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His vision, though perhaps tinted by his own work, at root makes contemporary the theories that have guided drama since time out of mind. Plainly we can, since Clifford Odets' agit-prop plays still get produced, and plays that most disdain the audience are often the ones with the biggest endowments. As he says, "a play is not about nice things happening to nice people. The role of art is to make us feel deeply, not think correctly. Theatre, in other words, retains its Aristotelian purpose in cleansing the soul.But Mamet broadens the scope of drama, away from stately tragedy and into more humane territory. I don't think its purpose is to enlighten us. Or John's mortgage and tenure troubles in Oleanna. Mamet explicates a compelling theory of drama that links the fine and liberal arts with multifarious forms of American religion and social experience.
I don't think it's to change us. And if, in performing the former, it accomplishes the latter, so much the better, but reversing the order will create sterile, unengaging work.Mamet's theory is based on his own works, and the goals he sets for his own writing. If he did, why bother mentioning Shelly's daughter in Glengarry Glen Ross. There are reasons why we don't want to sit though maudlin accounts of old news, but Mamet says: "If we are to identify with the Hero, which is to say, to see her story as our own, she can have had no `state' before the beginning of the story."This is palpable nonsense, and surely Mamet himself doesn't believe that. I don't think it's to teach us." This is especially good advice for young writers who have been coached by public school English courses to see literature as a manifesto to be decoded. Though he falters into occasionally harsh prescriptivism, he offers a look at one way American dramatists can and do communicate their world to an audience--and, in many ways, how they communicate the audience's own world as well.At the heart of Mamet's theory is his claim that all of us make drama out of the ordinary matter of our lives. The dramatist simply takes that hunger and constructs a public spectacle around it. This is incompatible with what Mamet sees as the purpose and origin of drama, but it doesn't mean all musicals are equal or that they are a blight on the theatre.
Yet for those who aim for Mamet's scale of accomplishment, this theory is a confident place from which we can begin our own creative process.In a few places Mamet pitches high and outside. Therefore, easy as it is to agree with his statements about the audience, the problem play, or the MacGuffin, it's tough sledding when he says that we CAN'T commit acts he considers errors. In the name of enlightenment they inflict on audiences the dreariest dumbbell harangues mankind can imagine.No, much better to delight first. It simply means that they subscribe to a different dramaturgical theory.But for all his high-handed pietism, Mamet offers a compelling theory of American drama in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries.
It's true that musicals are often plot-driven and suffer with timid characters and pat endings. In an age when much writing drifts listlessly, with neither audience nor intention visible to the naked eye, Mamet offers badly needed direction, and hope that writers can be about something in the tricky modern world. If we are to claim the Hero as ourselves, she must have a state, even if a dull disquisition isn't the way to illuminate it.Similarly, his round condemnation of American musicals, packed flippantly in with his excoriation of "problem plays," doesn't fit squarely. This spectacle raises us up as human beings, and purges the emotions we harbor but which are unacceptable in our modern era.
His claim that the forced monologue he disparages as "The Death of My Kitten" interferes with the audience's reception of the play is tough to stomach. But for theatre to have Mamet's holy purification role, we must broaden the definition of "delight" to encompass the whole range of human emotion, uplifting or otherwise. A play is about rather terrible things happening to people who are as nice or not nice as we ourselves are." In other words, though theatre still requires that characters have their hard-won pretenses stripped away, it is not only kings who must lose everything.From this it's a short step to Mamet's assertion that "the purpose of art is not to change but to delight. Too many young writers think their work will transform society and remake us as better people.
Truly a must have for the aspiring writer of drama. David Mamet, the master of Drama, gives advice and technique in this GREAT book.
It's FILLED with truth about life, art, and life & art. I read this book every year, and every year I take something new from it. There's SO much in this short book.
The education in this book has convinced me to abandon my earlier style, where characters have wordless internal monologues while not moving for a play's 2 or 3 hour duration.3 stars. Through studying David Mamet's theories, I came to realise that a character can be understood not only through what they do, but also through what they say. My style has started to incorporate Mamet's technique of having characters talk, often to each other, as well as to express themselves through physical acts like gestures and walking.
This book is a great essay about dramaturgy and politics that evolves some philosophical and psychological theories.
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