A student edition of Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play First staged in Britain in 1983, Glengarry Glen Ross is the tale of four real-estate salesmen in a cut-throat sales competition. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and was made into a film, starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin, in 1992. "The finest American playwright of his generation" Sunday Times "A chillingly funny indictment of a world in which you are what you sell" Guardian "Nobody alive writes better American...Here at last, carving characters out of language, is a play with real muscle" Observer "David Mamet, screenwriter of The Verdict and The Postman Always Rings Twice, is alongside Sam Shepard and Michael Weller, one of the most distinctive voices on the contemporary American stage" Michael Coveney, Financial Times

A renowned psychologist, Charles, is asked to testify on behalf of one of his former patients who has committed a shooting. At first he is hesitant, and as his lawyer and his wife begin to tell him how he should handle the situation, Charles clings more fervently to his morals and his ethics. However, the tighter he clings, the more his reputation and career hang in the balance, especially as more truths are revealed about his relationship to his patient.

A very wealthy businessman buys a plane to carry his fiancee, a non-US citizen, into Canada. However, an unexpected landing of the plane prompts an investigation into the man's affairs based on his tax payment history. As his assistant tries to help him put things back together, secrets are revealed, and it is discovered the man is a powerful political insider who's been evading tax law. The investigation deepens and his future is even more at risk.

Nothing is quite what it seems in David Mamet's latest work. With a nod to his mentor, Harold Pinter, Mamet once again employs his signature verbal jousting in this battle of two women over freedom, power, money, religion -and the lack thereof. Premiered on Broadway, under the direction of the playwright, in Fall 2012 starring Patti LuPone and Debra Winger.

The Penguin Classics debut that inspired a classic film and a current Broadway revival
Reginald Rose's landmark American drama was a critically acclaimed teleplay, and went on to become a cinematic masterpiece in 1957 starring Henry Fonda, for which Rose wrote the adaptation. A blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, "Twelve Angry Men" holds at its core a deeply patriotic belief in the U.S. legal system. The story's focal point, known only as Juror Eight, is at first the sole holdout in an 11-1 guilty vote. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not affected by their personal biases. Rose deliberately and carefully peels away the layers of artifice from the men and allows a fuller picture of America, at its best and worst, to form.

Comedy

Characters: 2 males, 2 females

Bare stage, movable props

The Obie award-winning Sexual Perversity in Chicago "takes funny and painful digs at the fantasies and distances of the contemporary sexual game," according to The New York Times. Two male office workers, Danny and Bernie, are on the make in the swinging singles scene of the early 1970's. Danny meets Deborah in a library and soon they are lovers as well as roommates. The other couple, Bernie and Joan, seem to have the politics of sex down pat but are as confused as their more naive counterparts. After much comic drama, the two men end as they started, talking a good game in the local bar.

Published with The Duck Variations.

"Mamet has the most acute ear for dialogue of any American writer since J.D. Salinger."-The Village Voice

"Marvelously observant...A glittering mosaic of tiny, deadly muzzle flashes from the war between men and women among the filing cabinets and single bars."-The New York Times

A big-shouldered, big-trouble thriller set in mobbed-up 1920s Chicago--a city where some people knew too much, and where everyone should have known better--by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Untouchables and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross. Mike Hodge--veteran of the Great War, big shot of the Chicago Tribune, medium fry--probably shouldn't have fallen in love with Annie Walsh. Then, again, maybe the man who killed Annie Walsh have known better than to trifle with Mike Hodge. In Chicago, David Mamet has created a bracing, kaleidoscopic page-turner that roars through the Windy City's underground on its way to a thunderclap of a conclusion. Here is not only his first novel in more than two decades, but the book he has been building to for his whole career. Mixing some of his most brilliant fictional creations with actual figures of the era, suffused with trademark Mamet Speak, richness of voice, pace, and brio, and exploring--as no other writer can--questions of honor, deceit, revenge, and devotion, Chicago is that rarest of literary creations: a book that combines spectacular elegance of craft with a kinetic wallop as fierce as the February wind gusting off Lake Michigan.

