# David Mamet Exits Stage Left

An episode of [Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1100417601), 3 Aug 2025, 1 h 19 min.

Audio: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/arttrk.com/p/30200/clrtpod.com/m/rss.art19.com/episodes/d5bdc22b-700b-4b16-99de-c0a89aa835c7.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIhVJbnZpc2libGVOZXR3b3JrBjoGRVQ%3D--0761ee75eb25694efc17849092f8583c07f6c68b

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 (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 (1:07:06), and what he believes a ‘peaceful and patriotic’ protest should look like (1:10:12). Watch this conversation on our new YouTube channel. Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at mail@talkeasypod.com. See 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.

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