No holding back for Mamet

NEW YORK — Early this summer, David Mamet turned on the telecast of the Tony Awards, for which his play "Race" had received a nomination for best featured actor. After a few minutes, and the long kiss between host Sean Hayes and "Promises, Promises" co-star Kristin Chenoweth, Mamet had had enough.

"I was kind of disgusted, I must say," he says during a recent interview from the dining room of the Upper East Side hotel where he stays during the Broadway run of "Race," scheduled to end Saturday. The Tonys, he adds, remind him of Constantin Stanislavski's comment on a production he disliked: When the talking walrus comes on, it's time to go.

"I don't want to see a talking walrus," Mamet says. "And I don't want to see two actors on stage kissing each other to death."

Verdict handed down, the 62-year-old playwright resumes his late-morning breakfast of scrambled eggs and decaf cappuccino as he discusses the theater and "Theatre," his new book. His salt-and-pepper hair is closely shaved, his glasses large with thick rims. He is dressed for heat, in a white cotton jacket and flowered shirt. In his quick, rounded Chicago rhythm, he swears like a real estate agent — in a Mamet play — and philosophizes like a rabbi.

Best known for "American Buffalo," "Glengarry Glen Ross" and other plays, and for the screenplay of "The Untouchables," Mamet is a brand name for punching, profane dialogue; for stories of betrayals and reversals; for questions about conscience and the meaning of order. Man is cruel in love and work, a predator but not hopeless. As he writes in his current book, "We are doomed by our own nature, but grace does exist."

He calls the Tonys "the Chamber of Commerce" of the stage business, but that's almost a compliment from a man who has rejected his "brain-dead liberal" past. "Theatre" is a kind of free market manifesto for drama and on the dock are Marxism, psychoanalysis, state-supported theater and Stanislavski, the innovative actor and director whom Mamet admired as a "talisman" long ago but decided didn't make any sense.

Mamet's book is a rejection of abstraction and a call for actors to leave out the personal drama and just say the lines. His goal is grand yet modest: "If it (the book) saves one young student a trip to graduate school, or an attempt to parse the Stanislavskian trilogy, I will not have lived in vain."