David Mamet Exits Stage Left

David Mamet is one of the most celebrated American playwrights of the last century: Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, and Glengarry Glen Ross— which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1983 and remains timely today. Our conversation unfolds, fittingly, in three acts. Act I: the inspiration behind his new novel about education, Some Recollections of St. Ives https://www.amazon.com/Some-Recollections-St-Ives-Novel/dp/1648211402 (5:38), weathering the ‘emotional hurricane’ of his childhood in Chicago (18:22), and how the drama of those early years materialized in his 1994 play The Cryptogram and beyond (27:00). In Act II, Mamet talks writing dialogue for the stage and screen (29:16), his disdain for psychoanalysis and the Actors Studio (32:32), and the philosophy that guided both his first theatre company (33:24) and subsequent plays (38:01). In the closing act, we wrestle with Mamet’s rightward shift: his views on DEI (41:48), late-stage capitalism (51:33), ‘Constitutional Conservatism’ as it relates to the 2020 election (1:01:48), his latest book The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-disenlightenment-david-mamet?variant=43727607234594 (1:07:06), and what he believes a ‘peaceful and patriotic’ protest should look like (1:10:12). Watch this conversation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be62DXxpgq0 on our new YouTube channel. Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  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 Glen Ross, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and remains as timely today as it did back in 1983. In fact, a new production of Glengarry starring Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Kieran Culkin was recently mounted on Broadway at the Palace Theatre. Its final performance was on June 28. And it's not just Mamet's stage plays that remain in circulation. It's his films, too. There are the ones he wrote and directed: House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, State in Maine,

• 1:23Sam Fragoso?

  and the ones he wrote for hire: The Verdict, The Untouchables, 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 is a man whose work often circles similar themes: alienation, distrust of authority and feelings, and of course, the importance of independent

• 2:07Sam Fragoso?

  thinking. And yet, what was once 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, "a brain-dead liberal." Mamet has continued his rightward shift ever since, writing books with titles like Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of Free Lunch, and The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror and Entertainment, which was published in June, both of which I read in preparation for today's episode. Listeners of this show will know that that's not exactly uncommon. I try to read and watch as much

• 2:47Sam Fragoso?

  as possible before each of these interviews, and this talk with David was no exception. I had also rewatched all of his films. I had hoped to ask him about the Chicago con men he met playing poker that inspired House of Games, or the sales team he worked with selling real estate that served as the basis for Glengarry Glen Ross, or the critiques around his writing, how he renders women, his apparent disdain for the feminist movement, and what many view as his embrace of toxic masculinity. But, as I said, the subtext of David Mamet has become the text of David Mamet, the substance of which is made clear

• 3:28Sam Fragoso?

  right at the top of this interview, which unfolds in many ways like a three-act David Mamet play. Everything discussed at the beginning comes back at the end. Inside the political bookend is my attempt to sit with what director Sidney Lumet rendered David's enormous injury. "I have no idea where it comes from," Lumet told The New Yorker in 1997, "but there's a prevailing sense of 'I've been screwed.'" A lot of David's movies are very much about being had. And so, Act Two was mainly about Mamet's Chicago upbringing and the surrogate family he found and formed in theater.

• 4:10Sam Fragoso?

  The rest of the conversation, well, it's unlike any other I've had in my nine years of hosting Talk Easy. I know there are some who have preemptively objected to sitting with Mamet in the first place. I don't share that objection, just as I don't share most of David's politics. If you listen through the end of this episode, or if you watch through the end of this episode on YouTube, I think that will be abundantly clear. But I do think, for better or worse, this exchange is representative of exchanges I've had and heard and seen since Donald Trump's return to the White House, which

• 4:48Sam Fragoso?

  are freighted and frightful and delivered at a fever pitch. How that fever breaks, I don't know. But I do know that I tried to reach David, even when he didn't always exactly want to be reached. And so with that, here is my conversation with David Mamet.

• 5:28Sam Fragoso?

  David Mamet, pleasure to meet you.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Nice meeting you too, sir.

• 5:31Sam Fragoso?

  How are you doing?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  What a lovely question. I think I'm doing good. I got a whole bunch of stuff came out. Oh, did you get my book, St. Ives? Oh, dude. Yeah, because they sent me a box of it and it didn't arrive.

• 5:43Sam Fragoso?

  Do you want a copy?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, no problem. Also, I did this movie that just came out.

• 5:48Sam Fragoso?

  Henry Johnson?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Henry Johnson with Shawnee. That came out at the same time. So I'm spending some time taking my picks to market and I appreciate the opportunity to do it here. Thank you.

• 5:59Sam Fragoso?

  It's rare that we have someone on that has three projects out at once. Many people, you know, it takes a long time to get one project off the ground.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, but you know, I grew up with a, if I may, kind of a pushcart mentality because my grandparents were immigrants. They were very poor and my dad grew up very poor. And so this whole thing was work all the time. And if you got something that's working, you'd be a fool not to work harder. It's also, you know, what I do for a living is what I do for fun.

• 6:28Sam Fragoso?

  What the hell are you supposed to do?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. So, you know, Noah Coward said, work is more fun than fun. And I've always, I've always found that true.

• 6:37Sam Fragoso?

  Let's start with your new book, Some Recollections of St. Ives, the novel. I think you've been working on for a little bit now because a few years ago, you said to your wife, the actor Rebecca Pidgen, I want to write a book about education.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:53Sam Fragoso?

  When you said that to her, what did she say?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Oh, she said, please don't. But you know, if I may, a kind of a condign circumstance was apparently when Trump, before he came down the escalator, he said to Melania, I want to run for president. And she said, please don't. And he said, why? And she said, because you'll win. So anyway, you know, I always listen to my wife's advice, except when I don't.

• 7:20Sam Fragoso?

  Which is how often?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Not that often. She's much smarter than I am. And you know, she's, she has a level head and I'm a fucking hothead. And she's super smart and reserved. And I wrote an essay about profanity, hasn't come out yet, where I said, one of the things that as the Stoics told us, men most admire in each other is reserve. And so that we see a little bit of that on the right and none of it on the left. And so when someone says, you know, fuck you and fuck your mother and the horse you were in on, and the, and the other guy, rather than getting upset, says, yes, I, I see your point. I don't share it, but I understand. Now, the first guy is going to think, oops, I'm dealing with somebody here.

• 8:05Sam Fragoso?

  I don't see that in a lot of politicians, reserve.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  No, but I see it in some. And the thing about Trump is he's not a politician and he's treated so abominably and and he got the respect of a lot of people, myself included, because, you know, he was jammed up and shot and impeached and impugned and had the entire intelligence community against him. And he didn't go into his fuck you, you motherfuckers bag. He just said, okay, I'll, you know, I'll go along with it. My, my time will come. And it has.

• 8:38Sam Fragoso?

  I want to get into all things Trump on the back end of this conversation when we talk about

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:44Sam Fragoso?

  the disenlightenment. Why a book about education right now? Your, your wife said, please don't. Did you find a semantic workaround and wrote a novel? Is that, was that what happened here?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly. So because I do a lot of thinking about education because I've been involved in education my entire life, both starting out as a victim and then as a teacher of acting and writing. And I taught at all the Ivy League schools as a lecturer, as a visiting fellow or something like that. And I started a couple of acting schools and I wondered, how is it that people learn? Because when you're a director, what you're doing is imparting your vision, when you're a film director, it's not only to the actors, it's everybody on the, on the production staff in such a way that they can understand

• 9:34Speaker 01

  and act on and respond to. And most of the people I met in the film business, because film was a collaborative business, somebody said film was a collaborative business, bend over. And that was actually me. And Mike Nichols had it put on a pillow that he put on his couch. But in a film, someone has to be in charge. It can't be a committee. And if someone is in charge and he or she is actually capable of expressing him or herself.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  They can get the results that they wish and people say, oh, I get it. You say, oh, make it more Ro Koko than Baroque. I can do that. You're saying, make it prettier. I don't know what the fuck that means. And most film is, you know, is staffed and certainly all of it is administered by idiots. So I was thinking a lot, working in the film business about about education. And I was thinking this morning about Columbia. And I I taught some classes for a year at Columbia for my friend Mike Hausman, who's a professor of film. And I actually made it into a book called Undirecting Film. And as I say, you know, Columbia is now, it's decided to reconstitute itself as as a hellhole.

