SOURCE: Van Leer, David. “Speed-the-Brow.” New Republic 28, no. 1 (29 October 1990): 32-6.

In the following review, Van Leer discusses many of Mamet's works that were produced from the mid-1970s to 1988.

In the past fifteen years David Mamet has established himself as one of our most powerful playwrights best known for Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Speed-the-Plow, he is praised for the contemporaneity of his deadbeat settings and characters, for the honesty of his gritty dialogue, for the intensity of his moral vision. Not simply a chronicler of modern life, Mamet is a prophet decrying the dark underside of the American dream. Yet Some Freaks, his second book of essays, possesses so little of the style, wit, intelligence, or intensity usually claimed for him that one finishes the embarrassing collection wondering what Mamet's reputation for high seriousness could possibly be based on. Even more disappointing...