Martial Arting With David Mamet

By Joel Stein

David Mamet has me in a rear naked choke hold, and I'm quickly losing oxygen. He has knocked me to the ground and spun me on my back, with his right arm hooked tightly around my neck. He is 24 years older than I am and quite a bit shorter, but it has been determined in less than 20 seconds that he can kick my ass. "That was very good," he says, his breathing only faintly increased as I get up from the mat and suck in air. "You moved it from a double-leg takedown to a single-leg." Yes, my first seven seconds were heroic. If wrestling 60-year-old playwrights were at all like bull-riding, I could go pro.

Before Mamet disassembled me, he arranged for me to get an hour of training at Street Sports in Santa Monica, Calif., where for seven years he has been studying Brazilian jujitsu, a type of martial art that involves very little punching and kicking but a lot of rolling around on the ground and touching in ways that made me, if this is possible, uncomfortable while getting beaten up. Five students--all of whom act in his new film about ultimate fighting, Redbelt--took turns pummeling me under the instruction of Mamet's trainer, Renato Magno, who told me later I'd need five years before I could compete with the author of Glengarry Glen Ross. "He trains two or three times a week. If he misses a session, he likes to triple the time," Magno added. "He likes gambling, knives and guns. He drove a taxi." Never had someone used so many words to tell me I'm a wuss.

Mamet is so into jujitsu that not only did his daughter train here, but also his rabbi does. Mamet says it has taught him to be less aggressive than his characters. "One of the wonderful things I've learned from this is, in any confrontation, turn to the side. If someone says, 'You son of a bitch,' is he hurting me? Let the argument go. Take the fight out of your expression. No one ever won a fight by looking tough. It's a good lesson in life, and I'm still working on it," he says before failing a little bit and making passivity sound Mametian. "Now I can say, 'I see you're distressed with me. You're angry with me. Is there anything else?'"

Another change in Mamet is that he believes the liberal tenets he grew up with are mistaken. He detests George W. Bush and the Iraq war--in jujitsu terms, Mamet thinks the U.S. was suckered into expending its energy and exposing weaknesses--but he's newly sold on libertarian economics. "I had a revelation during the midterm elections," he says. "I was making my TV show, The Unit, early in the morning. And I thought, I don't know what these people's politics are, but we're all dedicated to this idea of working together. That's all a traditional conservative view of economics is. That the free market will always accomplish socially and economically what government cannot. Two people left to their own devices will get along--because they have to."

This is not what I've learned from decades of Mamet plays and movies, which suggest, actually, that left alone for three seconds, two people will screw each other over in really complicated ways that need to be figured out for hours after the play, over drinks and dinner. But he seemed to mean it. Mamet is reading so much (Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek) and writing even more (cartooning for the Huffington Post; blogging from the perspective of the main character in his new Broadway play, November; writing articles for magazines; composing essays about the theater) that he's like an increasingly efficient machine, his efforts all cleanly converted to output. "I'm in the best shape of my life," he tells me, as if I need convincing. "Strong, moderately lean, great cardio."

Eight years ago, Mamet gave me the most useful writing advice anyone ever has: People say things only because they're trying to get something. And now he tells me the most important lesson from jujitsu: "Never, ever turn your back to someone." And right then I realize that even though one of the writers I most admire in all of history is in better physical and intellectual shape than I am, I wouldn't trade places. I'd rather be mugged by Shakespeare than walk backward through life.