With the onset of the 1980s, David Mamet was widely considered a powerful, yet controversial voice in contemporary American theatre. The decade would further establish him as a playwright of world stature and also as an extremely prolific artist at home in several artistic genres: drama, poetry, fiction, children's literature, nonfiction, and film. As the decade developed, so he was confirmed as one of the most original and important voices not only of his generation but also in the history of American drama, ranking alongside Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard. It was in the 1980s, too, that the dramatist's reputation began to spread internationally, so that, by the beginning of the next decade, his plays were among the most frequently performed in the Western world, in English or in translation. His fame even extended to Asia, where some of his plays were performed in Japan, South Korea, and China.

The 1980s were also marked by a number of controversies surrounding his dramatic work. These were particularly symptomatic of the disturbing nature of Mamet’s theatre: they had already started in the 1970s with his early succès de scandale, Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), and American Buffalo (1975), and were to continue well into the 1990s, in particular with Oleanna (1992). Mamet’s theatre indeed tends to shock a certain part of the theatregoing audience for four major reasons: its alleged machismo, misogyny, violence (physical and verbal), and the Jewish cultural heritage that he claims for himself, especially in his most recent work.