David Mamet

When "Edmond" was first performed on stage in the early 1980s, it was possible, especially in those early "Morning in America" Reagan years, to recognize David Mamet's play as a timely dissection of what is now commonly referred to as the Angry White Male.

Introducing David Mamet, songsmith, and Michael Ritchie, multiculturalist. The playwright famed for filling playgoers' ears with staccato cussing will seek to seduce them through song in his first musical, "A Waitress in Yellowstone," one of seven world premieres on Center Theatre Group's three stages in 2006-07.

David Mamet has created a television show and, given that he is a great figure of the American theater and one of the more reliably interesting if not always completely successful artists in American film, this is news. His series, "The Unit," which begins tonight on CBS, concerns a supersecret rapid response team of globetrotting U.S. Army special forces commandos and the women who love them.

The last line of retired Command Sgt. Maj. Eric L. Haney's 2002 memoir describes how he can spot a fellow counterterrorism soldier on the evening news: "It's always in a bad place, and the Delta Force member is the man who looks like he's at home." It's also indicative of how a 53-year-old soldier with a pedigree that includes stints as an Army infantryman, Ranger and founding member of the secret counterterrorist arm Delta Force has come to feel right at home on an unlikely battlefield.

If you didn't already know, you'd probably never guess who coined the fancy quips and epigrammatic fusillades unleashed by the two late-19th century lipstick lesbians stalking the Geffen Playhouse's new production of "Boston Marriage." No, it's not Ronald Firbank or Ivy Compton-Burnett, though the author seems to be strenuously imitating their class-conscious drollery.

ANYONE who has seen David Mamet's tough-talking, all-male plays -- including "American Buffalo," "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Romance" -- might assume that his writing and directing "Boston Marriage," a corseted, turn-of-the-century drawing room comedy with an all-female cast, would be like loosing an American buffalo in a china shop.

David Mamet has long been American drama's fugleman of four-letter words. But his latest play is shocking due to a new F-word: funny. "Romance" is indeed a funny play, but it's also as intricately plotted and thematically pregnant as his other acclaimed, non-comedic works that introduced American theater to the poetry of profanity. This was lost amid the laughter (first nervous, then uproarious) that greeted the play's world premiere in New York City earlier this year.

WE are told we should not judge a book by its cover. But the cover is that which we see first, and it is, in all life, difficult to discount a first impression. The American Cancer Society and the Drug Enforcement Administration thus might appear on first impression to be organizations suggesting the support of these two misfortunes.

As an actor toiling away in the ranks of the largely unknown for the last 17 years, my initial reaction to David Mamet's screed against the casting process was one of quiet enjoyment. When no less a figure than Mamet comes forward to give the collective denizens of the casting couch a good telling off, it doesn't get much better. But once the glow of self-righteous anger has faded, you're left with regret and a vague sense that you got it wrong and shot yourself in the foot. All job interviews, no matter what the profession, entail various forms of absurdity.

Welcome to Huffingtonpost.com! Please join us at 9 p.m. tonight when we take our blog live, in a first-ever HuffingtonPost chat! With us online will be regular contributors Walter Cronkite, David Mamet, Larry David, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer, Sen. Gary Hart, David Geffen .... AriannaHuff: ... So, like I was saying, how can we trust a president whose greatest achievement is making Al Gore and John Kerry actually look appealing? I mean, have things gotten this bad?