LOS ANGELES (TNA) – Making peace with the gods is what drama is all about, says David Mamet.

How telling that in these days, at this time, virtually none of the morons and dreamers, the scoundrels and schemers in Mamet’s most famous works – Hollywood bloodsuckers, real estate small-timers, political bigwigs, pawn shop impresarios – ever make that peace; the drama is in the desperate measures to which these (mostly) men will go to achieve these ends.

And still, they fail.

“Most of my plays are about only succeeding at the cost, the failure of another,” Mamet says. “That American thing.”

David Mamet

In this regard, Mamet is one of the writers of our time, a classical craftsman who, in a career spanning some 30 years, has merged hardboiled noir, vernacular fireworks, a ghoulish machismo, devastating gusts of profanity, an Old Testament morality, and an omniscient, frequently ironic and brutal view of mankind to create some of the stage’s and screen’s most lauded, significant works.

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Glengarry Glen Ross,” Mamet machetes the moral, spiritual and psychological chicanery that occurs over a particularly heated 24 hours in a desperate do-or-die real estate office that might as well be purgatory itself, with all roads leading to Hell.

In “American Buffalo,” a trio of dumpy ne’er-do-wells with big American dreams plots their escape from the pawn shop that is their literal and figurative holding cell.

And in the hit CBS show “The Unit,” whose third season premieres Sept. 25 – the same day the DVD of season two hits stores – top-secret Special Forces agents grapple with extreme missions overseas and rapidly decaying personal relationships.

Mamet believes his stories are universal regardless of the setting, be it professional or geographical.

“Every business has a natural division between the assembly line and the front office,” he says. “The workers bitch about the depredations of those in suits, and the suits bitch about the workers’ intransigence.

“Hollywood is no different, no better, and, probably, no worse than the auto industry, politics or the defense department in this divisiveness,” he adds, commenting on his career as a preeminent filmmaker, TV producer and playwright. “It is a poor thing, but mine own.”

In Mamet’s world, banking on luck is a fatal character flaw, while counting on fate to be unkind is one’s only hope for survival. This place – be it Hollywood, Chicago or Washington, D.C. – is unforgiving; occasionally deadly, but always murderous to a man’s ego.

No one gets out alive in the blitzkrieg of Mamet’s vindictive, venomous wordplay, his labyrinthine plots that click precisely, clock-like, toward eleventh-hour moments of epiphany that quickly destabilize with a second or third contradictory revelation followed by a gut-blast of irony.

So nobody wins in Mamet’s stories – not the assholes who believe they are heroes or the losers who think they deserve the shit they always take. Kinda like life, a constant, dizzying carousel of shin-kicking, soul-slashing, backstabbing yearning for ascension of any kind at all. It’s the stuff of great drama, and most actors can’t wait to play it.

“David is revered,” says actor William H. Macy, a friend and collaborator since the pair attended Goddard College in Vermont in the early 1970s. “He is worshipped in the theatrical community. The vast majority of actors think he can walk on water, and I’m not sure he can’t. He’s a rooting, tooting genius.”

Contrary to his characters, who throw down a verbal gauntlet in discursive, profane spasms, Mamet is tight-lipped about his own life.

Born and raised in Chicago, Mamet, now 59, claims the theater was a longtime calling, one he carried through college and the formation of several independent theater companies, including the renowned Atlantic Theater Company.

His first play, “Duck Variations,” was produced before the playwright had turned 30. By the time “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and “American Buffalo” followed a year later, his surname had become an adjective used to describe dramas featuring morally ambiguous characters with spitfire tongues and urgent, distinctly American concerns about success and climbing the ladder.

In the early 1980s, Mamet made the move to Hollywood, writing an Oscar-nominated adaptation of James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Since then, Mamet has enjoyed a critical and creative success virtually unrivaled in theater and cinema, taking on the occasional work-for-hire gig in Tinseltown (“Hannibal,” “Ronin”), adapting his plays for the big screen (“Buffalo,” “Glengarry”), while also nurturing his own aspirations as a filmmaker (“The Spanish Prisoner,” “State And Main”).

Four years ago, Overlook Press published Mamet’s novel, “Wilson,” a super-academic commentary on the ur-historical text of future historians. It’s been described by critics as “jabberwocky” and “textual perversity,” as well as “dark” and “offbeat.”

But it’s that same dialogue – dubbed “Mametspeak” by critics of theater and film – that keeps some of the world’s great actors lining up to work with Mamet, even if – as rumored – the playwright rehearses his actors with a metronome to finely tune their line deliveries.

Indeed, metronome or no, Mamet currently enjoys a regular, albeit informal repertory company of actors – including Macy, Alec Baldwin and Joe Mantegna – as well as the type of A-list callback roll once kept by Woody Allen.

“If you can do Mamet, if you can do ‘Oleanna,’ you can do anything. A lot of tough language in there,” Macy says. “David is the toughest of the tough. There’s always a compulsion on my part to do his lines letter-perfect and still make it like I was ad-libbing. I like to talk, and I like to talk loud. Mamet’s good for that.”

Unlike the doomed chumps and the damned victors of his writing, Mamet himself seems to conduct a life largely drama-free.

“I only work in Hollywood because that’s where they make the fucking movies,” he cracks.

Perhaps he’s made his peace with the gods, and that’s why he is so capable of recounting the brutal journey the rest of us insist on taking again and again, rarely fruitfully.

Or, if you ask him, maybe not; Mamet’s more inclined to credit a humble Midwestern upbringing for his grounded sensibility and his work ethic.

“Keep your eyes open, your mouth closed, work hard, be a part of the community and tell the truth,” Mamet has said. “What else is a writer supposed to do?”

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