David Mamet's Theatre

...For Mamet, the stage performer is the free market's rational actor—perhaps another reason why his plots are often described as "economical...

...Though declarations from his profane Pulitzer Prize-winner Glengarry Glen Ross—"Fuck YOU...

...Though the tactic seems in line with Mamet's convictions about the supremacy of gut feeling, he dismisses the practice with his usual absolutist flair and an added dash of elitist animosity: These invited test screeners never engage that portion of the human mind that loves a story...

...No one would deny that capitalism rules the box office, but since when do the rules of commerce necessarily apply to art...

...In thrall to neoclassical models of economic behavior, Mamet conflates Milton Friedman axioms into a shaky moral judgment about drama itself...

...Mamet may have found striking commercial success, but not every playwright plies his craft solely to pay the rent...

...I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get...

...they rarely waste a scene...

...Is he auditioning for a post as Sarah Palin's minister of culture...

...This peculiar outlook requires that the audience must pay in order for theater to work...

...the lyrics of the most resilient pop songs are true poetry, they are well remembered and thus imbued with utilitarian value...

...Enter Theatre, Mamet's latest collection of essays: Mamet has certainly earned the right to codify his wisdom, but having already written separate mini-textbooks on acting, writing, and directing, he cannot realistically expect his slim new volume to supersede his body of work...

...Do not fear, for nothing will excite you...

...There is a section of his Bambi vs...

...no, they have become enmeshed in a fantasy of business, and they now work to imagine what some notional other group might just like...

...students, the drama's sympathies lie with the hopeless old-timer Shelley Levene, a slumping real estate huckster relegated to the bottom drawer...

...His plots are compressed...

...are regularly plastered upon the Facebook pages of M.B.A...

...As he writes here, "the critical and academic love of issue plays reveals a misunderstanding of drama...

...For Mamet, though, anyone seeing a play or film for free is inherently suspect...

...Mamet has also quietly written three books of fiction, two children's books, several essay collections, memoirs, ruminations on craft, and a biblical commentary with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner...

...my advice is to walk the other way when Mamet, a master of Brazilian jujitsu, approaches you in a dark alley...

...Harshness is his métier...

...The drama works to the extent that opposing arguments are granted equal weight, but with the benefit of hindsight, Oleanna broadcasts an unambiguously dark warning about the corrosive, emasculating influence of identity politics...

...He assails Stanislavski, Strasberg's "Method," and acting theory in general as worthless, argues that the theater director is an unnecessary appendage, and as for critics and professors...

...In or out...

...And by critic, I don't refer to Ben Brantley of the New York Times, but to the audience's "unlicensed, unschooled" ability to respond critically...

...That's my name...

...Because most likely they are...

...So instead of making a case for why he's unmoved by experimental theater, Mamet equates nontraditional dramatic forms with totalitarianism...

...Nothing...

...To stretch Mamet's central economic metaphor, the critic is the Keynesian hand that corrects the crude inequalities of the marketplace, stimulating or depressing the currency of artistic worth...

...So Mamet has dispensed with the poker face...

...How do I know...

...Though an excited Dinesh D'Souza publicly welcomed Mamet to the fold, the playwright is unlikely to find success as an ideologue ("We just seem to" isn't the most compelling argument for why citizens prefer the diminution of the state...

...After perfecting the art of show-don't-tell, he's decided to tell, tell, tell...

...I wondered and read," Mamet writes, "and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to...

...In Mamet's blinkered terms, nobody goes to a lecture seeking new knowledge, while audiences only frequent entertainments that challenge their worldview...

...It's as if he finds his own dramas so compelling that he fears the audience will be too enthralled to discover the subtext...

...Dramatic tragedy, on the other hand, "reveals the folly of the hero's (and so the audience's) assumptions about the world and himself...

...Few would disagree with Mamet that lectures don't belong on Broadway, but listen to the man's narrow, almost juvenile definition of a lecture: "Sit still and listen while you are told something you already know and are charged for it...

...Plays should not be political, he says, though his two most recent productions are November— a tepidly received "play about politics" that finds a xenophobic Dubya-like president trading odd-couple barbs with his lesbian speechwriter—and Race, whose title tells you most of what you need to know...

...Theatre is itself a lecture, though as Mamet tells us he has no use for didactics...