David Mamet

Full Length, Comedy

Characters: 3 male (1 non-speaking)

Bare stage

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-The-Plow, takes us into the lives of two actors: John, young and rising into the first flush of his success; the other Robert, older, anxious, and beginning to wane. In a series of short, spare, and increasingly raw exchanges, we see the estrangement of youth from age and the wider, inevitable and endless cycle of life, in and out of the theatre.

"A comedy about the artifice of acting...It is also about the artifice of living...An evening of pure theatre."-The New York Times

"A comic masterpiece."-New York Daily News

"The warmest and often the funniest play in town."-New York Post " Mamet has] the most acute ear for dialogue of any American writer since J.D. Salinger."-Village Voice

Drama / Characters: 3 male Scenery: Interior Best American Play, New York Drama Critics' Circle Award during the 1976-77 season, this volatile drama starred Robert Duvall in the original Broadway production and has seen revivals with Al Pacino and most recently on Broadway with John Leguizamo in 2008. In a Chicago junk shop three small time crooks plot to rob a man of his coin collection, the showpiece of which is a valuable "Buffalo nickel". These high-minded grifters fancy themselves businessmen pursuing legitimate free enterprise. But the reality of the three- Donny, the oafish junk shop owner; Bobby, a young junkie Donny has taken under his wing and "Teach", a violently paranoid braggart- is that they are merely pawns caught up in their own game of last-chance, dead-end, empty pipe dreams. "Gripping drama"-The New York Times "Mamet is an actor's playwright...[He] senses the possibilities inarticulateness affords a savvy actor."-Women's Wear Daily "It isn't often that a play with a dramatic intensity of American Buffalo comes to the Broadway theatre."-New York Post

In David Mamet's latest play, a male college instructor and his female student sit down to discuss her grades and in a terrifyingly short time become the participants in a modern reprise of the Inquisition. Innocuous remarks suddenly turn damning. Socratic dialogue gives way to heated assault. And the relationship between a somewhat fatuous teacher and his seemingly hapless pupil turns into a fiendishly accurate X ray of the mechanisms of power, censorship, and abuse.

Bobby Gould in Hell by David Mamet

Short Play, Comedy

Characters: 3 male, 1 female

Interior Set

This is Bobby Gould's day of reckoning. The conniving movie mogul from Speed the Plow awakes in a strange room. A loquacious interrogator in fishing waders enters. Gould argues his case. A woman he has wronged appears and gets so carried away that she says some sassy things to the Interrogator. In the end, Bobby is damned for being "cruel without being interesting."

"Funny and pungent."-N.Y. Times

"Lifts the soul."- N.Y. Daily News "Hilarious ... with flashy magic tricks."-Newsday

Published with The Devil and Billy Markham by Shel Silverstein

Short Play, Comedy

Characters: 1 male

Bare stage

In this amazing rendition of a tall tale written in rhymed couplets, Billy Markham loses a sucker's bet with the Devil but ultimately outwits him.

"A tour de force with the jokes coming Faust and furious."-N.Y. Post. "A rip snorting, raunchy delight. Very, very funny."-Associated Press

Drama / Characters: 3 males, 1 female / Interior set / Multiple Award-winning playwright/director David Mamet tackles America's most controversial topic in a provocative new tale of sex, guilt and bold accusations. Two lawyers find themselves defending a wealthy white executive charged with raping a black woman. When a new legal assistant gets involved in the case, the opinions that boil beneath explode to the surface. When David Mamet turns the spotlight on what we think but can't say, dangerous truths are revealed, and no punches are spared. "Scapel-edged intelligence " -New York Times "Provocative and profane " -NY-1 "Mamet is most concerned with the power and treachery of language: a line of dialogue vital to the prosecution case is cynically rewritten by the defense. Mamet's larger contention is that attempts to create a more equal and tolerant society have made race an unsayable word...brilliantly contrives here a moment in which the single most taboo sexual expletive is ignored by an audience which then gasps at the word "black..".Mamet remains American theatre's most urgent five-letter word." -The Guardian Intellectually salacious...Gripping...rapid-fire Mametian style...Mamet's new play argues, everything in America - and this play throws sex, rape, the law, employment and relationships into its 90 minutes of stage wrangling - is still about race." -Chcago Tribune "There is intrigue within intrigue, showing how personal prejudice and individual missteps govern the course of things...Mamet adroitly mixes comic darts with tragic arrows." -Bloomberg News

Full Length, Dramatic Comedy / 2m, 1f / 2 ints.

