bad ideas with an excellent plot: the Mamet/LaBute problem

Both Neil LaBute and David Mamet are still working — but neither occupies the cultural center the way they once did, and for different reasons.

Both men built careers on confrontation, cruelty and moral absolutism, mistaking provocation for profundity and abrasion for insight.  For a time, American theater rewarded this.  Their work arrived when cynicism felt bracing, when misogyny could be disguised as diagnosis, when stripping characters of their potential passed for honesty.

Mamet’s decline is the clearer case.  His early mastery of rhythm and power gave way to repetition, then to grievance.  The language stayed sharp; the thinking calcified.  His later work reads less like tragedy than pamphlet — politics replacing drama, certainty replacing curiosity.

Some examples:

When confrontation revealed something –

• Glengarry Glen Ross

  The cruelty has a function.  The verbal brutality exposes how capitalism reshapes language itself — speech becomes a weapon, persuasion becomes violence.  The characters are hollowed out by the system, not by authorial contempt.  The play discovers something structural, not just mean.

  
  

• American Buffalo

  Mamet’s famous rhythms serve moral ambiguity.  The characters posture and bluster because they’re frightened, deluded and trapped.  The audience is invited to watch masculinity collapse under its own mythology.

When confrontation curdled into grievance –

• Race

  Ostensibly about race and the law, it reduces every character to an ideological mouthpiece. The play doesn’t investigate power so much as announce conclusions.  No one learns; no one surprises themselves; the audience is instructed, not engaged.

  
  

• The Anarchist

  What might have been a meditation on guilt and radicalism becomes an argument Mamet already knows the answer to.  Curiosity is gone.  The play feels less like drama than a courtroom brief for the author’s worldview.

LaBute’s fall is quieter but just as damning.  His plays confuse sadism for inquiry, cruelty for courage.  They offer no counterweight — only traps sprung on characters (usually women) in the name of “truth.”  As cultural literacy around gender and power evolved, his work was revealed not as daring but as blunt, schematic and incurious.

Some examples:

When cruelty still posed a question –

• In the Company of Men

  The misogyny is undeniable — but the film frames it as pathology.  The men’s conspiracy exposes how cruelty masquerades as bonding.  The audience is meant to recoil and understand how such harm is socially engineered.

  
  

• The Shape of Things

  Manipulation is the subject, not the method.  The final revelation lands because the play has genuinely examined authorship, control and the ethics of transformation.

  
  

When cruelty became the point –

• Fat Pig

  The play presents humiliation without counterweight.  The characters exist largely to enact contempt.  The cruelty doesn’t expose social systems or inner contradiction — it simply repeats a premise and calls it honesty.

  
  

• Some Girl(s)

  A parade of women designed to be discarded, each scene a trap rather than a discovery.  The structure guarantees superiority for the author and impotence for the characters.  Nothing is risked except empathy.

  
  

The problem with Mamet and LaBute is not that audiences became “too sensitive.”  It’s that theater grew more sophisticated.  We learned to ask: To what end?  What is being risked? What is being discovered?

Mamet and LaBute once answered those questions.  And now they mostly don’t.

What curdled was not their talent but their premise: that confrontation alone equals depth, that domination is the same as revelation.  When the culture stopped mistaking severity for seriousness, their work lost its camouflage.  Theater didn’t reject danger; it demanded stakes beyond humiliation.  It didn’t ban cruelty; it asked whether cruelty disclosed anything we didn’t already know.

Their absence from the center isn’t a moral purge or a sensitivity spiral.  It’s a market correction of attention.  Writers who once shocked us into awareness began repeating themselves, and repetition is the fastest way to drain shock of meaning.  Meanwhile, other voices learned to be just as ruthless with power while remaining curious about people.

What lingers from Mamet and LaBute is a lesson, not a legacy: provocation without inquiry is noise; certainty without doubt is propaganda; and cruelty without discovery is just cruelty. 

The theater moved on — not because it grew timid, but because it grew smarter.

Do you agree/disagree?  I’d love to know why.