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Home > Dramatists
Monday, 24 May 2010
Those who were unable to attend the 10 May Howard Barker at the Segal Center event can
now listen online to "A Conversation with Howard Barker,"
conducted by
Prof.
David Ian Rabey of the University of Aberystwyth, at theatreVOICE. The hour-long discussion
is divided into two parts: part one ("about history, abandoning social
realism, and creating new definitions of political theatre") is here, and part two ("about tragedy, working with
actors, and the ethics of directing") is here. There is also a
question-and-answer session that concludes part two.
Home > Dramatists
Friday, 21 May 2010
 On the late lamented television
show Murphy Brown, Wallace Shawn occasionally guest-starred
in the role of Stuart Best, a former newsman who was occasionally invited
to deliver short, whimsical, observational essays in the high-pitched
whine for which Shawn is perhaps best known. His vacuous, folksy, cheery
commentaries, utterly devoid of content and which always ended with a
broad smile, shrug and the cheery admission "That's all's I know!" would
eventually drive Murphy into homicidal furies that would almost lead
to her leaping across the desk to strangle him.
Shawn's own commentaries in Essays, written over a twenty year period and
recently collected between hard covers, are not as bad as all that. His
meditations here on politics in the first half of the book and theatre in
the second are deeply-felt considerations of the intersections
between public and private morality, and Shawn makes few concessions even
when he considers his own capacity for violence and injustice. But, like
David Mamet's prose style in Theatre,
it partakes (like Shawn's style in dialogue) in that
faux-naïf quality that I identified as a failing of American
writing about theatre in general:
Our family was privileged, but it was carefully explained
to me that we were not rich, only "middle class," and so, oddly, I would
need to "work for my living" rather than just receiving it automatically
— in other words, the little package that was the life I'd evitably
possess would be waiting for me in the baggage room with my name written
on it, but, annoyingly, it wouldn't be delivered to the house, I'd have to
get into a taxi and go get it.
Despite this, I grew up lazy, and I've stayed lazy. I've
always like to eat ice cream and cake, and the line of least resistance
for me has always been close to the border of sleep. What I was nine or
ten, I kept an enormous mound of comic books on the floor of my bedroom,
and my favorite thing was to burrow into my mound, find myself a
comfortable position there, and in this wonderful swamp, which was also
readable, I would reach a state that fell exactly midway between reading
and napping.
This excerpt is selected almost at random from the first half of the
book, on politics, in which the policies of the Bush and Clinton
administrations are excoriated for their global brutality, and Shawn's
honesty in confronting his status as a member of the leisure class in an
advanced Western democracy is entirely welcome. But because the stakes he
discusses are so high, this "that's all's I know" quality becomes, at
times, problematic. Charles McNulty in his Los Angeles Times review of the book called Shawn's tone
"Pollyannaish," but that's not the worst of it: "[C]omplicated questions
are approached with a simplicity that strips the conventional barnacles
from the search for truth. There's something bracing about this when it
works. But when it doesn't — which is about one-third of the time in
this collection ... — it can seem as though reductive cliches are
being replaced with tendentious caricatures." Perhaps McNulty had this
passage about Bush in mind:
The love of killing is inside each one of us, and we can
never be sure that it won't come out. We have to be grateful if it
doesn't come out. In fact, it is utterly wrong for me to imagine
that Bush is violent and I am not, that Bush is cruel and I am not. I am
potentially just as much of a killer as he is. ... But we can't deny that
Bush and his men, for whatever reason, are under the sway of the less
peaceful side of their natures. From the first days after the World Trade
Center fell, you could see in their faces that, however scary it might be
to be holding the jobs they held, however heavy the responsibility might
be for steering the ship of state in such troubled times, they were in
fact loving it. Those faces glowed. ...
Which, for all's I know, might be true. But it's just this
tendentiousness that makes the first half of the book sometimes grating
reading, even when you agree with the man. Because those stakes are
higher, so should be the discourse: the reader balks that things might not
be as simple as all that, an observation with which Noam Chomsky (whose
interview with Shawn appears in this volume) famously trounced William F.
Buckley in a 1969 debate.
