October 2006
Satellite Theater

Mamet Primer

By Shamrock McShane

Early spring 1975 in Chicago. We're rehearsing a play that will open the Goodman Stage Two.

Maybe it was Bill Woodman's way of fobbing off the kids. They were letting us put on a midnight show in the lobby. Twelve performances. From a stack of scripts, Patrick O'Gara, our messianic director, had chosen Robert Gordon's poetic and ethereal Once and for All. I was assistant director.

Our set designer was Michael Merritt. He was a member of our ensemble. We'd been working together for three years. We were building our own theater company. It was the Golden Age of theater in Chicago.

Michael was going to design another set in the fall for the play that opened the second season of Stage Two. It was something different that Greg Mosher, Woodman's assistant, was working on, a new script.

Michael Merritt was a Vietnam vet, largely self taught, a hell of a nice guy, and within the next five years he would prove himself one of the preeminent set designers in American theater. And then he would be dead of a brain tumor. David Mamet would dedicate his play Oleanna to the memory of Michael Merritt

Michael Merritt's next project was designing the set, a junkshop on the south side of Chicago, for American Buffalo.

In the fall, when Stage Two started up its new season, things were different. William Woodman was the artistic director of the Goodman, and he saw his role as that of caretaker of the classics. Woodman and the Goodman made Chicago the home of state of the art productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Brecht, OıNeill, you know the list — you read Satellite.

Woodman's assistant was hot–to–trot straight–out–of–Juilard Greg Mosher. And Mosher had a burr under his saddle named David Mamet. Instead of plucking a script from the pile as Patrick O'Gara had, Mosher was going to direct Mamet's new play American Buffalo.

That was just the start. In the end, Woodman was canned and Greg Mosher took over, and it appeared to us plebeians something like a palace coup.

As Heraclitus said, "The end and the beginning are the same." What happened when American Buffalo opened Stage Two for the 1975–76 season was the be all and end all of American drama from that moment until now. There is more, of course. There is Angels in America and much of Mametıs oeuvre, as well as Shepard, Wilson, you know the list.

American Buffalo is the essential drama of "savage shitheads in the wilderness" and if that offends you, this is not the play for you. But you'll be missing a lot of laughs.

And what of the violence in the world? Or a woman's place in it? Is it not All a matter of Free Enterprise?

"The freedom of the individual to embark on any fucking course that he sees fit in order to secure his honest chance to make a profit."

William H. Macy played Bobby, the kid, in the first go–round of Buffalo at the Goodman and when the play was re–mounted at the St. Nick Theatre the following year, 1976, befitting the bicentennial.

Mamet was living in the Lincoln Hotel. We were wont to refer to him as The Great Man. All the young bloods of the theater would hang out at Sterch's or Oxford's Pub or at the Body Politic on Lincoln Avenue, which was known simply as the Street — Mamet, Macy, Bill Petersen (now of CSI), Megan McTavish (now the head writer for All My Children and General Hospital), a bunch of us.

Chicago was different. If you wanted to be a star, you went to New York or Los Angeles. If you wanted to start a theater, you went to Chicago.

I met up with William H. Macy again in the nineties. He was visiting Gainesville and I was playing the part of John in Mamet's Oleanna. Macy had originated the role. He knew what a bear of a part it was, and he saluted me "From One John to Another." I finally became a made Mamet Guy.

In 2000, while he was hanging out here in Gainesville where his folks used to live, Mace told me he was going to play the part of Teach in a production of American Buffalo at the Atlantic Theatre in New York.

Now Iım playing Teach.

Robert Duval played Teach on Broadway. So did Al Pacino. And, my hero, Dustin Hoffman played the part in the movie opposite Dennis Franz. They now all qualify as Mamet Guys — an army that includes Alec Baldwin, Charles Derning, and what the hell, Sean Connery.

And there are Mamet Broads too. Lindsay Crouse and Rebecca Pidgeon (Mamet married both of them — separately of course), Felicity Huffman, Julia Stiles, Patti LuPone, Linda Kimbrough.

The role of Teach started with a guy named Bernard Erhard. I don't know what ever happened to him. When the play moved to the St. Nick, Erhard was replaced by Mike Nussbaum, who is one of the Quintessential Mamet Guys, along with Mace, Joey Manetegna, Jack Wallace, Colin Stinton — you are starting to know The List.

Mr. J.J. Johnston of Chicago can go to the head of that list, as the originator of the role of Donny Dubrow, and it is he to whom Mr. Mamet dedicated the play.

Scot Davis plays Donny in our production at the Civic Media Center on Sunday and Monday nights November 12 through 27.

Scot Davis and I have been acting together in Gainesville for more than a decade now, ever since we played Roma and Aronow in Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross at the Acrosstown Theater in the mid–nineties. (Pacino and Alan Arkin played our parts in the movie.) We've been in more shows together since than we care to count, but doing Mamet again brings us full circle around the Vicious Campfire, as the Great Man would say.

The kid, Bobby, is played by my kid, Mike.

This is the way things go in the theater, as in much of public life — nepotism. What can I say? The kid got me the gig.