• 10:50Sam Fragoso?

  A hellhole that settled this morning with the Trump administration.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yes, but no.

• 10:55Sam Fragoso?

  They didn't settle enough?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Well, of course it didn't. I mean, it's nothing's going to change. The problem is that-

• 11:00Sam Fragoso?

  What would you like to see at an institution like Columbia?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  I would, well, first I would like to see them absolutely apologize. Two hundred million dollars is nothing.

• 11:08Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm. What number, was there a dollar amount that would be enough?

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought they should have been bankrupted. I thought they should have been bankrupted and closed down. Because what are they actually teaching?

• 11:17Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 11:18Sam Fragoso?

  Well, that's a different question. There are many institutions across this country where I think we can go, I don't know what they're teaching. Which is in part why you wrote this book, right? Is you're you're a kid growing up in Chicago-

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:30Sam Fragoso?

  -who quote, "Never opened a schoolbook in my life."

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:34Sam Fragoso?

  You said in your play, Oleana, there's a university professor who was told since childhood that he was an idiot.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:41Sam Fragoso?

  And so he behaved like one. You said of all your characters in that play, that's the one you identify with the most.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah. Um, what Columbia allowed to happen was heinous, absolutely heinous. I'm, you know, speaking as a fellow who loves New York and as a Jew. And as somebody who's worked at Columbia is fucking heinous, they should have been closed up and told, go home.

• 12:06Sam Fragoso?

  For allowing protests.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  What? They weren't protests, they were riots.

• 12:09Sam Fragoso?

  And how do you make the distinction?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Well, things are pretty easy to make. If someone was outside your house, how would you make the distinction?

• 12:16Sam Fragoso?

  A house is not university.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  The house is, to a certain extent, the local parentis for the, for the children who, whose parents have paid or who have paid to go there, and they're entitled to complete protection.

• 12:26Sam Fragoso?

  But you believe people are entitled to protest?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Of course they are.

• 12:30Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. And in that case, how would you have liked young kids that are pro Palestine to protest on campus?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  I would have liked them to have obeyed the rules that the school had in place. And they shouldn't have put other students in fear. They shouldn't have disrupted classrooms. They shouldn't have thrown rocks through the windows and broken down doors with hammers. That's not protest.

• 12:52Sam Fragoso?

  Every protest has had some people at the protest with not clear convictions, using it as an opportunity to throw stones, both literally and metaphorically, that are not representative of the beliefs that the protesters have.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  I'm not talking about ideas, I'm talking about behavior. We don't know what people's ideas are. I don't know what yours are. I mean, imagine you had a kid, right, who was a Jew in a classroom over there, and masked protesters came in screaming from the river to the sea, which means kill the Jews and standing on, and making you guys afraid. Would you call that a protest or a riot?

• 13:31Sam Fragoso?

  Do I think someone coming in and screaming in your face scares someone? Yeah, I think that does scare someone. I don't, I don't know if that's right. No, I don't think so. But you can admit that protests often pushes the boundaries. It's a moment full of passion, and sometimes in that passion is imprecise.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Well, the, the, your argument is interesting. It was actually first advanced, to my knowledge, in this century, in this last century by Hitler, who said, what are you going to do? We get the people together, they want a good Germany, and if some people throw rocks through the Jews' windows, what are we going to do? I think people should be responsible for their actions. I certainly am. Want to be or not.

• 14:12Sam Fragoso?

  But a vast majority of the protesters were not violent.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Well, so what? A lot of the vast majority of the black churches in the segregation South were not burned.

• 14:20Sam Fragoso?

  I am still asking you, how would you have liked them to protest?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  I would like to protest peacefully.

• 14:25Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, it sounds to me like you'd like them to protest not at all, because a lot of them did protest peacefully.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Good, a lot of those, as I say, that a lot of them protested peacefully does not abrogate the idea that Columbia allowed allowed those who are not peaceful to continue.

• 14:41Sam Fragoso?

  And those people should be properly punished.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Of course they should. I got another question for you. Who funded the riot stroke protests? Who funded them?

• 14:52Sam Fragoso?

  Gosh, I don't know. I mean.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  I don't know either, but somebody did. To do what? To bring what about?

• 14:57Sam Fragoso?

  I think that's that seems to be the the point of contention and maybe the only interesting part of this, which is, what is the purpose of pro Palestinian protest on campus? That seems to be the question.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Well, the purpose seems to be, listen, that most of the people involved are useful idiots is of course true. They don't know what the fuck they're talking about. And they don't know what from the river to the sea means. And they don't know what the sea is, what the river is. And they don't know what Palestine is. A lot of people don't. But they like to protest and they like to throw rocks through windows. And as usual, as we see in the contemporary unrest, someone is behind it, someone. The question is always, as we both come from Chicago, cui bono? Who benefits? Right? So who benefits? Who benefits from terrorizing Jewish students? Who benefits? I don't know, but that's a question that everybody should ask.

• 15:48Sam Fragoso?

  And is that why you wanted to write a book about education in this moment?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Well, no, no, I wanted to write a book about education because I found, like, as I say, I worked in all of the elite universities and I found them not particularly corrupt, but hypocritical, because especially in the arts, they weren't teaching anything. They were taking the kids money and and but they weren't teaching anything. So of all the schools I worked in, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the only one, all the students were the same. They they.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  They weren't very smart and they didn't know how to learn. But there was one school, which was an exception, and that was MIT, where the kids were brilliant. So I started thinking about the paradigm of a scientific education. Something is either provable or it's not provable, right? The equation either zeros out or it doesn't. It's called science, right? It's replicable or it's not. So these kids who didn't know anything about dramatic structure, we'd talk to them and I'd say, "Okay, I'm going to show you how this works over here." And they understood it because it was mechanical.

• 16:58Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm. As a kid, did you find any value growing up in Chicago in the classroom?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  No, did anybody?

• 17:06Sam Fragoso?

  But it is curious because in the 20th century, much of the literary tradition of the 20th century comes out of Chicago. Hemingway, Richard Wright, Nella Larson, Saul Bellow, the early work of Philip Roth, all Chicago. Did it provide an especially fertile ground for writers to write?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  No, certainly not. The great writers who came to Chicago, they certainly didn't study in the Chicago public schools. For example, Dreiser studied, I believe, in a one-room school in Terrapin, Indiana. But who knows, Hemingway was over in Oak Park. I don't think any of those people benefited from the education at Chicago public schools because only I alone have escaped to tell you. A lot of my teachers were born in the 19th century. They were older people, set in their ways. Okay, very, very good. And most of them were women because that was the tradition in American schoolteachers. And might I have learned something?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Yes, I learned something very, very important in those schools, which is to make up my own mind. You know, just because someone was sitting on the other side of the desk didn't mean what they were saying was helpful. And it also didn't mean what they were saying was true. Might have been, but I just wasn't listening.

• 18:22Sam Fragoso?

  Was your mind in part molded by the house that you grew up in? Because you came of age in Chicago, on South Side, on Euclid Avenue, in a three-story red brick house.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:35Sam Fragoso?

  Your father?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  A two-story.

• 18:37Sam Fragoso?

  In a two-story red brick house?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:40Sam Fragoso?

  Your father, a labor lawyer, your mother, a teacher. And in that house, you said once, "My life was expunged of any tradition at all. Nothing old was in the house."

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:50Sam Fragoso?

  What do you think your parents were distancing themselves from?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  It's not that they were distancing themselves, they'd been distanced. They were first generation American Jews. Everybody who stayed behind was either killed by Hitler or killed by Stalin. And there wasn't anything in a reformed, which is to say diluted Jewish house.

• 19:10Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean by that?

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Well, the tradition of reformed Judaism has always been one of assimilation. Which is to say, "We're Jewish and we're proud of it. We're not ashamed of it, we just don't want any connection to it, because I'm just like you."

• 19:25Sam Fragoso?

  Ah.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  So that was very, I don't know if that's still the case, but it was certainly the case in mid-century America.

• 19:31Sam Fragoso?

  Did that make sense to you as a kid?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it made sense, which is to say, "I want to stay away from those fucking kikes." Because that's what my generation learned from a generation of assimilated Jews. And so their religion was the New York Times and the New Yorker and Franklin Roosevelt. And the idea of good works, which is why we're where we are today.

• 19:55Sam Fragoso?