...That is what pays the rent...

...The ambivalence of his earlier work has now solidified into something forceful...

...When rhetorical battle lines are drawn, Mamet is the kind of guy you want on your side...

...Although Mamet proposes an idealized feedback loop between the dramatist and the audience, one cannot simply imagine the critic out of existence...

...Is there no such thing as a great work of art with a limited audience...

...That "period," with its authoritative force, barely masks the obtuseness of this argument...

...Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business that lambasts the test screening process, whereby select audiences are invited to preview a new film and pass an immediate judgment, in order to help the studio market the film...

...And they vote accordingly, thumbs-up, thumbs-down, in self-congratulation at having suspended that obviously now puerile, wide-eyed state of enjoyment of the unlicensed, unschooled, and mere "member of the audience...

...Mamet may have relinquished his hold on the zeitgeist—to the point where Time magazine devoted an op-ed last year to categorizing his diminishing returns—but serious students of American literature should care to consider what Mamet's libertarian revolt reveals about the politics of dramaturgy and the shortsightedness of "just-folks" populism...

...He criticizes the "repressive mechanism" as the force behind intellectual thought in more than one book...

...Staking out his position as a teller of inconvenient truths—and pictured on the book cover sitting in the back of a theatre with his feet perched defiantly atop the chair in front of him—Mamet warns the reader that "many of the observations and suggestions in this book might be considered heretical...

...The Long Con AKIVA GOTTLIEB Theatre by David Mamet Faber and Faber, 2010 157 pp., $22 Here is a fact beyond dispute: David Mamet is the most visible and widely respected American playwright of the last quarter-century...

...As a playwright, Mamet's trademark is clipped, noirish, quotably obscene dialogue that hits with blunt force, but clearly he harbors a logorrheic tendency as well...

...His acid-tongued dramas of the 1980s, which zeroed in on the hustlers and crooks at capitalism's margins, are regularly revived on Broadway, sometimes running alongside premieres of his newer plays...

...A man who clearly believes in the primacy of drama over lecture had already explored these issues with considerable ambiguity in plays like Speed-the-Plow and films like the brilliant Homicide...

...so what is the mechanism that causes Mamet to keep writing these books, books that take him away from his central dramatic vocation...

...The unnecessary Aristotelian immodesty of this jeremiad's title—Theatre, not Some Thoughts on Theatre—speaks volumes...

...Though his disenchantment has been gradual, Mamet's truths have never marched in liberal lockstep...

...Mamet believes that theatrical performance is entirely physical and intuitive, the ability to "stand still and say the words...

...In the past five years, he's also published a harangue against the movie industry (Bambi vs...

...Mamet betrays no particular familiarity with performance art, and thus never explains why the provocations of, say, Marina Abramovic are inherently devoid of both meaning and text...

...And "the job of the dramatist is to get, and that of the actors and directors to keep, the asses in the seats...

...The job of the actors, director, writer, and set designer is to transmit the essence of a drama to the audience so that the audience member is too enthralled to think rationally...

...Mamet's ideological 180° turn didn't find its full expression until March 2008, when apropos of very little he published an essay called "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" in the Village Voice...

...He confidently stretches his logic to bizarre conclusions: Once there is no text (yet the two hours are still called "theatre"), once the text is mocked by vandals, once those vandals are honored as innovators, we are left not only with pageant, but with pageant exploitable or understandable in service of some greater good (the Nuremberg rallies, the Million Man March, Woodstock, et cetera...

...Brass-knuckle simplicity has always been Mamet's hallmark...

...But Mamet is so convinced of the supremacy of his technique that he's unable to conceive of the necessity for a more contemplative approach...

...Presumably included is anyone who waits in the six-hour line for tickets to Shakespeare in the Park...

...There's a fairly obvious category mistake here, one that enables Mamet to offer an intellectual analysis of contemporary theater while saying his fellow theatergoers should be denied the same right...

...From experience...

...But where Mamet's entire project clicks into place is on page sixty-four, with his defense of the theater as "a magnificent example of the workings of that particular bulwark of democracy, the free-market economy...

...As a film director, his recent projects have proved less than commercially successful, but he's achieved a level of Hollywood autonomy that allows him to direct his own screenplays, and The Unit, a television program he created, has run on CBS primetime for the past four years...

