In Mathilde Dratwa’s new work, A Play About David Mamet Writing About Harvey Weinstein, a fictional version of the acclaimed playwright is poisoned, castrated, and murdered with his own award.
The play takes direct aim at Mamet, whose works like American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross remain canonical despite their swaggering male characters and derogatory treatment of women. Dratwa’s inspiration came from Mamet’s 2019 play Bitter Wheat, which was based on Harvey Weinstein and followed a fictional film mogul’s downfall from sexual malfeasance. “If Mamet gets to write about Weinstein, then I get to write about Mamet,” Dratwa explained.
Her play also scrutinizes the institutions that have elevated Mamet and expands its critique to include a sung-through list of famous sexual predators. The work received its most significant presentation to date in a sold-out, one-night-only reading at the Off-Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons on July 21. The reading, a benefit for the New York Civil Liberties Union, featured a star-studded cast including Abbi Jacobson, Heléne Yorke, Tony Award winner Kara Young, and Billy Eichner, with direction by The Acolyte‘s Leslye Headland.
Dratwa said the idea for the play sparked from an “absurd anger” upon learning that Mamet had been commissioned to write about Weinstein before a script even existed. “Why this playwright?” she recalled thinking.
Initially conceived at the height of the #MeToo movement, the play evolved from a “takedown” into what Dratwa now calls “more of a dissection.” As the initial anger subsided, her focus shifted to broader questions of artistic authority and complicity. “It became more about who gets to write what plays and what’s my complicity?” she said. The script gained underground traction during the pandemic, passed between actors in dressing rooms and read aloud in living rooms, though it has yet to receive a full production.
Dratwa acknowledged feeling both excited and apprehensive about the high-profile reading. “I know [Mamet is] very litigious, and I know that within the theater community, there are Mamet die-hards,” she said.
Her nervousness also extends to the play’s sharp critique of the theater world itself. One character dismisses a rumored all-female production of Glengarry Glen Ross as hollow progress, stating, “That’s about as enlightened as Broadway gets.” Dratwa worries such lines might feel particularly pointed now, citing a recent “dismal” year for gender parity in programming at major theaters. In the current political climate, she feels these critiques have become “a little more actually dangerous.”
Dratwa attributes the industry’s reluctance to engage in such public criticism to deep-seated power imbalances. “You are in a career that is a vocation that you love, and where you feel like any opportunity is easily taken away,” she observed. “That fragility makes people really, really cautious.”
Despite the play’s provocative premise, Dratwa insists its message is not about violence or cancellation. “I don’t actually believe violence is the answer,” she stated. “The answer is more expansive and generous.” Instead of tearing down established figures, she advocates for amplifying new voices, calling for more productions of works by female, non-binary, and disabled playwrights.
Ultimately, Dratwa hopes for a new model of theater that is more immediate and responsive. She laments that most playwrights are taught to write “timeless plays” because the production pipeline is so slow. “Wouldn’t it be really cool if we could write plays with shelf lives, but see them pop up quickly?” she mused, envisioning a future for her play as a nimble “pop-up” that could tour various venues, allowing theater to be a more vital and timely “mirror to society.”