  So, your father would encourage you and your sister Lynn to listen with the inner ear. What did that look like?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Well, it doesn't mean anything. He wrote, he read a book about semantics by S. I. Hayakawa. No, check that, S. I. Hayakawa, who was then teaching at San Francisco State or San Jose State. It's a very good book, it's a primer on semantics called Language and Thought and Action.

• 20:20Sam Fragoso?

  And why does it not mean anything?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Tell me what it means.

• 20:23Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, I don't know, I didn't grow up being told, "Listen with your inner ear," you did.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sort of didn't mean anything. Let me ask you a question, okay?

• 20:30Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  You're an actor, okay, say you're an actor.

• 20:32Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, I'm not, but thank you.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Okay, but I'm talking to you.

• 20:35Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  And I say, "Okay, I'm gonna, I want you to listen with your inner ear." What does that mean?

• 20:41Sam Fragoso?

  I really don't know.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Exactly, so it doesn't mean anything.

• 20:44Sam Fragoso?

  Nevertheless, the nice words were told to you as a kid.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:48Sam Fragoso?

  And you took them how?

• 20:49Speaker 01

  I said, "I don't get it."

• 20:50Sam Fragoso?

  You didn't play games where he tested your powers of observation and memory?

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Maybe, I don't know, you know? It's like William Goldman said, he was asked about something early in his career. He says, "I've forgotten what lies I told." Here's the thing, to say, for example, you go to school and people tell you you're stupid, and they say, pay more attention.

• 21:12Sam Fragoso?

  Do people tell you that?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Sure. They said, pay more, they put me in a remedial reading class because I wouldn't read Dick and Jane. When people say, pay more attention, it occurred to me years later, which is one of the reasons I wrote that book, a legitimate response to pay more attention would have been, be more interesting. It's not hard to pay attention to something that interests you. It's damned difficult to do so to something which bores the fuck out of you. It can be done, but it's difficult.

• 21:40Sam Fragoso?

  All right, let's be more interesting. You said in your family, prior to the days of television, we like to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak language viciously.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's true. And also just to speak language, there was a, a, a great premium paid on being able to come up with a good repast. And I was thinking about my family yesterday because I saw for the billionth time, one of the funniest movies ever made in Italian filmmaking, it's about 1956, called Seduced and Abandoned, about a family, dysfunctional family in Sicily, but I repeat myself, and everyone screaming throughout the whole fucking movie and slapping each other in the face and stuff. And it's so magnificently done that one doesn't get tired of it. And to the contrary, it's always funny.

• 22:28Sam Fragoso?

  Was your childhood funny?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  No, no, it wasn't funny at all, no.

• 22:33Sam Fragoso?

  But you saw some of it in the Italian absurdist film?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, as I say, it was a dysfunctional family.

• 22:39Sam Fragoso?

  It's just called it an emotional hurricane.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, very, it's very well put.

• 22:45Sam Fragoso?

  How'd you go about weathering the storm?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I, um, I, I grew up, I went to college and I arrived in, like, my college was in Vermont and it was hard to get there. And I took a plane, I think, from Chicago to Boston. And there were no internet highways at that time, it's a while ago. And so I hitchhiked up to this college in Vermont. And I arrived in the middle of the night, there was nobody there, nobody greeted me. But one of the dormitories was open, so I just went into the dormitory and laid down and covered myself with my raincoat. And it occurred to me, you know what? I never have to see those people again. I loved them, but I never had to see them again.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  So on the one hand, I was deracinated, but on the other hand, I was, I was free. You know, and freedom, as we know from when we read the Bible, terrifies people. Right? The Jews were taken out of Egypt. All they want to do is go back.

• 23:46Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  So there was a certain free zone, as we used to say in Yiddish, between the idea of, of, of freedom and the idea of rootlessness. But I was very fortunate. And then I fill in, fell in with the theater community, which was, as many people have found through history, a new and better home. And I said at one point, I think it's true. Nobody with a happy childhood ever went into show business.

• 24:10Sam Fragoso?

  You also said, uh, in the film State in Maine, I didn't get to have a childhood.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:18Sam Fragoso?

  And the character says, I had one, no big deal.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Exactly so. Exactly so, which people say, right? Who haven't been subjected to that experience.

• 24:28Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  But you know, as the psychiatrists say, it's never too late to have an unhappy childhood.

• 24:33Sam Fragoso?

  Well, can we, can we talk about one part of your unhappy childhood? Your parents split up at 11, I think it was, right?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:40Sam Fragoso?

  And when they split, it's my understanding that your mother moved you and your sister to Olympia Fields, which you.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  No, before that, we actually moved to an apartment a few blocks away.

• 24:51Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. Was that what you called New South Hell?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  My sister called it that. And she wrote this very, very funny pilot years ago called New South Hell.

• 25:00Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  But Olympia Fields, oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's going, that's going back away. And Flossmore, which you would think was a community of dentists, just occurred to me, but, but not.

• 25:14Sam Fragoso?

  I'm so glad. I was gonna make the joke. I'm glad you.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 25:17Sam Fragoso?

  You made it.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Thank you. I, I saved you the shame.

• 25:22Sam Fragoso?

  When the family split, I guess I'm just wondering, did you see it coming?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  I didn't see anything coming, but you know, a lot of, you're talking about the protesters and so forth. It's a very good idea for children's mental health for them to have a community. And the primal community is the home so that they can feel secure in their desires to revolt. So if they got nothing to revolt against at home to test themselves, they're probably going to revolt someplace else. I had a friend who was, a friend of many decades who was blind and he worked with the blind. He talked a lot about blindisms, which is when you're, blind people are, one blindness is they're moving their head constantly because they're trying to locate themselves in space.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  They can't do it through their eyes, so they're doing with their appropriate receptive ability, basically of their ears. They're trying to find out where I am. So a lot of people get into, if they can't locate themselves in the home or in the religion or in a tradition, they're going to find a new tradition to locate themselves in. It makes them feel secure. That's why people go into gangs, right?

• 26:36Sam Fragoso?

  And is that why you went into playwriting?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's why I went into the theater, right? Cause I was good at it and all of the stuff that, you know, it says in the Bible, the builders have rejected becomes the cornerstone. Right? So that's, that's what happens sometimes in the arts. I'm no good for anything. Oh, except I'm very good for this.

• 26:57Sam Fragoso?

  In 1994, you wrote a play called The Cryptogram.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:01Sam Fragoso?

  There's a section in it that I thought we could read today, if you're open to it.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Sure. Okay. The room is denuded, various packing boxes are seen. John, a 10 year old kid is sitting on one of them. Donnie, his mother comes downstairs carrying a box. She puts it down and starts for the kitchen. So who do you want to read?

• 27:21Sam Fragoso?

  Who would you like to play?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  I don't care. I'll read John. Where were you?

• 27:26Sam Fragoso?

  I'll put the kettle on.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Where were you?

• 27:27Sam Fragoso?

  I went up for your bag.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  The movers will take it.

• 27:29Sam Fragoso?

  There were some things I thought you might like to have.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  What things?

• 27:32Sam Fragoso?

  For the first few nights until the boxes come.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Mother.

• 27:35Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Do you ever think things, mother?

• 27:38Sam Fragoso?

  What? What, John? What did you say?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  I asked you, do you think things?

• 27:42Sam Fragoso?

  What things, John?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Do you ever wish that you could die?

• 27:45Sam Fragoso?

  Do I wish I could die?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:46Sam Fragoso?

  I don't know.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yes, you do.

• 27:48Sam Fragoso?

  No, I don't know, John.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yes, you do. You can tell me. It's not such a bad feeling, is it?

• 27:52Sam Fragoso?

  I don't know.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Yes, you do. I think you do.

• 27:54Sam Fragoso?

  Uh, John, the things occur in our lives and the meaning of them, the meaning of them is not clear.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  The meaning of them.

• 28:01Sam Fragoso?

  That's correct. At the time, but we assume they have a meaning. We must, and we don't know what it is.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Do you ever wish you could die? Would you tell me?

• 28:08Sam Fragoso?

  Do I wish I could die?

• 28:09Speaker 01

  You can tell me. You won't frighten me.

• 28:10Sam Fragoso?

  How can I help you? Do you see?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 28:13Sam Fragoso?

  At some point, there are things that have occurred. I can't help you with that.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  I can't sleep.

• 28:18Sam Fragoso?

  Well, it's an unsettling time.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  I want.

