In A Play About David Mamet Writing About Harvey Weinstein, a fictional David Mamet is poisoned, castrated and murdered with his own playwriting award.
The piece, written by playwright Mathilde Dratwa, takes aim at Mamet and his plays, which include American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna, and have maintained a place in theater canon, even as Dratwa points to their swaggering male characters, crude language, derogatory treatment of women and more. In 2019, Mamet premiered the play Bitter Wheat, which was inspired by Weinstein and follows a fictional film mogul who is brought down by his own sexual malfeasance. This gave Dratwa the inspiration for her piece.
Her play also makes note of the institutions that have held Mamet up and expands its target to include a sung-through list of famous sexual predators, before pausing and examining the carnage.
Characters include an angry playwright overseeing scenes between her bolder alter-ego, a millennial actress auditioning for a role and “some old white dudes named David.” Abbi Jacobson, Heléne Yorke, Tony Award winner Kara Young and Billy Eichner will take on these roles July 21, in a one-night reading of the play directed by The Acolyte’s Leslye Headland. George Strus and Rachel Sussman are producing.
The reading, which will take place at the Off-Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons as a benefit for the New York Civil Liberties Union, marks the play’s biggest production yet. Tickets quickly sold out for the reading, which Dratwa, whose other works have been produced Off-Broadway and elsewhere, notes as a positive sign, even as she’s unsure about how the industry will react.
Dratwa spoke with The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the performance about her nerves about presenting these ideas, the politics of the theater industry and the nuance she found in the piece.
Why do you want to write this play?
The genesis for the play happened when I read a tiny little blurb that [Mamet] was writing about Harvey Weinstein and that the play would get produced in London. It made me absurdly angry. I couldn’t really figure out why, and then I realized, Wait, hold on, this play’s being produced. There’s no script yet. He hasn’t started writing it. His Broadway producer came to him and was like, “You should write about this.” And he did. And now he has a theater lined up in London, and he’s writing about this. Why? Why this playwright? It was something so absurd. And I just thought, if Mamet gets to write about Weinstein, then I get to write about Mamet.
His play, Bitter Wheat, did eventually premiere in London in 2019. Were you still working on your play when that happened?
Yes. And the play evolved. When I first found out about it, it was the height of #MeToo, and all this stuff was going on. And then by the time Bitter Wheat happened, the world had shifted a little. And I realized when the anger had died down, what I was actually really interested in was more of a dissection than a takedown. And it was less about David Mamet is doing this awful thing, and how dare he when he writes this kind of play. And it became more about who gets to write what plays and what’s my complicity?
And it also became that way as it went from fun vignettes that I was just getting my friends to read to an actual play. I wrote it for my friends for monologue nights. And then weirdly, the play started having a life of its own. During the pandemic, people were apparently passing it around. A friend of mine was like, “Oh, I went to someone’s living room and we read it out loud.” Another friend was like, “We were passing it around in the in the dressing room.” And yet no one wants to produce it, for obvious reasons.
No one has wanted to produce it?
I mean, so far. I won’t say that that’s because of the subject matter, it could be for a variety of reasons, but it’s certainly true that two of my other plays have had productions, and the third one is having a workshop production. And so this is the last of the four that I’ve written, and it’s just interesting to me that that’s the one that hasn’t received that kind of attention yet.
How are you feeling about doing this high-profile reading of it now?
I feel super excited. I also feel really apprehensive, because I know [David Mamet’s] very litigious, and I know that within the theater community, there are Mamet die-hards, and I’m just curious who’s going to show up and how it’s going to be received. I’m super excited about the caliber of the actors that we were able to attract, and I think that’s a testament to the producers and to Leslye, but also curious how it’s going to land.
In addition to the Mamet content, you also bring up several statements about the theater industry that I haven’t heard said so publicly. For example, one of your characters talks about the rumored all-female Glengarry production saying, “That’s feminism in 2025: an all-female almost-production of Glengarry Glen Ross. Making a woman say the line, ‘you fuck little girls, so be it.’ That’s about as enlightened as Broadway gets.” Are you nervous about how those statements will be received by the industry?
