As an audience, if you see 1800s or something, it more often seems that the actors are carrying the weight of the time. It always has a Shakespearean tone to it. To me, that always feels very theatrical and very unrelatable.
Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.
I don't know what it means and I don't care because it's Shakespeare and it's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words.
Characters on stage, like people in what we refer to as "real life," do not speak to reveal themselves. They do not speak to conceal themselves. They speak to get whatever it is that they want. It is the only reason they speak.
Any time you get to do a David Mamet play, it's a great opportunity. His writing is such that I think it's a big challenge, but when you get it right, it's a great opportunity to play every night, really.
And, since they are theater people, they are all talking. All of them. Simultaneously. They do not need to be heard; they only need to be speaking.
Like most playwrights, I hate talkbacks with a passion that can burn a hole through hell.
The thing I know how to do most is write a play. I came up loving plays and learning about plays and writing plays. I actually feel like an outsider when I'm writing movies and television.
A hit, a very palpable hit.
I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
My plays are always pushing towards cinema anyway. They're down and dirty, real and more fun.
The conventional wisdom with David Mamet is, you do not change a word. And that agrees with me. If you want to change any of David's words, it's like wanting to change the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare - you should do something else.
I quoted David Hare one of his lines the other day to illuminate whatever point we were trying to make in the conversation, and I said 'What play was that?' and he said 'It was your line, you said it about a hundred and fifty times in The Vertical Hour.'
The wonderful thing about writing for theatre is you can go anywhere you want with the language. There are no limits. With film, they frown on language - it's always 'Too many words.'
Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature,--endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity.
I think that's the best way to see things, especially this kind of play where there's no pyrotechnics, it's literally just people talking.
When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that are very intimate, but fill a 1,500-seat house. Plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' have deep moments of silence and intimacy to them.
I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.
Theater is about language, so characters have to define themselves through language for an audience.
There is nothing cooler than having lines like, 'Batman, the fate of the world is upon us.' Who gets to say that? And who gets to say that in a deep, earnest, amazingly sexy way?
Some of the greatest works of theater, from Chekov's work to modern playwrights', consist of just a few people in a room with no one leaving.
The one overall structure in my plays is language.
Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.
When I was growing up in the '80s and working in the theater, David Mamet exploded with a whole new reworking of what dialogue should sound like. It was punchy and raw and repetitive, bursting with dynamic. I remember that switching on a lot of lights for me.
Dialogue comes naturally to me and I can hear the characters' voices in the scenes.
