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<p>David Mamet is one of the most celebrated American playwrights of the last century: <em>Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, </em>and <em>Glengarry Glen Ross— </em>which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1983 and remains timely today. Our conversation unfolds, fittingly, in three acts. </p> <p>Act I: the inspiration behind his new novel about education, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Some-Recollections-St-Ives-Novel/dp/1648211402"><em>Some Recollections of St. Ives</em></a><em> </em>(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 <em>The Cryptogram </em>and beyond (27:00).</p> <p>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).</p> <p>In the...