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Monday, 17 May 2010
 There he is, dressed in blue jeans
and work boots, lazing about on the comfortable seats of a commercial
theatre and surrounded by velvet drapery: David Mamet, theatrical pugilist
and provocateur, who has just distilled the wisdom of his four
decades in the American theatre into Theatre, a series of
short essays that display what he believes he has learned about acting,
directing, the commerical and non-commercial theatre, and the world
itself, in a spare 155 pages.
In the fifteen years between 1982 and 1997, Mamet wrote some of what
are indisputably classics of the American theatre. Edmond,
Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, The Cryptogram,
The Old Neighborhood — all of them testimony to a unique
imagination and unstinting concentration on the elements of drama. These
plays, like the best drama, resist closure, education and comfort and grow
like crystals in the mind's eye with each engagement. Remorselessly and
unsentimentally, Mamet stripped the veneer from the lies that believers in
the American dream hold in common.
Then, a few years ago, somebody apparently slipped Mamet a copy of
The
Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek's analysis of the failings
of the socialist dream and the possibilities of the free-market
economy, and Mamet took an about-face from an explicit apoliticism to
a firm stance in favor of laissez-faire libertarianism, a change
announced in his 2008 essay "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'"
Theatre, perhaps of necessity, displays elements of both the
artist and the polemicist, leading to an infuriating and maddening book in
which what is given on one page is taken away on the next.
"The theatre is a magnificent example of the workings of that
particular bulwark of democracy, the free-market economy," Mamet
writes on page 64 in an essay called "Politically Correct." "The theatre
especially exemplifies the dramatic free market in that interactions
between playgoer and presenter, between consumer and purveyor, are
immediate, unfettered, not subject to regulation. ... There is an
immediate feedback between parties to the transaction, and each will
maneuver until he has achieved his particular end ... without recourse to
logical, verifiable position statements. The interactions of the theatre,
a free-market institution, resemble thus not a legal proceeding but a
wrestling match. ... It is the province not of ideologues ... but of show
folk trying to make a living."
Mamet's prose style is of that faux-naïf quality found to
a
disturbing degree in American writings about theatre and American drama
itself, perhaps Our Town being the most faux example of
this
naïvete. His targets in many of the essays here are ideology,
especially
the communitarian ideology of the contemporary American non-profit
theatre, and theory, especially the diluted psychologism of the American
directing tradition. And he is right — so far as he goes. But his
blind spot here is that he neglects to acknowledge that
laissez-faire free-market libertarianism is every bit
as much a political ideology as that of the socialist or communist dream.
This ideology can be used as much as an instrument of corruption and crime
as can those of the left, as the recent financial shenanigans in the U.S.,
and now abroad, are attesting.
The fact is that the motives of those who promulgate any ideology are
never simon-pure. Mamet may no doubt agree with William Goldman's
assertion that, in the theatre business as in film, "Nobody knows
anything" — nobody knows what play will succeed or fail, but
decisions must be made as to which plays appear on stages, on the Broadway
stage as well as in the smallest black-box theatre south of 14th
Street. Informing those decisions are prejudices and ultimately power
— who has the money or influence to determine what choices any given
audience member will have when he scans the theatre listings in
preparation for the weekend. This is the broken hinge in the libertarian
ideology: while celebrating choice, the libertarians deny that this choice
is limited by what the producers believe will attract the largest
audience, and in these decisions as to what to include in a season, or
even between book covers, they engage in a kind of cultural
authoritarianism as well. This is the argument for subsidized theatre
— another target of Mamet's wrath — but it is in this
subsidized theatre that audiences may first engage with that work that may
be uncommercial in the contemporary political climate, and what happens on
those stages may, in time, end up on Broadway.
