As Mamet Returns to Broadway, His Claims on Pedophilia Get Spotlight

David Mamet’s latest character describes an airplane pilot who gets lost because his map is incomplete. “The pilot’s answer to the question ‘where am I?’ lies not on the map, but out the windscreen,” says the character, speaking in the everyday language set to staccato rhythm that has come to be known as Mametspeak. “That’s where he is.”

This new monologue is not delivered in one of Mamet’s dozens of plays or films, but in a friend-of-the-court brief that Mamet filed last month. He wrote it in support of a Texas law intended to prevent social media companies from censoring conservative voices. (The law has been challenged on the grounds that it could prevent private platforms from reasonably moderating content.) The legal setting helps explain the absence of one typical Mamet feature: profanity.

With a revival of “American Buffalo,” his classic 1975 drama about small-time hustlers in a Chicago junk shop, opening Thursday night on Broadway in a production starring Laurence Fishburne, Mamet has been engaged in a blizzard of activities that are hardly standard fare for preshow publicity. But they are very much in keeping with his long history of pushing hot buttons — and with his late-career embrace of conservatism and support for former President Donald J. Trump.

In addition to the amicus brief, Mamet released an essay collection this month, “Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch,” in which he complains about the “plandemic” coronavirus lockdowns, decries “the Left’s anti-Trump psychosis” and suggests that it was Democrats and the media who threatened “armed rebellion” in the event that their preferred candidate lost the 2020 election.

Then, over the weekend, Mamet fueled outrage by claiming on Fox News that “teachers are inclined, particularly men, because men are predators, to pedophilia.”

He made the remark while discussing a Florida law prohibiting classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in certain younger grades, a law opponents have labeled “Don’t Say Gay.”

“If there’s no community control of the schools, what we have is kids being not only indoctrinated but groomed, in a very real sense, by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators,” Mamet told the host, Mark Levin.

“Are they abusing the kids physically?” Mamet added. “No, I don’t think so. But they’re abusing them mentally and using sex to do so.”

In response, the Tony Award-winning actor Colman Domingo wrote on Twitter, apparently referring to another Mamet play, “Speed-the-Plow,” “American Theater. Do your duty. Take out the trash. Buffalo’s, Plows and all.” And the culture writer Mark Harris wrote on Twitter, “At a time of increasing threats to gay people, David Mamet has chosen to ally himself with the purveyors of a vicious ugly slander that will endanger teachers and LGBT Americans. It’s inexcusable.”

Mamet declined through a representative to comment for this article; in “Recessional,” he dismisses The New York Times as “a former newspaper” and suggests that The Times and other media insist on works that “express ‘right thinking,’ that is, statism.”

Mamet, 74, came to prominence in the 1970s with a series of plays including “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and “American Buffalo.” His 1984 play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” two acts of profane one-upmanship among desperate real-estate salesmen, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. He has worked extensively in Hollywood, receiving Oscar nominations for his screenplays for “The Verdict,” a 1982 movie starring Paul Newman, and “Wag the Dog” in 1997, which he wrote with Hilary Henkin. He wrote and directed a number of films, including “House of Games,” “The Spanish Prisoner” and “Heist.”

He first announced his rightward turn in a 2008 Village Voice essay, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” (He said on a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” that he had intended the essay to focus on “political civility,” and had been surprised by the headline.) He wrote last year on the website UnHerd that he had been “elected a non-person by the Left many years ago,” and added: “It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.”

The new revival of “American Buffalo” — one of his most admired works, and one often read as a critique of capitalism, in a production starring Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss — will test his ability to play on one of his main fields, Broadway. And it will offer an indication of whether, at a moment of intense political polarization, audiences are still receptive to works by artists they may disagree with.

In his new book, Mamet is pessimistic on the market for challenging plays, warning that theater on Broadway has largely been replaced by pageantry, complaining of the “fatuity of issue plays” and bemoaning the demise of the “knowledgeable Broadway audience” in an era when its theatergoers are mostly tourists.

