How important is David Mamet anyway?

I suppose I should address David Mamet's diatribe in The Village Voice on his newfound aversion to the left wing. He is, after all, arguably the most influential American playwright of the last 25 years, and I'd argue that an introduction to his work is bound to fuck up the styling of most young playwrights for at least a few years (Oleanna pretty much permanently castigated me to critical aspirations). Still, I feel immensely unqualified to write about it, as I did not see Boston Marriage, Romance, or November. I would feel worse about this, if I didn't hear such nearly universally terrible things about the former two. The latter play had all the indications of closing the store on Mamet's career, but I think I was not the only one surprised when it got a glowing review from John Lahr and did exceptionally well at the box office (perhaps the result, as Ben Brantley put it, of being a "David Mamet play for people who don't like David Mamet.") But because I haven't seen these plays, I'll focus more on the politics and past cases of lefty playwrights gone right.

Mamet's long had indications of his right-wing leanings, even in his earliest work, which had a frank honesty towards the brutality of dog-eat-dog capitalism, be it real estate (Glengarry Glen Ross) or Hollywood (Speed-the-Plow). He also fiercely criticized political correctness in my personal favorite of his, the aforementioned Oleanna. Even when his plays were scathing critiques of the culture of capitalism, there was a sort of acceptance of capitalism's logic behind it all. The biggest indication of late, of course, has been his right-wing Israel book The Wicked Son and his rant on Hollywood in Bambi vs. Godzila. He hasn't just been a contrarian, he's been an outright reactionary. It's arguably what we've loved most about him. Now we just have direct evidence of the fact.

Michael Billington raises the absolutely worthy consideration that his dogmatic conservatism may be making him a worse playwright, as he loses the moral nuance that characterized his earlier work. He cites Kingsley Amis and John Osborne as playwrights who suffered after there newfound conservatism. As an Osborne devotee, I must raise a red flag here, because as John Heilpern pointed out in his recent biography, Osborne was always more contrarian than conservative, and he certainly never had a political mantra as direct as what Mamet has provided here. So, I guess to sum up, I'm dissappointed by Mamet, though not particularly surprised, and I don't particularly expect all that much from his later career. It was nice while it lasted.