The last two weeks of preview performances of “American Buffalo” played for 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 Trump’s presidency; he told The Guardian earlier this year that Trump had done a “great job” as president and suggested his defeat in 2020 was “questionable”. In Recessional, he writes that Trump “speaks American, and those of us who also love the language are impressed and excited to hear it from an elected official.”
“One of the reasons my friendship with David has survived all these years,” said comedian Jonathan Katz, “is that we never talk about politics.”
Much earlier, Mamet appeared to be questioning the liberal view he says surrounded the theater world with his 1992 play ‘Oleanna’. It depicts a disputed sexual harassment allegation made by a female student against a male professor. read as an interrogation of 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 with Mamet’s longtime collaborator William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet’s wife—was the evidence of a shift.
Mamet’s early plays, Eustis said, are “hugely morally ambiguous and complex.” With “Oleanna,” argued Eustis, who has never worked with Mamet, “he started to put his finger on the scales.”
But Leslie Kane, an emerita English professor at Westfield State University who wrote several scholarly books about Mamet and said she grew close to him and his family, saw a clear line between Mamet’s long-held obsessions as an artist and some of his later obsessions. political positions. † “His concern is language and the ability to use language,” she said, adding: “I think that’s what he believes: In our current environment, speech impairments require people in society to pay attention to what they are doing. say.”
But Mamet, who has recently put free speech at the center of attention, isn’t a fan of post-show discussions of his own works with members of the productions. In 2017, he made news with the stipulation that none of the discussions, known as talkbacks, should be held within two hours of his plays performing, demanding a $25,000 fine for each violation. In his new book, he says talkbacks “turn an evening at the theater into an English class.”