...Akiva Gottlieb is a writer living in New York City...

...Whatever his macho posturing, the man sees himself as a cultivated public figure with something to say...

...For example, in more than one section, he betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of poetry...

...any deviation is a form of repression...

...indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years...

...In plays like Glengarry and American Buffalo, Mamet examines the complete dramatis personae of the American marketplace: the takers and the taken...

...Godzilla), as well as a fairly repellent collection of thoughts on anti-Semitism (The Wicked Son) based around the formulation, "The world hates the Jews...

...He states, empirically, that nobody can quote a line from a contemporary poem...

...In or out...

...Mamet projects the most condescending sort of faux populism, one that conveniently pretends that those who respond to problems intellectually are part of a different class and species, out of step with real core values...

...It's as beautiful as any long con: watch me demonstrate one thing while I tell you the exact opposite...

...That both the American theater and our particular free-market economy have lately sustained major damage goes unmentioned...

...I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama...

...That is the American way, and that is our real poetry, the poetry of the American people...

...Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production...

...His essays in Theatre are worth assessing as a crude and wrongheaded but ideologically fascinating polemic, the place where Mamet's reactionary ideas about culture and politics converge in earnest...

...His work appears in the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and the National (Abu Dhabi...

...In 1985, along with his thespian standby William H. Macy, he opened the Atlantic Acting School in New York City, training young performers in a process called "Practical Aesthetics...

...What could be more entertaining...

...Like the aging Tolstoy, this accomplished artist has retreated into a corner to set out his principles, having brought along only the tendentious texts of Thomas Sowell, Paul Johnson, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman for reference...

...He espouses solidarity with the tough-as-nails proletarian schemers, the men whose hard work and street smarts somehow fail to yield the elusive fruits of free enterprise...

...Or maybe he believes that audiences are now so neutered that they can't recognize a play called Race, with its pointedly provocative employment of ethnic slurs and racial stereotypes, as a challenge to their intellect...

...And if they're not, you can be pleasantly surprised...

...Period...

...His Oleanna—originally staged just after the Clarence Thomas hearings and revived on Broadway in 2009—portrays a well-meaning but pedantic humanities professor spurred into violence by a feminist automaton who threatens him with a specious sexual harassment charge...

...One finds this blunt-ness typified by the simple, direct titles of Mamet's plays and films: Race, Homicide, Redbelt, Heist, Spartan, even Sexual Perversity in Chicago...

...He understands the conventional machinery of plot and suspense, the MacGuffin and the lastminute reversal...

...This dog-eat-dog sentiment isn't inherently compatible with a liberal humanist worldview, and yet Mamet has long been considered "the chief critic of capitalism among American playwrights" (New York Times) and "one of our great leftist cynics" (Village Voice...

...his self-assigned mission is to be the one man brave enough to chop through the thickets of political correctness and speak the impolite truth...

...Vibrating with rage and resentment, they might represent the most sustained argument against intellectualism ever published by an American belletrist...

...After equating the missteps of the latter President Bush to those of John F. Kennedy and deciding that government interference generally only causes further strife, Mamet conjectures as to how humankind ever solved its social problems without the state...

...For Mamet, there is no possible liberation from the strictures of traditional dramatic form...

...Comity—which is to say, the opposite of drama—is not David Mamet's strong suit...

...His character development is impressively unembellished...

...Alfred Prufrock is no better or worse than a rap lyric...

...He privileges the experience of drama—which he defines as a willingness to suspend the rational capacity—over the response, thus nudging aside intellectuals as "those who have no gift as entertainers and yet will not go home...

...When it was not maligning NPR as "National Palestinian Radio," the piece framed Mamet's embrace of conservatism—a philosophical position distinct from the Republican Party—as the product of a moral search: I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart...

...The truth is what Mamet says it is...

...Performance art is neither fish nor fowl," he writes, "but the bastard child of Stalinist repression (plays with no meaning) and deconstructionism (plays with no text...

...Wacky being Wallace Stevens and real Merle Haggard...

...For him, the stakes are clear...

...Always do business as if the person you're doing business with is trying to screw you," says Ricky Jay in Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner...

...Whatever merit exists in Mamet's ideas is overwhelmed by an annoying tendency to project personal preferences into universal truths...

...It is a rap lyric (try it), and I say get wacky or get real...