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There are some people in the world that we all just imagine have to be from New York. Woody Allen is one, Joan Rivers and Richard Pryor are others, and David Mamet must be a New Yorker himself. He talks fast, in a pretty spectacularly catchy rhythm, and he has strong opinions. He seems like a New Yorker, in dress, in manner, and in his remarkable impatience. Interestingly, he is from Chicago, and maybe most people already know that, but it certainly came as a shock here, and it’s hard to figure out why it was a shock. Going back and looking at the writer and his work, it still makes sense that he must be a New Yorker even though the facts don’t support it at all.

In many of his earlier plays, where moderately successful characters seemed like the types you’d run into outside a New York hotel , people with great ideas and plans, and a whole lot to say. They sounded like people who must be from New York, because they were so smart, interesting, terribly funny, and terribly cynical. New York or Chicago, maybe. The Chicago Mamet has earned the respect, and often scorn, of his peers in his own generation, as well as the ones before and after, because he has a remarkable gift.

It might be that Mamet’s characters are driven by the same hopes and desires that carry so many of us in this city. That makes him an honorary New Yorker for sure, along with the very developed dark side, with a wide array of secret passions, and secret stories, that we can also certainly relate to here. It also probably has something to do with the fact that every time he writes something, it’s produced all over Broadway and off-Broadway, and his TV and film work is so extensive that we sometimes get to hear Mamet speak even when we’re aware of it. And perhaps even more, the two cities have a lot more in common than anyone is comfortable to admit.