Revived on Broadway in 2008, the original production starred Joe Mantegna, Ron Silver and Madonna in this hilarious satire of Hollywood, a culture as corrupt as the society it claims to reflect. Charlie Fox has a terrific vehicle for a currently hot client. Bringing the script to his friend Bobby Gould, the newly appointed Head of Production at a major studio, both see the work as their ticket to the Big Time. The star wants to do it; as they prepare their pitch to the studio boss, Bobby wagers Charlie that he can seduce the temp/secretary, Karen. As a ruse, he gives her a novel by "some Eastern sissy" writer that needs a courtesy read before being dismissed out of hand. Karen slyly determines the novel, not the movie-star script, should be the company's next film. She sleeps with Bobby who is so smitten with Karen and her ideals that he pleads with Charlie to drop the star project and and pitch the "Eastern sissy" writer's book.

"Hilarious and chilling ."- The New York Times

"Mamet's clearest, wittiest play." - The New York Daily News

Comic Drama

Characters: 7 male

2 interior sets

This scalding comedy took Broadway and London by storm and won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize. Here is Mamet at his very best, writing about small-time, cutthroat real estate salesmen trying to grind out a living by pushing plots of land on reluctant buyers in a never-ending scramble for their share of the American dream. Revived on Broadway in 2006 this masterpiece of American drama became a celebrated film which starred Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin and Alan Arkin.

"Crackling tension...ferocious comedy and drama."-The New York Times

"Wonderfully funny...A play to see, remember and cherish."-New York Post

Comedy / Characters: 4m, 1f / Interiors David Mamet's new Oval Office satire depicts one day in the life of a beleaguered American commander-in-chief. It's November in a Presidential election year, and incumbent Charles Smith's chances for reelection are looking grim. Approval ratings are down, his money's running out, and nuclear war might be imminent. Though his staff has thrown in the towel and his wife has begun to prepare for her post-White House life, Chuck isn't ready to give up just yet. Amidst the biggest fight of his political career, the President has to find time to pardon a couple of turkeys - saving them from the slaughter before Thanksgiving - and this simple PR event inspires Smith to risk it all in attempt to win back public support. With Mamet's characteristic no-holds-barred style, November is a scathingly hilarious take on the state of America today and the lengths to which people will go to win. "At once a barbarian, a bully, and an idiot ('I always felt that I'd do something memorable-I just assumed it'd be getting impeached, ' he says), Smith brings oxygen to Mamet's rhetorical brilliance-so much that Mamet seems almost giddy with pleasure as he makes his cretinous creation squirm...Broadway comedy is generally a testament to Twain's maxim that honesty is the best of all the lost arts. On the boulevard, laughter is meant to distract, not galvanize, to enchant, not disenchant. Into this weak hand, David Mamet has dealt an ace." -John Lahr, The New Yorker

Comedy / 2m / Simple Set School is a brief comic discourse on recycling, poster design and the transmission of information. Premiered with Keep Your Pantheon as Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet at the Atlantic Theater Company, NYC in the fall of 2009. "A textbook example of the style that made its author famous. Featuring characters identified only as A and B, as if they were points on a diagram, this merry little sketch moves with the show-off alacrity of a calculus prodigy whizzing through equations at the blackboard." - The New York Times

11m / Comedy In Keep Your Pantheon, an impoverished acting company on the edge of eviction is offered a lucrative engagement. But through a series of riotous mishaps, the troupe finds its problems have actually multiplied, and that they are about to learn a new meaning for the term "dying on stage."

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! "Savagery appeased can only grow. Once you give in to it, it must escalate, like a fire searching for air." The man who won the Pulitzer Prize for GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, who wrote the classic films THE VERDICT and WAG THE DOG sounds his alarm about the Visigoths at our gates. In RECESSIONAL he calls out, skewers, mocks, and, most importantly, dissects the virus of conformity which is now an existential threat to the West. A broad-ranging journey through history, the Bible, and literature, RECESSIONAL examines how politics and cultural attitudes about rebellion have shifted in the United States in the last generation. By screaming down freedom of thought and expression, Mamet explains, we kill invention and democracy - the foundations of security and growth. A wickedly funny, wistful and wry appeal to the free-thinking citizen, RECESSIONAL is a vital warning that if we don't confront the cultural thuggery now, the commissars and their dupes will transform the Land of the Free into the dictatorship at which they aim.