• 28:21Sam Fragoso?

  A yes?

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Would you like to go to the cabin?

• 28:23Sam Fragoso?

  Well.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  I wanna go to the lake.

• 28:25Sam Fragoso?

  Well, no, John, we can't. You know, we can't.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  I don't know that.

• 28:28Sam Fragoso?

  No, we can't.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  That's why I can't sleep.

• 28:31Sam Fragoso?

  What do you want me to do, John? I'm not God. I don't control the world. If you could think what it is I could do for you, if I could help you.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Do you ever wish you could die? It's not such a bad feeling, is it?

• 28:41Sam Fragoso?

  I know that you're frightened. I know you are, but at some point, do you see, John, everyone has a story. Did you know that? In their lives, this is yours.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good play. We did that play in, first in, uh, Boston for Harvard. It was produced by Bob Brustein from American Repertory Theater. We did it and it was Felicity Huffman and Ed Begley Jr. And every night at the end of that play, people were weeping like a drain. It was great.

• 29:11Sam Fragoso?

  Did you weep when you wrote it?

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Maybe, but it took me a long time to write that play because, um, the problem in writing a play is not dialogue. If you can write dialogue, you write it. If you can't write it, big deal, because we do plays in translation. So dialogue's no fucking good. But what you have, one has to be able to do, independent of one's talent in writing dialogue, is to structure a plot, which is hard work, because it all has to come out, uh, equal, which is what, what the, uh, kids at MIT understood. So it took me a long time to reason my way through that.

• 29:46Sam Fragoso?

  Did it take you a long time to reason your way through the ways in which your mother raised you?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  I find it's really interesting that you that you're interested in my in my parents. Why?

• 30:04Sam Fragoso?

  Why would I not be?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Well, the reason you I would think that you'd not be because you got seventeen books over here that I've written. I'd rather talk about them. Listen, if I wanted to talk about my parents, I'd I'd find a psychiatrist, you know, and and pay the psychiatrist to listen to me bitch for five hours a week.

• 30:20Sam Fragoso?

  Bitching is not part of this. I'm not asking for bitching.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  The thing about childhood is one does get the opportunity to make some correction when one is a parent, because one says, I'm, you know, I'm not going to do what was done to me. I'm going to give you the things that I I never had. The problem with that is, and we see it a lot in in, especially in the Jewish immigrant communities, where I was born, is say, I'm going to give you the things I never had. But it's also important to give to the kids the things you did have. So so there.

• 30:56Sam Fragoso?

  What did you have?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  What did I have?

• 30:58Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Well, what did I have? Well, I had a dad who worked like mad and who who.

• 31:04Sam Fragoso?

  The answer to work is more work.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So the ends who the the, as they say, the kids are never listening, but they're always watching. So one thing that I always watch is my dad was always working, you know, he worked seven days a week and he would come home from an office all day and work. And his answer to everything was work harder. And so it was difficult for me because he just didn't understand me. And I think one reason was he didn't have a father. So his father deserted the mother when they came over from Poland. So he grew up without a father. He had to figure things out for himself. So he really didn't know how to be a father. I think he did a very good job providing those things he thought a father could do.

• 31:48Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Which was, you know, enough to eat and some clothes and and so forth. I loved him. He was a wonderful guy.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Another thing that that occurred to me in my in my journey from the cradle to the grave is in terms of education was the phenomenon of psychiatry. Because I dealt with it as a kid and found it helpful at all. And then I dealt with it with my own kids and didn't find it helpful at all. I met a couple of psychiatrists who were actually wise, but the wisdom was that of a wise aunt or an uncle. Then I dealt a little bit deeper because of my interest in theater education and thinking about the Stanislavski system, which actually doesn't exist. So I'm thinking that the the harness made of the Stanislavski system is psychiatry.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Let's talk about your feelings. Let's talk now, if you're talking to an actor, you can waste a month in rehearsal, which most people do, talking about your feelings and what do you think the character feels.

• 32:55Sam Fragoso?

  And you think those are unimportant in acting?

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Of course they're unimportant because the audience doesn't care. The audience just see, here's how you learn about the theater. You put on a play and you watch the audience. You don't watch the actors, you watch the audience. Where do they lose their attention? What interests them? Well, they aren't interested in an actor. They're portraying feelings that the actor thinks might be appropriate to the character at that point. They're interested in watching what the actor does and listening to the lines.

• 33:24Sam Fragoso?

  So when you started the theater company in 1974 with William H. Macy over on North Halsted, was this the guiding philosophy that that you two brought to it?

• 33:35Speaker 01

  The guiding philosophy is let's put the play on. We enjoyed putting on plays. And both of us had had the experience of putting on plays at college. And he's my student at college for a while. And both of us had had the experience of doing plays in summer stock, where you get the script on Monday and you put it on on Friday. So very few people did the math. And they said, wait a second, if I put it, got a script on Monday and I put it on on Friday and everybody understood the play, why the hell is everybody in the professional theater rehearsing for a month? So what you're doing if you're rehearsing for a month is you're talking yourself out of it. Our philosophy was to put on the play. And we we knew that if the people liked it, we got to put on a play next week.

• 34:19Sam Fragoso?

  There were a lot of young people that auditioned to be part of the company.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:23Sam Fragoso?

  And instead of auditioning them.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:25Sam Fragoso?

  You interviewed them.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Tested them.

• 34:28Sam Fragoso?

  You tested them. Now, what kind of questions would you ask?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Well, that's another thing that I realized that the audition process is terrible because for some reason, it's it's terrible on the actor. So it's it's terrible for the actor and it's also terrible for the person doing the interview for several reasons. One is you're going to have to disappoint a lot of people, which is is it's just no fun because they paid you the compliment of showing up. The second one is if you audition five people, by the time you get to the third one, you can't remember the first one. The Actors Studio, for example, became famous for a bunch of actors who went there and they had the most stringent auditioning process in the world. Well, see, the gag was Bobby De Niro and and Al Pacino and Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman, right? And so forth. They didn't learn anything at the Actors Studio.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  The Actors Studio was just smart enough to pick the best actors in the country who auditioned. So what we were doing when we chose students, we were at NYU at the time, was said, oh, I'm not interested in if you can act or not, because I'm not going to be able to tell if you can act from an audition. And the other thing is if.

• 35:32Sam Fragoso?

  How can you tell if they can act?

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Oh, it's an excellent, you watch their work. When you audition someone, if you audition them with a script, you're putting a terrible burden on them because they want things so bad, what they're going to do is figure out what they think you think they should be doing and they're going to act like an actor giving an audition, whether they want to or not. So the question with an actor is not whether they can act the script, but whether they can act. And if they can act A, and they're right for the part, they can they can act B. There's no magic to it.

• 36:05Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, the rest of my conversation with Dave and Mamet.

• 36:21Sam Fragoso?

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• 39:09Sam Fragoso?

  In your book, True and False, and even in On Directing, you talk about how there isn't any inner meaning of the characters, just actors saying lines. The ridiculous notion of interior life has taken over theater and film. Is that true? Do you think there is no inner meaning? Is that all hogwash to you?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Of course, it's hogwash.

• 39:31Sam Fragoso?

  The rest is narration?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Sure, it's narration either. And the problem is that it's narration on part of the playwright. "Well, Jim, it's good to see you today, although you are my brother. I hope that things weren't too hard for you in your trip to the wilderness and that you do find your lost daughter. Bobby, thank you for saying that. I'm going to forgive you for the time you hit me when I was eight." So there's that on the part of the writer. And there's also that on the part of the director saying, "Be more something. Be more, listen more."

• 40:03Sam Fragoso?

  So in the 1970s, creating this theater scene in Chicago, you had sexual perversity in Chicago, American buffalo. During that time, you said, "That was the happiest you'd ever been. We were having the time of our lives. It was also the only real legitimate socialist enterprise I've ever been part of."

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:24Sam Fragoso?

  Is it a coincidence that the time of your life was in what you've called the only real socialist enterprise you've experienced? Is it possible?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yes, it's possible.

• 40:34Sam Fragoso?

  There was some value in the socialist enterprise?

• 40:37Speaker 01

  For a limited amount of time.

• 40:40Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, explain.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Well, when you're young, okay? Your needs are few.

• 40:44Sam Fragoso?

