David Mamet has revealed that he has written a play about Harvey Weinstein. In an interview to promote his new novel, Chicago, a prohibition-era murder mystery, the Pulitzer-winning playwright said: “I was talking with my Broadway producer and he said, ‘Why don’t you write a play about Harvey Weinstein?’ And so I did.”
There are no official production details confirmed for the play, which is titled Bitter Wheat, but the Chicago Tribune’s Rick Kogan reports: “There has been great interest in the lead role expressed by a Chicago stage legend who is now a movie star.”
Mamet previously explored allegations of sexual harassment in Oleanna, his 1992 play in which a student accuses her professor of misconduct.
“I think about this a lot now,” he told Kogan. “I have a bunch of daughters, a young son,” he said. “Every society has to confront the ungovernable genie of sexuality and tries various ways to deal with it and none of them work very well. There is great difficulty when you are switching modes, which we seem to be doing now. People go crazy. They start tearing each other to bits.”
Mamet is no stranger to writing about Hollywood. His 2000 film comedy State and Main followed the travails of a movie crew shooting on location in Vermont and starred Alec Baldwin as a wayward leading man and William H Macy as a stressed director. Mamet’s 1988 play Speed-the-Plow also satirised the film business and was staged at the Old Vic in London in 2008, with Kevin Spacey in the role of a desperate movie producer.
Mamet’s last new Broadway play, China Doll, opened to lacklustre reviews in winter 2015 and starred Al Pacino as a fading power broker, a role written for him. Mamet’s next movie is a crime drama, an adaptation of Don Winslow’s novel The Force, and is slated for release next year.
