David Mamet Has Flop and Hit on One Broadway Block Robert Caplin for The New York Times Theaters on West 45th Street are showing two David Mamet plays: a hit ("Glengarry Glen Ross") and a flop ("The Anarchist"). A stroll down West 45th Street in the theater district is all it takes to understand the contradictory fortunes facing David Mamet, for years the heavyweight of bare-knuckled American playwrights, as well as the producers who believe that loyalty to the writer makes good business sense. At the Schoenfeld Theater is Mr. Mamet's latest box-office hit: A revival of "Glengarry Glen Ross," his Pulitzer Prize-winning crowd-pleaser from 1984 about an office of desperately scheming salesmen. The producers are charging up to $377 a ticket simply on the drawing power of their star, Al Pacino, even before its official opening this weekend. Two doors down at the Golden Theater is Mr. Mamet's latest box-office flop: The premiere of "The Anarchist," his 70-minute meditation on crime and punishment, which opened on Sunday night to scathing reviews. Just two days later, facing anemic ticket sales, the lead producers - the same ones mounting "Glengarry" - announced an imminent closing date. "The Anarchist" is arguably the fastest failure of a major writer's new play on Broadway since the early-1980s duds of the Pulitzer winners Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and especially Edward Albee, who was excoriated by critics for plays like "The Man Who Had Three Arms" that were less accessible than earlier works like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The demise of "The Anarchist" raises questions about the theater business. Did the lead producers" devotion to Mr. Mamet - and the hope of a lucrative "Glengarry" revival - mean staging a new work that wasn't right, or ready, for Broadway? Should playwrights direct their own work, as Mr. Mamet did with "The Anarchist" and his last new drama on Broadway, "Race"? And does Mr. Mamet, whose brawny, expletive-filled early plays remain stage mainstays decades after their debuts, still have something to say to a contemporary audience? "A major headache behind the scenes on Broadway is the producer-playwright relationship, because sometimes you have to produce some things on Broadway that really aren't good enough to be there, just to keep your writer happy," said Elizabeth I. McCann, a producer who helped revive Mr. Albee's career in New York in the 1990s, starting with "Three Tall Women." "Some playwrights call up their most reliable producers and say, "I want my play on Broadway," and it can end up there even if it's going to be crucified," she continued. The loyalty to Mamet is a real risk because he's not writing the hits that he once was. The collapse of "The Anarchist" has also revealed ill will inside the production, as can happen backstage when a show goes south. Its stars, the Tony Award-winner Patti LuPone and the Oscar nominee Debra Winger, were stunned to learn on Tuesday night that the show would close and believed that the producers were acting prematurely, according to two people familiar with their thinking, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Ms. Winger was also frustrated with Mr. Mamet, these two people said, because she believed he had not given her enough guidance about her character's intentions. On Wednesday Ms. Winger, in response to questions about Mr. Mamet, replied by e-mail, "It's a bigger story than you could ever fit in your daily column." She declined to comment further. Mr. Mamet did not reply to interview requests made to his assistant or agent. Ms. LuPone delivered her own salvo, meanwhile, saying in a statement: "I'm so proud to have originated "The Anarchist" with David and I'm not happy that the producers pulled the plug on it, robbing potential audiences of David's work." She declined to elaborate. At the center of the cross-fire on Wednesday was Jeffrey Richards, a lead producer of both "The Anarchist" and "Glengarry," who has made his name on Broadway during the past decade as the prime mover of many Mamet productions. In an unusual move, Mr. Richards broke the bad news about "The Anarchist" just days before this Saturday's official opening of "Glengarry," overshadowing that other Mamet show. In an interview Mr. Richards insisted that he could not delay the closing notice simply to spare Mr. Mamet's feelings. "We wanted to announce the news immediately so anyone interested in "The Anarchist" will buy tickets," said Mr. Richards, who is closing that show on Dec. 16. "The Anarchist" is one of Mr. Mamet's more abstract works, featuring a high-minded debate between two characters whose backgrounds are revealed slowly - a Weather Underground-style prisoner (Ms. LuPone) and a seeming adversary (Ms. Winger) who has the power to release her. Mr. Mamet's other recent new plays were more grounded - the legal arguments over a rape case in "Race," the machinations of a corrupt American president in "November" - and yet none have approached the popularity of earlier works like "Glengarry" and another boys-behaving-badly masterpiece, "Speed-the-Plow."