  What were the needs?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Well, community, lust, shelter, and food.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  So we were all working at straight jobs in order to fund the theater. So we were all supporting ourselves and it was a communal enterprise for a short time. Now, what happens is at a certain point, one matures and one's needs elaborate. I want to get married. I have greater responsibility. I have greater expenses. I can't afford, for example, to make the same contribution I could to the theater company. I'm going to have to get a job outside. So the communal enterprise can work for short. Listen, it worked in Israel for forty years in the Kibbutzim.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  But at some point socialism falls apart. Because, for example, in the Chicago theater scene, as the Chicago theater community got more needs, some of us answered those needs by becoming involved in the more commercial theater. And some of us answered the needs by elaborating the theatrical structure rather than saying, we're going to rely solely on the ticket price. We're going to have an infrastructure and we're going to have an outreach program. And we're going to have a program for women writers. And we're going to have a program for these writers and we're going to have a school. And so what happens then is, of course, the tail wags the dog.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  And as we see in any community, eventually, nothing fails like success. And the infrastructure will kill the enterprise.

• 42:28Sam Fragoso?

  Explain that for me.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  They say in the business world, the better you are, the better you get, the better you better get.

• 42:35Sam Fragoso?

  So is that what happened with all of you guys in the seventies, early eighties, making this theater scene happen in Chicago?

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Well, several things happened. One is this, so if the place becomes so successful, it's going to attract both helpers and parasites.

• 42:52Sam Fragoso?

  Opportunists.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what a successful enterprise does. Just like, that's what DEI is. These places become so successful that they're going to have to figure out other things to do to expend their energy and to increase their power and their constituency. So when that happened in Chicago Theater, what happened? Go ahead.

• 43:13Sam Fragoso?

  The DEI point is something, you know, you write a lot about in the disanlightment. Lot of disdain for DEI, lot of disdain, it seems.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  No, I wouldn't say it's disdain, it's loathing.

• 43:27Sam Fragoso?

  You don't see any value in, in trying to open the door to people that don't look like you?

• 43:35Speaker 01

  No, I see a value in not closing the door to people who look like you, it's a completely different idea.

• 43:40Sam Fragoso?

  Go ahead.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing, one of the things I wrote in my book, uh, Disenlightenment, was my experiences in aviation, I'm a pilot, my pilot for planes out here for a long time. As I said, that, that it used to be that if you saw a, a woman, the first women were hired and, and as left seat pilots in the airlines in 1973, or a black person up front, flying the plane, you thought, wow, that guy's, that woman's really got something on the ball, because they had to work a little bit harder to get her, thank God. So that became normalized. As the door was opened, uh, in aviation to women and to, uh, to minorities.

• 44:25Sam Fragoso?

  And you think women and minorities should continue to have to work harder?

• 44:29Speaker 01

  No, they don't have to work harder. What, what I said in the book, they don't have to work harder. What I said in the book is, under DEI, and this is all before all the crashes started happening in Washington DC, what's gonna happen is that organizations are gonna start fudging the test.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  United came out like several years ago, I think they backed off, and they said 50% of the hires have to be women and minorities. That's a good idea, but the question is, what if there aren't, uh, in September 1st, 50% applicants? And the answer is, in order to meet the quota, they're gonna have to start fudging the test.

• 45:10Sam Fragoso?

  You know, but you know, this is, this is the thing. People who, and by the way, I think the, um, the DEI measures and the promises that companies made, most of them, one, didn't come to fruition, two, were purely political gestures and basically hollow, and three, when they did hire more minorities or people of color, the numbers are super small across the board. We can go through industry after industry, and in part because of what you're saying, which is, the problem to get there is you need people properly trained to do any number of these jobs. You can't just start hiring people. By the way, I think all people, irrespective of race or class, if they want

• 45:55Sam Fragoso?

  to do a job, should have access to the education and training to get that job.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 46:00Sam Fragoso?

  That is not contested by any Democrat that I know. Not, not one.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Why are you talking to Democrats? Here's the thing about what happens is like, when you say nothing fails like success.

• 46:14Sam Fragoso?

  Why, why say that?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Why not?

• 46:16Sam Fragoso?

  Because Dave, because you, because, because you start all these interviews that you've done last year, and you say, I got kicked out of the left.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  I did.

• 46:25Sam Fragoso?

  Fifteen years ago. Bullshit. That's bullshit. We've had on Senator Warren this year, we had on Ta-Nehisi Coates, we have on you. There's, there's no kicking out of left. You're, you're here.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. I, I, I would like to retract my statement. You're absolutely right, and I haven't been paying attention to my life for the last 20 years. But here's the thing about when I say nothing fails like success. Listen, you can't, it says in the Bible, you don't want to give a servant power. The worst thing in the world is a servant. What are you, you want to give a bureaucrat power, because when they've given power, they will use it and they'll like it. And eventually, it will metastasize into something worse. For example, you say DEI, we have to get more of this, and we have to get more, we have to get more of that. And the next step is unfortunately,

• 47:17Speaker 01

  an inevitable decay into quotas. So, so DEI, so the New York Philharmonic and various philharmonic organizations, I think it's the New York Phil, around the country, always audition soloists behind a curtain. Lately, they said, no, no, no, that's insufficient. You have to take the curtain away. Why?

• 47:38Sam Fragoso?

  I don't know. Let me go back on something. You said, oh, okay, I, I, I guess I haven't been paying attention to my life in the last 20 years.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:46Sam Fragoso?

  And I don't have any interest in dismissing that. What I'm merely saying is the fact that we're having a conversation, we may have some different ideas. I think is an invitation to talk.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 47:58Sam Fragoso?

  And I don't think there's a canceling happening, at least on my side. I don't know what to tell you.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  I appreciate it.

• 48:04Sam Fragoso?

  In terms of the, the being booted out of the Democratic Party.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  I wasn't really in the Democratic Party. I just thought of it as a Democrat because I was a congenital Democrat.

• 48:14Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  I wrote an essay for the Village Voice. I said, we have to be politically civil to each other.

• 48:19Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, I read it.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  For example, I said, I'm not even civil to myself. For I refer to myself as a brain dead liberal. And that, and the fact that I did that made me question of political antagonisms. I say, why would I, why would I want, and also political beliefs? Why would I want to say, yes, I'm a brain dead liberal? But the phrase was then, and it still is, I think today, I'm a congenital Democrat.

• 48:45Sam Fragoso?

  What does that mean?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Well, the congenital Democrat means somebody who, I think it goes back to the 50s. Is once parents voted for Franklin Roosevelt, so their children voted for Franklin Roosevelt. So their great grandchildren are still voting for Franklin Roosevelt. But Franklin Roosevelt hasn't been there since 1944.

• 49:03Sam Fragoso?

  Right. So that shift that happened, you said for the last 20 years, it's been happening. Did that bother you?

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sorry, do what bother me?

• 49:12Sam Fragoso?

  Being, as you say, kicked out of the left?

• 49:15Speaker 01

  I found it interesting. You know, I've been working as a professional writer and dramatist for over 50 years. And one of the things that, that is constant is criticism. You know, you put on a play in Chicago and in a little garage theater and the Chicago Tribune is coming to review you. Right? So you get used to criticism pretty soon. So one has to learn how to deal with it. Right? Because when it's good, it's never good enough. And when it's even marginally bad, it's, it's atrocious. So you say, okay, I get it. I can, you know, I can deal with that. Or as we used to say, you know, I drove my car here, I didn't come off the bus. So being criticized is, is nothing new to me.

• 49:57Sam Fragoso?

  Part and parcel with the job.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Sure, because the idea is I put my name on it. You want to know who wrote that book? I did, and you got my name on it. If you don't like it, you know who to criticize.

• 50:07Sam Fragoso?

  But the criticism that came politically felt like what to you?

• 50:11Speaker 01

  It was different because it wasn't about the work. And so I thought, oh, that's interesting.

• 50:17Sam Fragoso?

  What was it about?

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Well, it was about what the people understood to be my political beliefs.

• 50:22Sam Fragoso?

  And why don't we talk about those?

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Which weren't, which I didn't realize I had political beliefs. So that's what shocked me.

• 50:29Sam Fragoso?

  You didn't realize you had political beliefs until 2008?

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:33Sam Fragoso?

  So we were to look back on Dave and Mamet. What is it, 1947? When you were born? To 2008, no political beliefs?

• 50:42Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 50:44Sam Fragoso?

