Interview: In David Mamet's Latest, Evan Jonigkeit Plays the Patsy — Or Does He?

Henry Johnson started out as an under-the-radar play at multi-disciplinary arts venue called the Electric Lodge in Venice, California. It’s writer, David Mamet, insisted that critics not be invited. Even with a famous cast — Evan Jonigkeit, Shia LaBeouf, Chris Bauer, and Dominic Hoffman — most people didn’t know it was happening. That is, until LaBeouf, making his stage debut and apparently wanting to have his performance on the record, went rogue and personally invited critic Charles McNulty from the Los Angeles Times. Then Henry Johnson became a lines-down-the-block sensation that no one expected.

Mamet’s latest is a callback to his glory days, a drama about a patsy (or is he?), who happens to be willingly complicit in a heinous crime that lands him in the big house. Like in the best of Mamet’s works, you never quite know what anyone’s motivation is, and by all accounts, that made Henry Johnson a thrilling stage production.

Knowing that capturing lightning in a bottle is nigh impossible, Jonigkeit, LaBeouf, and Mamet set about doing so anyway, not in a theater, but on screen. A film of Henry Johnson is available now for online rental, reuniting the four actors who did the stage production. Jonigkeit, who plays the title role and happens to be married to Mamet’s daughter, the actor Zosia Mamet, is also among the producers, and here’s what he had to tell us about this unique, unexpected experience.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

So, you’re doing this play at an off-the-radar venue and you’re not inviting press. You costar invites a critic to come see it.
Dave [Mamet] is not too concerned with the critics and what the opinions are. He’s been that way for a long time. But Shia, this was his first time doing a play, so he wanted to be put to the test. He wanted to see what people who talk about this craft for a living thought about him and the production, so he went rogue. It wound up being a good thing and making it more of an event than it had started out as.

This project was born out of the writer’s strike, right?
So, Dave had never seen my work before, and then he saw me in the Jen Silverman play Witch at the Geffen Playhouse in 2018. I guess he thought I could do it, that I knew how to act, so he wrote me this play when I was shooting Archive 81. I was game to do it, but nothing happened with it until the writer’s strike in 2023 and we all had time.

Marja-Lewis Ryan, who had collaborated with Dave in the past, basically asked him if he had anything laying around and he presented Henry Johnson. The cast was assembled — Shia had written Dave a fanboy letter and they wanted to work together — and we dove in.

Tell me about what it’s like interacting with David Mamet, the theater practitioner, as opposed to David Mamet, your father-in-law.
It’s not much different, honestly. He’s a brilliant person. He’s funny. He’s the type of guy who can recite something from any of Shakespeare’s works and has an encyclopedic history of theater and literature and film. And you understand that him being the provocateur that he’s been for decades is not an accident. He knows that he’s being whatever he’s being at all times, and he brings that intelligence to the set every day. He has a clear vision for what is that he wants.

It wasn’t always easy. I’ve said elsewhere, we have different points of view on things, for sure. That includes the work we do. The typical Mamet doctrine is that you show up, you know your lines, you hit your mark, you say them, and that’s enough. What he means is that you have to tell the truth. How I find that truth for myself is maybe different than what Dave would do, but he continued to guide me towards what he is looking for. We became a lot closer as a result of this.

I don’t want to use a phrase like “return to form,” but it does feel more in line with the moral and ethical quandaries of Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo than some of his more recent work. It feels like old school David Mamet.
I agree with you. That’s why I did it. When he sent it, I was like “I wonder what this is going to be?” Once I read it, I was like, “Damn, that’s pretty fucking cool.” It raises questions of what happens to an individual that doesn’t think for oneself, and that’s fascinating.

You can make a case that the character, Henry, is sort of opaque and there’s not much there; that he’s a patsy or a dupe or whatever, but he does make the choices he makes. I think we can relate to that — we all think we’re doing the right thing all the time, and sometimes unintended consequences unfold.  It’s a shame that we don’t take a moment to inspect what happens if we don’t act from a place of morality, or we don’t investigate what those unintended consequences might be. That is the point that Dave is making.

So, the play closes in Venice. Why do it as a film instead of trying to continue on with the stage production in New York or Chicago or elsewhere?
We made the film because it was the most expedient way that we could do it, and it was the only way we could keep the cast together to have a record of what we made.

When it started, it came together pretty quickly. We threw it on its feet with no real enhancement or producer on board. Nobody had a game plan for what was going to happen next. I’ve produced in the past — I started a theater company in Philadelphia — but when I’m acting, I’m the actor. I kept my two cents out of it and never really asked questions until we all started to ask questions, which is when we saw lines down the street.

I had to go off and do work, so we had to stop doing the play, but before that, me, Dave, and Shia sat down. It was clear there were no ambitions for New York. It takes a really long time to negotiate and get a house in New York. But we could make a film of it. Shia brought in a friend of his named Lije Sarki, I brought in a coproducer named Erin Kennedy, and we hit the ground running.

There wasn’t necessarily a lot of forethought about whether to continue doing the theater piece versus doing the film version. It was just the only opportunity to put it down. We just knew that if we didn’t do something right then that it would probably fall apart and be too hard to put back on its feet.

Would you do a theater version again, or is this the retirement of Henry Johnson?
I think it would be unlikely that we would all get back together, but I’m never saying never. We all love working with each other. This was Shia’s first play ever, and he was an amazing dance partner. We had some incredible nights together up there on stage. It was really and exciting and alive.

I hadn’t done a show in a black box in a really long time, so that was cool. The first shows I ever did in my life were in a black box, where all we needed were four dark walls and some folding chairs, doing plays that changed my life. This felt very much like that. We had an intimate space that allowed for all of us to feel like we were doing something exciting. It was really a beautiful experience.