. You might even want to check that the fillings are still in your teeth. Yes, the boys are back in town and the rest of humanity is a horde of hapless suckers just waiting to be picked clean. David Mamet's scathing and often uproarious take on the life of a salesman is an achievement on a level that really needs no sales pitch. Even so, Mamet could ask for no better advocacy than the brilliant, turbocharged revival at the Royale Theater, which affirms Glengarry Glen Ross' stature as a great American play.

In Boston Marriage, David Mamet combines his distinctive, fast-talk dialogue with the light, witty breeziness of Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest and the florid descriptiveness of Henry James. Forsaking his usual contemporary, often male-dominated milieu, Mamet sets the piece in a late-19th-century upper-class drawing room with an all-women cast. It's a curious mixture of playwright, styles, place and gender - and not a particularly successful one. Dialogue and characters don't appear persuasive in the writing, and certainly are not in a Theatre Catalyst Project production that doesn't get a firm hold on either.

After absorbing the first scene of Boston Marriage, seasoned theatergoers may be forgiven for sneaking a look at their programs to double-check the name of the author. Can this really be the work of David Mamet? On a drawing room set out of The Importance of Being Earnest, two ladies toss off poised epigrams with posh words and impeccable grammar. To fans who cherish Mamet as a brilliant playwright and our nation's leading man of four letters, the transformation from sleazeballs and losers and the staccato of the streets is quite a shock.

I guess we should despise the greedy, boffo-box-office-seeking, public-be-damned movie producers David Mamet presents in his 1988 play Speed-the-Plow. But the playwright and the Lantern Theater Company production of the play make them and their milieu so entertaining that it seems more appropriate to give them a metaphorical pat on the back for providing such an enjoyable time. That's the case largely because director Dugald MacArthur and his three cast members offer what amounts to Mamet-lite.

The salesmen David Mamet presents in Glengarry Glen Ross are guys you hope you never meet except on the stage, and these cynical, do-anything-to-close-a-deal real estate hucksters are difficult to take even there. Mamet makes it clear that you can't help but have as much contempt for these salesmen from hell as they have for you. It is significant, and deliberate, that the one you think you could like is pretty much a complete failure at getting people to buy the land these guys are selling out of a Chicago office.