“They come to Broadway exactly as they come to Disneyland,” he writes in “Recessional,” published by the HarperCollins imprint Broadside. “As in that happiest place, they do not come to risk their hard-earned cash on a problematic event. (They might not like the play nor appreciate being ‘challenged’; they might just want a break after a day of shopping.)”

His recent publicity (he “seems to be doing his best — or worst — to make headlines,” Deadline noted) may also affect the box office.

When Mamet appeared on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” recently, Maher challenged Mamet on some of the views of the 2020 election he expressed in his book. “You think the attempted coup was from the Left; I think it was from the Right,” Maher said.

“I misspoke,” Mamet said, urging people to skip that page of the book.

But Mamet, for all the concerns he expresses in his book of being blacklisted, is unlikely to be canceled from the canon. “If I was teaching a class on contemporary American drama, I would teach Mamet,” said Harry J. Elam Jr., a longtime scholar of 20th-century American drama at Stanford University who is now president of Occidental College, speaking before Mamet’s most recent comments. “He has that type of importance.”

Gregory Mosher, who has directed nearly two dozen Mamet plays — including the 1984 premiere of “Glengarry Glen Ross” — said that Mamet’s influence extended beyond his own plays and films to other spheres. He sees Mamet’s mark on works of prestige television such as “The Wire.”

“Mamet made it OK to write about worlds that we now take for granted on HBO and elsewhere,” said Mosher, the chairman of theater at Hunter College, “and of course to say the word you can’t print.”

The last two weeks of preview performances of “American Buffalo” played to houses that were 93 percent and 88 percent full, according to the Broadway League. (Through a representative, the production’s director, Neil Pepe, and producer, Jeffrey Richards, declined to comment.)

Mamet embraced the Trump presidency; he told The Guardian earlier this year that Trump had done a “great job” as president and suggested that his defeat in 2020 was “questionable.” In “Recessional,” he writes that Trump “speaks American, and those of us who also love the language are awed and delighted to hear it from an elected official.”

“One of the reasons my friendship with David has survived all these years,” said the comedian Jonathan Katz, “is we never discuss politics.”

Much earlier, Mamet appeared to question the liberal outlook that he has said surrounded him in the theater world with his 1992 play “Oleanna.” Depicting a disputed sexual harassment allegation a female student makes against a male professor, it was read as interrogating political correctness. For Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, “Oleanna” — which Eustis saw in its original run at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village featuring Mamet’s longtime collaborator William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet’s wife — was evidence of a shift.

Mamet’s early plays, Eustis said, are “tremendously morally ambiguous and complex.” With “Oleanna,” argued Eustis, who has never worked with Mamet, “he actually started to put his finger on the scale.”

But Leslie Kane, an English professor emerita at Westfield State University who wrote several scholarly books about Mamet and said she grew close to him and his family, perceived a through line between Mamet’s long-held obsessions as an artist and some of his later political stances. “His concern is language and the ability to use language,” she said, adding, “I think that’s what he believes: In our current environment, restrictions on speech require that people in society must watch what they say.”

But Mamet, who has made free speech a central issue lately, is not a fan of post-show discussions of his own works featuring members of the productions. In 2017 he made news with a stipulation that none of the discussions, known as talkbacks, could be held within two hours of performances of his plays, calling for a fine of $25,000 for each offense. In his new book he says talkbacks are “transforming an evening at the theater into an English class.”

One person who thinks that the politics of Mamet’s plays — to say nothing of his punditry — are largely irrelevant to his plays’ success is Mamet himself.

“For fifty years I’ve paid my rent by getting people into the theater,” he writes in “Recessional.” “There are several strategies for doing so, but from the first I’ve relied on the most effective I know: be good.”

The technique was not infallible, he notes.

“And the audience and I sometimes differed about its definition,” he writes. “I did, however, know one certain way to keep them away: tell ’em the play was good for them.”