I am, and I’m also aware that a few years ago, the Lillys [which tallies non-profit productions by gender and race] were like, “For the first time ever, we have parity in terms of gender representation on stage.” And this year, dismal. So clearly, if you don’t have that sort of constant vigilance and push that, it doesn’t continue. And this particular year, a number of theaters have announced seasons with virtually no women, or one woman in a co-creator role.
It’s not finger pointing at all, but it feels a little bit dangerous in a way that I don’t know that it would have a few years ago, before the election. I feel like, “Oh, we’re back to a place where this is a provocative thing and people feel singled out.” And artistic directors of Roundabout and Williamstown and all these places that failed women a little bit this year [in terms of their programming] are going to feel targeted. And also what’s going on politically in the broader way. We have someone in the White House who said, “Grab her by the pussy.” There was a time after I wrote it, when I think there was like this wave, and I would have felt very much like, “Look at my righteous anger.” And now it just feels a little bit different, and just a little more actually dangerous.
Why do you think members of the theater industry have been hesitant to say things like this publicly?
I think that theater is a world where you’ve got a lot of people who really, really, really want to work, and the power dynamic is so complicated. It’s its own specific flavor of the same thing, but it’s like what happened with Weinstein too, right? What do you do when someone has more power and someone else is so hungry, and you are in a career that is a vocation that you love, and where you feel like any opportunity is easily taken away? And I think that there’s something around that fragility that makes people really, really cautious.
What’s your relationship with David Mamet plays?
When I was studying acting and in drama school, those plays are where teachers go for material. So it was introduced to me at a very impressionable age, and I really loved it, and the guy I was dating said that he was his favorite playwright. For a lot of people, I think he brought a certain vernacular to the stage, and he had an irreverence, and I was swept up in that. And it took me a while to question the content of what I was actually being asked to use for scene study class and monologues.
What do you think of his plays still being produced on Broadway? The revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, with Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr just finished its run, and American Buffalo was revived a few years ago.
It’s interesting, right? Bitter Wheat got panned, but it got produced and it got a slot before it had a script. He has another few that didn’t do so well on Broadway, but once you’ve reached a certain level, you can fail a lot and still be around in a way that I don’t know is true of up-and-coming female playwrights.
Can you talk about your decision to move from violence into a more nuanced take on Mamet in the play? You let him defend himself, in a way, and also turn the magnifying glass on yourself as a playwright.
First of all, I don’t actually believe violence is the answer. And secondly, what are we trying to say? Are we trying really to just cancel everybody? I don’t think that that’s the answer either. I think the answer is more expansive and generous. It’s not a pushover answer, but it has to ride that line of we’re not going to stand down and we’re not going to turn into pushovers, but we also don’t actually advocate for violence, and we also don’t know that we have to prevent any of these people from being staged ever again. I don’t think that’s the end goal. So what is it? And then it became more personal, because some of what is in the script, too, around race and stuff like that, came from real mistakes I made, and real conversations that I had with actresses of color who felt very strongly about their role in this play when they came to read for Zoe [the millennial actress].
At one point in the play, you seem to suggest that the solution is producing more female and new playwrights. Is that the answer?
Yeah, I think female and non-binary and playwrights with disabilities. I think that there is an expansiveness to what is possible in the theater. And a lot of people that are drawn to the theater were people that were ostracized or cast out in some way in high school, and found their way to a place where they could go on. And I just really want to believe in the theater as a place where we can all belong. And so I don’t think it’s about, let’s not produce this playwright. It’s more about all these names, who are they? Where are they? Let’s produce all of these people and more.
Is your hope to get a more full-scale production of this play?
I actually really love the idea of a pop-up on someone else’s set that could be done for not a lot of money. You use the light plot that’s available. Potentially, it could also even tour like a night at Playwrights, a night at the Roundabout.
I think theater can be more things and different things, and theater can also be more reactive. I wish this play had this kind of attention four years ago. The things that we’re seeing on stage are a little bit behind. Unless you’re David Mamet, you get a theater on the West End to agree to do your play before it’s written. But if you’re not that, you have to wait for so long that by the time it’s done … So we’re taught to write timeless plays without a shelf life. And I think why isn’t the theater a vital part of holding up a mirror to society? And wouldn’t it be really cool if we could write plays with shelf lives, but see them pop up quickly?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.