  None that were perceptible to you or perceptible to the audience?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Well, none of them were perceptible to the audience because I don't think you can find it in the book, in my work, because that's, if you're trying to write a place of political beliefs and put it in your work, you're misusing the audience. So there's two things wrong with that. One is it's cheating. There's three things. And the other one is it's immoral. And the third thing is you're going to lose your audience.

• 51:09Sam Fragoso?

  Trying to affect change by writing plays?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, one doesn't affect change by writing plays. And it's not my job to affect change. I don't know any more about the world than you do. I may know different things. But the other thing, as our constitution says, is as much as we might know or as wrong as we might be, we all get a right to vote. And as long as that works, we can probably live without tearing each other's throats out.

• 51:35Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. You said once that the best compliment you could pay a play is to walk out of the theater and to be inspired to talk about your lives as a result of the production you just watched.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the second best compliment. The best compliment you could walk is to walk out and be silent. You see people thinking about it, right?

• 51:54Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  So there's this other thing that talk about the metastasis of success, where people say, well, since we're all talking about our feelings when we put on the play, we're talking about our feelings in the rehearsal room, why don't we do this? After the play, let's get together with the audience. We'll call this a talkback. And they can say, what did you have in mind? And I can say, what did you think about that? So what you've done is you've just eviscerated the theatrical experience, which should end with them either going out laughing, or going out thinking, or going out saying, well, that's an interesting thing. Let's get a cup of coffee. If the play's any good, when they get a cup of coffee, they're probably going to talk about the play. But the only people who are going to show up to do that talkback

• 52:39Speaker 01

  are people like you and me, who like to talk.

• 52:42Sam Fragoso?

  If you really believe throughout your career, people talked about how Glengarry Glen Ross, or American Buffalo, or any number of these plays, were anti-capitalist. They talked a lot about how it was anti-capitalist. And you say, my plays are anti-capitalist. You said once, back in 1984, if my plays are about anything, they're about the individual's inner spirit. The purpose of the theater, to me, is to examine the paradox between the fact that everyone tries to do well, but that few in any succeed.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's pretty good.

• 53:17Sam Fragoso?

  That's good, because you said it.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks. It's good anyway. But here's the thing. Marx was anti-capitalist, right? How did he live? He sponged off of Friedrich Engels, and he took the money from his books. Engels's family were furniture manufacturers. So his life gave the lie to his writing. Brecht, for example, was the pet puppy dog of the East German Communist Party. In his quote anti-capitalist plays, he took the money for them. I take the money for my plays. They're under indictment of capitalism. I don't know what there is to indict about capitalism. Are there abuses of capitalism? There are abuses in anything, because we're human, right? We're sinful, confused creatures.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  You can find abuses in fucking peach yogurt, for God's sake.

• 54:10Sam Fragoso?

  Someone here that had claimed that is a little moral what aboutism relativism. There's abuses of anything, so why be upset about the abuses?

• 54:20Speaker 01

  No, no, no, that's quite a jump on your part. I didn't say one shouldn't be upset about abuses. I should, one should not use the playwriting to address them. There are certain people who do that. And we say, yeah, yeah, yeah, then they, you know, they win the Pulitzer Prize and blah, blah, blah. But people don't remember them three years later, let alone 400 years later.

• 54:42Sam Fragoso?

  So playwriting is a bad place for it, but the polemics you have written here, including the disenlightenment. Tell me what happens to David Mamet in 2008 that made you go, I suddenly have politics? That you previously did not have at all, according to you.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, when you grow up in a Jewish mid-century family and then go into the theater, you're surrounded by liberals all the time.

• 55:08Sam Fragoso?

  And then that bothered you?

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Didn't bother me because, you know, the fish doesn't know that there's water. So the thing is that when I took in all of this Barry Goldwater is insane, how do I know? 400 psychiatrists send a letter to the New York Times. Richard Nixon is a crook, he's never done nothing for anybody. And of course, I grew up in the middle of the Vietnam War, which was a horrible time for this country. It's a terrible, terrible tragedy. And then I went into the theater, everybody in the theater is liberal.

• 55:40Sam Fragoso?

  In Vietnam, what did you make of Kent State?

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Kent State, there's an interesting thing about Kent State was terrible. The question is what happened? And James Michener was our most successful American writer. He wrote South Pacific, Texas, Hawaii, The Source. He was an orphan and he grew up, he became the most successful writer in American history. He's a very good writer. And he wrote a book called Kent State, What Really Happened? And he went down to Kent State immediately after the tragedy.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  He researched it and he said that the protests, a lot of them were funded by outside agitators. And the question in the Vietnam War was, who's funding all the protests? Not that the protests weren't legitimate, but the question was who benefited?

• 56:33Sam Fragoso?

  Same question you had at the beginning of this interview.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the answer was, most of the protests were funded by the Communist Party because they thought that would be the best way, and indeed it was, to win the Vietnam War. So he says in the book, not only were the protests backed and arranged by outside agitators, okay, but he comes very, very close to saying he doesn't even think it was the National Guard that shot the students. So I thought that was a really fascinating book. Can't State What Happened by James Michener.

• 57:07Sam Fragoso?

  There's a series of statements in this book that get very close to saying something that other people haven't, or most people don't, then sometimes you outright say it. And I thought we could hold some of this together because since you did find your politics in 2008, I still haven't figured out what happened.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Well, I told you that these people who I thought were my friends.

• 57:32Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  NPR, The New York Times, The Atlantic.

• 57:35Sam Fragoso?

  You consider publications friends?

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Well, I consider.

• 57:39Sam Fragoso?

  I thought your friend would be like Bill Macy or something like that.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Okay, supporters in effect, people who bought my stuff.

• 57:44Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  They just lost my number overnight.

• 57:46Sam Fragoso?

  Where did it go?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Well, for example, Troy Gross had this thing called All Things Considered. Every time I did something new, she'd call me up. I saw her, she came to my house in Vermont, we chatted, blah, blah, blah.

• 57:59Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  I had a new book, I sent it to her and I got a form letter back. You must realize that National Public Radio receives a lot of requests. Thank you for your interest. We can't accommodate her this time. So I thought, oh, I get it.

• 58:12Sam Fragoso?

  So your turn to conservatism was born out of a slight?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  No, my turn to conservatism was born out of a question. Somebody said that the actual scientist.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Doesn't say out of the discovery, Eureka, I have found it. What the actual discovery comes from is the psychiatrist saying, huh, that's funny. So that's what happened to me.

• 58:38Sam Fragoso?

  When you received the form letter, what did you say?

• 58:40Speaker 01

  I said, huh, that's funny. So I tried to understand that there were two political parties and tried to understand in what way they differed and try to take it back down to the bare metal and say, what is, not what is politics about, I get it, they're a bunch of fucking whores on both sides, but what is government about?

• 59:00Sam Fragoso?

  You've said many times that all politicians are whores and tricksters and con men. In this book, you call Donald Trump a hero.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:12Sam Fragoso?

  Is he not a whore, a con man, or a trickster?

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Well, I might have overstated the case. I mean, there were, of course, there were some Democrats, there may still be, I don't know, who are not whores, tricksters, and con men. But the other thing about Donald Trump is he's not a politician.

• 59:27Sam Fragoso?

  Is he a thief or a whore?

• 59:29Speaker 01

  No, I don't find him so.

• 59:30Sam Fragoso?

  He's not a politician in that he wasn't a politician, but once you're elected president, what is that?

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Well, if you're elected president, you're the president. A politician is someone who spends their life in politics.

• 59:41Sam Fragoso?

  This feels like the semantics thing you did with your wife in writing this book. Like, this is like a term that you're going about, but for years you have said all politicians are thieves and whores.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Okay, so I was overstating the case. What are you going to do, she'll send me to Vietnam?

• 59:57Sam Fragoso?

  Uh, no, I wouldn't do that because I wouldn't want your talents when you stood in Vietnam.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  A politician, you know, as you got this book here about Mayor Daley, Mayor Daley was a politician. He ran the quintessential machine city.

• 1:00:13Sam Fragoso?

  As my dad calls him, Old Man Daley.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:00:15Sam Fragoso?

  As corrupt as they come.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Yes, that's correct. But so somebody who, in my, in my book, was a politician, was someone who spends their life in politics. Donald Trump didn't spend his life in politics, he came into it late. So the tropisms and the markers and the alliances that someone who spends his life or her life in politics accrues, he didn't have. And so one of the downsides of that was his, his first term in office was completely

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Hamstrung because you didn't realize how the system worked.