Shawn is much better in the second half of Essays when he
discusses the art form to which he has devoted his life, the theatre. Like
David Mamet (the anti-Shawn, perhaps), Shawn has created a body of
work unique in the American theatre as well: plays which explore and
examine the nexus of morality and amorality in both the public and private
spheres. Human viciousness emerges in a variety of characters and private
situations, especially those that are most intimate: a bickering married
couple (Marie and Bruce, which will be revived this winter by The
New Group); the personal and almost erotic relationship between an older
woman who defends America's right to bomb Cambodia
and an impressionable, innocent younger woman (Aunt Dan and
Lemon); and especially Shawn's
masterpiece to date, The Designated Mourner, an elegy for the
decline of culture in the midst of barbarism and that culture's
responsibility for it. In this play as well as in his most recent,
Grasses of a Thousand Colors (which regrettably does not have a
New York premiere date yet), Shawn eases his characters and thoughts into
a dystopia of the near future, narrated from the distance of time by those
responsible for those dystopias; their monologues, which crawl and twine
back upon themselves, say far more about our oral culture of
rationalization than any other plays of our time.
And, as Mamet has his own theories on the status and decline of American theatre
in his time, so does Shawn. Shawn's diagnosis is perhaps more persuasive
because more broad-reaching:
... the people who would ultimately hear what I had to say
were the theatre-goers. And who were the theatre-goers? In my
country they were a small group, altogether, because theatre in the United
States has simply never caught on in the way it has in England or on the
European continent, for example. ... The habit simply had never been
formed. For most people in the United States, the issue of theatre simply
didn't arise. And as for those who, somehow, had gone to see a
play or two — well, the experience had left most of them rather
nonplussed. ...
So the theatre-goers in the United States — the
loyal followers of theatre, the ones who, despite everything, loved the
theatre — the theatre-goers were an odd little circle, a funny
old group. Not the sophisticates, one would have to say. Not people who
listened to Hugo Wolf or George Crumb or Charlie Parker on their evenings
off from the theatre. Not the aesthetes, with their well-worn copies
of Kawabata and George Herbert. And, of course, not anyone who was poor or
desperate or hungry or oppressed, because theatre is only for the middle
class. ...
No one would reward me, and no one would punish me, if I
followed the conventions of nineteenth-century theatre or rejected
them, if I wrote in a more naturalistic style or in a more surrealistic
style. In writing a play, should I draw my inspiration from George
Balanchine's ballets? Frederick Wiseman's documentaries? The verses of
James Merrill, Fra Angelico's frescoes, the songs on the radio, the day's
newspaper, my own life? No one cared.
In the corner of the universe where I'd be writing, there'd
been a breakdown in the system of rewards and punishments that
behaviorists would consider the only possible system of teaching a dog or
a writer how to do a task well. And yet the breakdown meant I was totally
free.
I quote at length like this because Shawn's prose style, like his
monologues, turns back on itself and reveals, deliberately, more than
the surface intends, and this takes time (both The Designated
Mourner and Grasses clock in at two-and-a-half hours or
longer). Shawn's drama draws in his interests in aesthetics and philosophy
and recapitulates them as detail in the turn of a phrase.
As also suspected, Shawn is at his best in writing about sex in the
theatre, particularly his own. Like Mamet, he saves the best for last, and
in "Writing About Sex," the final essay of the volume, he reveals the
power of sex and drama to provide an exemplar of contemplation and
self-invention in the midst of a growing authoritarian culture. "Sex
seems capable of creating anarchy," he writes, "and those who are
committed to predictability and order find themselves inevitably either
standing in opposition to it, or occasionally trying to pretend to
themselves that it doesn't even exist. My local newspaper, the New
York Times, for example, does not include images of naked people ...
because if it contained such images it couldn't be the New York
Times, it couldn't present the portrait of a normal, stable, adequate
world ... which it's the function of the New York Times to
present every day. ... The contemplation of nudity or sex could tend to
bring up the alarming idea that at any moment human passions might rise up
and topple the world we know. ... [Sex is] a symbol of the possibility
that we might all defect for one reason or another from the obedient
columns in which we march."
Like David Mamet's Theatre, Shawn's Essays is also a
maddening and enlivening read: for many different reasons, perhaps. But it
too defines a lack of a certain concept for drama on the American stage,
and the centrality of this drama to the culture in which it's produced (or
unproduced, as the case may be). Between these two books can be gleaned a
shimmer of those ideas and experiences that remain absent from the
American art of the theatre.
Home > Dramatists
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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Superfluities
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II (2008-2009)
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Contact
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by George
Hunka
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