As did, indeed, the work of Tony Kushner and some playwrights who
engage in writing what Mamet castigates as "victim plays." "This play ...
has a quantifiable meaning (such and such a group are oppressed, and
well-meaning people must learn to overcome their prejudice and come
to their aid), but it is a meaning that panders to the lowest in the
audience (See how smart you are? I, the author, am proud of you), and
ejects the audience both feeling self-righteous and having ratified
its potential for violence (How could that vicious school mistress not
have seen that the deaf are people too? Why, I'd like to ...). These issue
plays, then, are a mild form of propaganda, not putting forth the views of
the state but, perhaps more dangerously, positing the existence of and
recruiting for that group greater than the state: the confraternity of the
right thinking. This invitation is potentially the mild beginning of
fascism."
As I said, maddening, even if not entirely wrong — more maddening
in that Mamet in this book often engages in a kind of broad, slapdash
thinking about groups of people — the "victims," the "capitalists,"
the "oppressors" — not unlike that of the playwrights and ideologues
he criticizes. Mamet has it in for "intellectuals" generally (though he
acknowledges at the end of his book his "indebtedness" to Thomas Sowell,
Paul Johnson, Friedrich Hayek and others — all these are
intellectuals too, but apparently the right kind of intellectuals), but
worse, he posits that amorphous "audience," this mass which must be
entertained, coddled and attracted. But there is no audience; audience is
a fiction, an abstraction. In truth, they are individuals who are
attracted or not attracted, engaged or not engaged, by a play; it is a
matter of numbers, not of the abstract monster the audience. One gets the
sinking feeling that in trying to make this audience happy, Mamet fears
it: fears that he will be found wanting, a failure, if his play does not
meet with economic success. For the man who wrote the character of Shelley
Levene, this should be an awakening, and a warning.
And then there are minor aspects of the book which would be laughable
if ... well, they're just laughable, really. Next to Our Town,
The Front Page is Mamet's favorite American play; though he
castigates Eugene O'Neill's plays as museum pieces, he doesn't seem to
mind the rolltop-desk-slamming farce and dated "sweetie, get me
rewrite" dialogue of this otherwise perfectly respectable comedy. And my
own personal favorite is "Let us leave T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and all the
other quitters who preferred Europe" — a jingoistic bone-headed
locution, especially inappropriate for those Americans who courageously
chose to practice their art in a threatening, already war-ravaged
Europe rather than an isolationist United States, that makes Glenn Beck
look like George Orwell.
David Mamet's Theatre is just as enlightening about the state
of American drama and theatre as was Outrageous Fortune earlier
this year — perhaps moreso, since it comes from a man who is
undoubtedly one of the great American postwar playwrights. He is right and
wrong, constantly contradictory, and infuriating: all to the good, I
think. On page 68, Mamet writes:
Consider, in opposition, pseudodramas, mixed media,
performance art, agitprop, and other suggestions that there exists
a politically correct view, and that the correct venue for such a
view's airing is the dramatic arena.
These essentially meaningless spectacles, again, invite the
audience (self-selected by the political views the members hold) to
bask in a celebration of the death of meaning. They do not explore human
interaction (the task of drama), which is to say, they do not investigate
in order to arrive at a conclusion, but begin with a conclusion
(capitalism, America, men, and so on, are bad) and award [sic]
the audience for
applauding its agreement.
And on the final page:
The mystery in drama is time: how to use time, how to
exploit the human perception of time and its ordering into cause and
effect. The rejection of this intolerable burden, our human specialty, is
the goal of the religious mystic, the yogi, the lover, and the drug addict
— to live in a world without time, to achieve unbeing.
The examination of this urge and its avowal and the
confession of its tragic impossibility is the subject of all drama.
I'd like to see David Mamet try to sell that to a Broadway
producer; and I have no doubt that he believes in those words as much as
he does the economic theories of Milton Friedman, for he gives them pride
of place as the conclusion of his book. Nonetheless, that a dramatist's
thought can hold both concepts in an equilibrium — and fascinating,
enthralling concepts they are — argues for his continued importance
to an American drama that needs just such blooded, pugilistic, even
grossly pig-headed at times thinking and writing.
Terry Teachout briefly discussed the book in last Friday's Wall
Street
Journal here.
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