• 1:00:54Sam Fragoso?

  And disenlightenment, you're right. We have been formed into a herd. And if we are formed into a herd to which we continually repair for consensus and guidance and protection, our ability to think independently is lessened. So I want to know, do you think the Republican Party and the people on the right that you've started to commune with, do they increase your capacity to think independently?

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Other people don't increase my capacity to think independently or to think at all. I think for myself.

• 1:01:25Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think independent thinking is encouraged within the Republican Party?

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  I don't know that any kind of thinking is encouraged by any party. They're the position. Ah, I understand now. Okay. Here's where we differ, and it took me a long time to reason my way out of this. I grew up, as you did, thinking that it was the responsibility of those in power to do good. That's the essence of what the Democrats have been standing for, truly or not, for whatever. That government must do good, that power must do good.

• 1:02:00Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I think people should do good.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, so that's the, that's the difference. That power is not going to do good, that power is always going to be abused, that certain amount of exertion of power is necessary to keep the peace for the, for the populace. And the question is, where do you draw that line? So that's the question of all government, and that's the question.

• 1:02:22Sam Fragoso?

  But government is not full of replicants, it's full of people. Why would I not hold people to a standard of doing good, just because they have power?

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  No, I, I, I don't understand. I don't understand. I don't understand your jump. What I said was that government, which is an association of people, it is not their job to do good. Right? So people in government, according to the Constitution, there's only one way they can do good, which is by obeying the Constitution.

• 1:02:54Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  It's not their job to do good for others.

• 1:02:56Sam Fragoso?

  So let's talk about obeying the Constitution. There's a timeline of events that maybe I'm just like misreading. I'm, I've been dim before. In 2021, in The Unheard, you wrote this piece. You write, "The codependent terrifies societies, having achieved the perfection of leadership."

• 1:03:14Sam Fragoso?

  It is a grand idea to call it quits, abolish Electoral College, mail ballots to everyone on earth, require no voter identification, import new voters, and so on. In 2022, you say, "The election was rigged to the extent that we don't know to the extent to which it is rigged." On April 8th of 2022, you go on Bill Maher's show, and he asks, "Do you believe that the election, the 2020 election, was rigged?"

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Sam Fragoso?

  Because he says in your book, Recessional, on page 2, you are implying that it was. Then you say on the show, "I want everyone to buy the book, but skip page 2."

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's cowardice. That's simple. Hulk Hogan, rest in peace, just said it, where he was interviewed right before his death, and somebody was talking to him, I think it was Laura Ingraham, and said, "What do you regret in your life?" He said, "I regret that I'm a coward." They said, "Hulk Hogan, you're a coward? What are you talking about?" He rose from nothing, you became a national icon, everybody loves you, you started all these businesses. He says, he said he supported the MAGA movement, but he didn't want to alienate one half of his viewership, which was Democrat and one half was Republican.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  So he was, wasn't going to wear a MAGA hat. But then he said Trump got shot, and he stood up and said, "Fight, fight, fight." And Hulk Hogan said of himself, "You know what? I'm a coward." And so that's my response to these people. I didn't want to alienate half of the people who might buy my book.

• 1:04:51Sam Fragoso?

  You didn't want to alienate Democrats?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know what? I don't give a fuck about Democrats. I didn't want to alienate Bill Maher. I didn't want to get into the weeds about, "Let's go see who did what to who on what day." I was there to sell my book.

• 1:05:05Sam Fragoso?

  Fair enough. But you call yourself a constitutional conservative.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Sam Fragoso?

  And I want to know, the next day,

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Sam Fragoso?

  after you appear on the show,

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Sam Fragoso?

  at 8:00 AM,

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Sam Fragoso?

  Donald Trump calls you.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21Sam Fragoso?

  He says what?

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  He said, "David, I saw you on the show, it was really great." He says, "But you know, the election really was stolen." And so, and then he started talking about it. And I said, "You know, you know what, Mr. President? I agree with you." I said, "I wussed out. You're absolutely right."

• 1:05:35Sam Fragoso?

  What did he say on April 9th that you didn't believe on April 8th?

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  I did believe it on April 8th. What I was saying is that I was reprehensibly swallowing my, just like today, you know, you're trying to get me to talk about politics and so I get it. I thought I was going to try to sell some books. So I don't want to alienate you. I'd love to sell some books. Do you want to talk about politics?

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  That's fine. I didn't want to talk about politics with Bill Maher. I wanted to talk about whatever I was flogging that day.

• 1:06:10Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, but it's in this book.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:06:13Sam Fragoso?

  I assume since you wrote this book, it just came out, it is something you want to talk about, is it not?

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  I suppose so. So ask what you want.

• 1:06:21Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I'm wondering, as a man who has spent a life turning his time in card rooms and sales floors and turned it into work like Glenn Gary Gloros, banished prisoner, heist, movies about con men. I guess I want to know, given your capacity to understand and analyze and write about con men, whether you see Donald Trump in those same terms?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  No, he's a leader. He's a politician. Whom is he conning? Now, obviously, you don't believe within, you have no, no, here's the thing, I don't care about, Donald Trump to me is a hero because what he stood up for, what he's standing up for is the Constitution. And to me, the, there's something I think that occurred to me after the fact and occurred to a lot of people, which explains conservatism. And that's two things. One is he got shot, he stood up and said, fight, fight, fight. That was an act of courage. More importantly, or as importantly,

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  is that very few people panicked and they were more concerned with what happened to him than running for their lives, which was why he won the election.

• 1:07:49Sam Fragoso?

  I think that day was a tragedy for both sides, right? I mean, you you don't think there should be political attempts on people's lives?

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  I don't think there should be violence. I don't think that that violence happens at a protest. It's common sense to refrain from calling it a riot because the violence happened at a protest.

• 1:08:12Sam Fragoso?

  So the con man part doesn't track?

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Listen, this is, you know, this is what you're doing is legitimate human endeavor. It's called name calling.

• 1:08:21Sam Fragoso?

  In the book, you refer to Democrats as fascist, anti Semitic, fraudulent and barbaric.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Yes, some Democrats are, of course they are.

• 1:08:32Sam Fragoso?

  I think what it comes down to is this constitutional conservatism, which I bet we agree on a lot of things. The 2020 election seems to be the thing that, when you talk about therapy being this act of like resuscitating grievances. Who resuscitates grievances more about the 2020 election than Donald Trump? It is an ongoing, endless resuscitation of Hillary Clinton's emails, Hunter Biden's laptop. The 2020 election never ends.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Here's the thing that one of the Democrat tricks is we have to move forward. We shouldn't talk about Hillary Clinton.

• 1:09:08Sam Fragoso?

  I think we should, that's fine. We have talked about it.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Yes, but it hasn't been settled. If you don't have accountability for your actions, you can't have a society.

• 1:09:18Sam Fragoso?

  And do you think there should be any accountability for the behavior on January 6?

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Well, people went to jail. People were still in jail on January 6.

• 1:09:26Sam Fragoso?

  And you think that's, that's, that's okay?

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's okay or not, but there was accountability.

• 1:09:31Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think that was an appropriate response for, for them to be, to be jailed and to be prosecuted as they have been?

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  I think that the, I don't know. Look, there's an old saw that says where there's law, there's injustice. I think that Donald Trump said to those people, go and protest peacefully and patriotically. And some of them were doing that, some of them were rioting, and some of them were just walking around. And some of all three, so all three groups ended up in a joint.

• 1:10:03Sam Fragoso?

  Can I ask you, because I do want to wind our way back to talking about the work?

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:10:08Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:10:10Sam Fragoso?

  You don't think that's true?

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Go ahead.

• 1:10:14Sam Fragoso?

  Well, why are you saying it like that?

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Why not? Go ahead.

• 1:10:17Sam Fragoso?

  David, no one does this amount of, no one gives this much amount of time and care to someone's work if they didn't give a shit. So you're saying that in a way that's a little facetious. It's fine. How are you able to offer such a generous reading to what happened on January 6?

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, wait. What generous?

• 1:10:38Sam Fragoso?

  You're saying, you're saying some people, some people were there peacefully.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Sam Fragoso?

  Some people have not been so peaceful.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:46Sam Fragoso?