Edmond, a man set morally adrift, leaves an unfulfilling marriage to find sex, adventure, companionship, and, ultimately, the meaning of his existence.

What makes good drama? How does drama matter in our lives? In "Three Uses of the Knife, " one of America's most respected writers reminds us of the secret powers of the play. Pulitzer Prize--winning playwright, screenwriter, poet, essayist, and director, David Mamet celebrates the absolute necessity of drama -- and the experience of great plays -- in our lurching attempts to make sense of ourselves and our world.

In three tightly woven essays of characteristic force and resonance, Mamet speaks about the connection of art to life, language to power, imagination to survival, the public spectacle to the private script.

It is our fundamental nature to dramatize everything. As Mamet says, "Our understanding of our life, of our drama.... resolves itself into thirds: Once Upon a Time.... Years Passed.... And Then One Day." We inhabit a drama of daily life -- waiting for a bus, describing a day's work, facing decisions, making choices, finding meaning. The essays in the book are an eloquent reminder of how life is filled with the small scenes of tragedy and comedy that can be described only as drama.

First-rate theater, Mamet writes, satisfies the human hunger for ordering the world into cause-effect-conclusion. A good play calls for the protagonist "To create, in front of us, on the stage, his or her own character, the strength to continue. It is her striving to understand, to correctly assess, to face her own character (in her choice of battles) that inspires us -- and gives the drama power to cleanse and enrich our own character." Drama works, in the end, when it supplies the meaning and wholeness once offered by magic and religion -- an embodied journey from lie to truth, arrogance to wisdom.

Mamet also writes of bad theater; of what it takes to write a play, and the often impossibly difficult progression from act to act; the nature of soliloquy; the contentless drama and empty theatrics of politics and popular entertainment; the ubiquity of stage and literary conventions in the most ordinary of lives; and the uselessness, finally, of drama -- or any art -- as ideology or propaganda.

Playwright David Mamet's brilliant debut as a film director, House of Games is a psychological thriller in which a young woman psychiatrist falls prey to an elaborate and ingenious con game by one of her patients, who entraps her--with her own subconscious connivance--in a series of criminal escapades. It is a breathless roller-coaster ride of a movie that keeps springing one bizarre surprise after another, sustaining suspense with dazzling audacity. The unsuspecting audience is lured into a psychological and moral thicket of troubling implications, which bear the unmistakable imprint of Mamet's intensely personal vision.
Here is the complete screenplay of House of Games, with many illustrations selected from the film and an introduction by the author recounting in candid detail his experience as a first-time director.

Speed-the-Plow's Broadway run is the most recent triumph of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's astonishingly productive career. By turns hilarious and chilling....the culmination of this playwright's work to date....Riveting theater.-Frank Rich, New York Times; A brilliant black comedy, a dazzling dissection of Hollywood cupidity and another tone poem by our foremost master of the language of moral epilepsy... On its deepest level it belongs with the darker disclosures of movie-biz pathology like Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon. In a sense Speed-the-Plow distills all of these to a stark quintessence: there's hardly a line in it that isn't somehow insanely funny or scarily insane... [It is a] scathingly comic play.-Jack Kroll, Newsweek

American Buffalo, which won both the Drama Critics Circle Award for the best American play and the Obie Award, is considered a classic of the American theater. Newsweek acclaimed Mamet as the "hot young American playwright . . . someone to watch." The New York Times exclaimed in admiration: "The man can write!" Other critics called the play "a sizzler," 'super," and 'dynamite." Now from Gregory Mosher, the producer of the original stage production, comes a stunning screen adaptation, directed by Michael Corrente and starring Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Franz, and Sean Nelson. A classic tragedy, American Buffalo is the story of three men struggling in the pursuit of their distorted vision of the American Dream. By turns touching and cynical, poignant and violent, American Buffalo is a piercing story of how people can be corrupted into betraying their ideals and those they love.