  Some people were just walking around.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Sam Fragoso?

  Your capacity for empathy and generosity, it's on full display around January 6. But it seems limited to January 6. It, it, it doesn't seem to extend to the protests and the aftermath of George Floyd. Doesn't seem.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Where do you get that?

• 1:11:04Sam Fragoso?

  In this book?

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Show me.

• 1:11:06Sam Fragoso?

  Do you want to, you want to go through this?

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Let's stop for a second and take an overview. Why are you having me here today?

• 1:11:12Sam Fragoso?

  I have you here to talk about all matters of things.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Right. But it seems to me that what we're talking about here is a little bit more toward an inquisition rather than a dialogue.

• 1:11:21Sam Fragoso?

  I'm genuinely curious how you seem to be open and, and open-hearted about what happened on January 6, but seem to have.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  I didn't say I was open-hearted.

• 1:11:30Sam Fragoso?

  You offered understanding that there were different people doing different things on that day. That is a fairly more generous reading than you gave, especially the Columbia protesters and all of that.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Well, there's several things involved here, right?

• 1:11:43Sam Fragoso?

  Which is what I want to hear about. Yes.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Good. I'm talking to a guy who never got punched in the face. That's you.

• 1:11:50Sam Fragoso?

  That's not true, but okay.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm a Jew, okay?

• 1:11:54Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  I spend a lot of time.

• 1:11:56Sam Fragoso?

  But it's not true what you just said.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, that's, that's, okay. I'm going to stand corrected. I was born just a little bit of time, like 20 months prior to my birthday, we're throwing Jewish kids into the ovens. So, American Jews of the mid-century come, tactic of accommodation was to keep our head down and work harder and try to be liked. It's a terrible idea. It's a terrible idea to grow up with. And also it doesn't work. So there are people at Columbia, you know what? I'm not going to debate the Columbia riots when you ask me something else.

• 1:12:31Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  I'll tell you how I feel about it. Here's how I feel about it. It's as if we're going back and you're saying, wait a second, Dave, you're a black guy. And you're saying that these people burned a black church, but there were some people in the background who were just, who were perhaps just interested in the idea of states' rights. How do you feel about that? My response to that would be fuck you.

• 1:12:52Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. I can feel that that's your response to me is fuck you because you're started the sentence by looking at someone who's never been punched. And the way you said it made it seem like you wanted to be the first one to do it.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Ah, that's really interesting because that's fascinating that you think that someone who disagrees with you even vehemently wants to get violent.

• 1:13:24Sam Fragoso?

  No, I think it's interesting that you presumed for whatever reason that I hadn't been.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:13:32Sam Fragoso?

  You said you're looking at someone who's never been punched.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so yeah, okay, I'll give you a check mark for that. No, you said that you think that I want to punch you.

• 1:13:40Sam Fragoso?

  You said it in a way, I didn't actually think you wanted to, but you said it in a way that was aggressive and made it seem like the line of questioning is deserving of a punch. I don't really know why you said that.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Why, why you haven't been punched in the nose?

• 1:13:56Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Because that, that, that's my assessment, that you look like you haven't been around the block. Because if you're ever in a situation of, if you've ever, my-

• 1:14:06Sam Fragoso?

  I see. So you, you're making assumptions about me?

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Sam Fragoso?

  Based on nothing at all, basically?

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Well, based on my, my talk with you, you, you have a very, very liberal outlook on life, but you're very interested in feelings, good. And you're very interested in equality, good. And you're interested in D E I.

• 1:14:24Sam Fragoso?

  And David Mannett.

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Okay, good.

• 1:14:28Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, and David Mamet.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Sam Fragoso?

  First and foremost, actually, David Mamet, which I'd like to wind our way back.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Go ahead.

• 1:14:36Sam Fragoso?

  Without being.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Without being what?

• 1:14:39Sam Fragoso?

  I do want a dialogue. I don't want you to feel like it's an inquisition. I think that's boring.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Here's two things. One is that that's what I said. And the other thing is you you don't have to concern yourself. My feelings, I'm perfectly capable of controlling them.

• 1:14:53Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, I do concern myself.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:14:56Sam Fragoso?

  Why would I not concern myself? Because we're having a human interaction. Why would I not concern? That's silly.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  So that you feel you feel offended and because you think that I've had that something in my tone was a microaggression. You found, wait a second.

• 1:15:08Sam Fragoso?

  No, no.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Hold on a second. It's on the record that you found it sufficiently aggressive to suggest that what you thought that I felt was that I wanted to punch you in the nose.

• 1:15:19Sam Fragoso?

  I was making a joke. And we didn't joke didn't land, and that's my fault.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Yes, I get it. Well, you know, as we know, if you take all jokes as true, you're going to be right more often than you're wrong.

• 1:15:28Sam Fragoso?

  I do apologize that I that was imprecise on my part. And fair enough. I'm not offended by anything you said. And I was just asking why you thought the need to say that to me. That's all.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Why I thought the need to say to you? Because I find you kind of squishy.

• 1:15:44Sam Fragoso?

  Find me squishy?

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. Well, asked and answered. Would you like to continue?

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  I don't care.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Had enough? Okay.

• 1:15:53Sam Fragoso?

  No, I've had enough. I want to keep going. Yeah.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  Go ahead.

• 1:15:56Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. Squishy. That's the first time I've been called squishy.

• 1:16:02Sam Fragoso?

  Coming back to the work. In 1982, you wrote the screenplay for the verdict. And around that time, you said, writing stills two warning needs in me, the need to be accepted and the need to be revenged. Is that still true? Is that what writing does?

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't think revenge was accurate. I think that was a hyperbolic. The writing is always still to me need to figure something out. Whether it's something in me or something in me at one remove, which is two characters that I create trying to figure something out, trying to get something from each other. So it goes back to what I said earlier, which is the question is how that's funny? I don't get it. What's going on here? This is why I wrote these books that you're kind enough to call polemical.

• 1:16:54Sam Fragoso?

  Two of them, two of them. I've also read a bunch of other ones and they're not all polemical. It seems the squishy thing is, is that your, is that your read?

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Here's the thing, to go back again, I'm a Jew, right? The river to the sea means kill all the Jews. So Port the Intifada means kill all the Jews. People in hijabs and people in kaffirs standing on tables and screaming at Jewish children, storming into classrooms and breaking windows means kill all the Jews. For you to say, on the other hand, there may be some people out there that were involved in peaceful protest, is a loathsome piece of antisemitism. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Thank you for talking to me.

• 1:18:00Sam Fragoso?

  And that was David Mamet.

• 1:19:08Sam Fragoso?

  Well, that's our show.

• 1:19:11Sam Fragoso?

  If you're interested in hearing more about how this conversation came to be and all the backstory around it, we will be doing a bonus piece for Lemonade Premium, featuring some of the people on our team, including our producer Caroline Reebok, our editor Matt Sasaki, and an old friend of the show, Corey Etad, who helped us out in the research process. If you want to contribute to that episode, we'd love to get responses from any of you. You can send an email or a voice memo response to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. I want to give a special thanks this week again to Corey Etad, our photographer Julius

• 1:19:55Sam Fragoso?

  Chu, the publishers Skyhorse and Grove Atlantic. I also want to thank David Mamet for coming on the program. To learn more about David and his work, visit talkeasypod.com. You can also watch this episode, which includes David walking out on us, on our YouTube page at Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. For more episodes like this one, you'd have to find a different show because there are no other episodes like this one. But if you want to hear good actors talk about acting, I'd recommend Bob Odenkirk, Michelle Williams, and Jeff Daniels. To hear those and more Lemonada Podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen.

• 1:20:38Sam Fragoso?

  Again, you can subscribe to Lemonada Premium for exclusive bonus content, not to mention ad-free listening. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or head to lemonadapremium.com. If you want to purchase one of our mugs, they come in cream or navy. For our vinyl record with writer Fran Lebowitz, go to talkeasypod.com/shop. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Chenix Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Matt Sasaki and Nick Hines. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was recorded out of Operation Podcast in Santa Monica, California. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by

• 1:21:20Sam Fragoso?

  Chris Shatner. Production assistance from Nate Downey and Kiki Giorgio. Research assistance from Pierce Harvey. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragosa. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next Sunday with a brand new episode. Until then, stay safe, and so long.

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats. Yeah, that's correct. Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.

• 1:22:21Speaker 04

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