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David Mamet’s 1997 Paris Review interview includes this exchange:

“Interviewer:
Is there a moment in one of your plays that you really didn’t know was there?
Mamet:
Yes. I wrote this play called Bobby Gould in Hell … Bobby Gould is consigned to hell, and he has to be interviewed to find out how long he’s going to spend there. The Devil is called back from a fishing trip to interview Bobby Gould. And so the Devil is there, the Assistant Devil is there, and Bobby Gould. And the Devil finally says to Bobby Gould, ‘You’re a very bad man.’ And Bobby Gould says, ‘Nothing’s black and white.’ And the Devil says, ‘Nothing’s black and white, nothing’s black and white — what about a panda? What about a panda, you dumb fuck! What about a fucking panda!’ And when Greg directed it, he had the Assistant hold up a picture of a panda, kind of pan it 180 degrees to the audience … That was the best moment I’ve ever seen in any of my plays.”

The twenty-six brief essays in Theatre form an extended “panda” moment — featuring Mamet devilishly puncturing what he perceives as the pretensions of directors, The Method, and the politically correct. He writes with an assertive courtroom demeanor – alternating between spirited defense of his plaintiff (the integrity of the theatre) and avid prosecution of the philistines.

Two years ago in The Village Voice, Mamet declared a sort of conversion in “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal,” and Theatre voices a philosophical conservatism (affirming a tragic view of life over liberal-perfectionism) informing his professional values.

As in his theatrical and movie output, when he scores in the essays, he wins through a sensibly mordant stylishness. When he flops, he fails to convince that the enemies on his black list represent dangers that warrant such shrill, reactionary anger. It’s ridiculous to have to tell Mamet in response that, for instance, most liberally-inclined poets affirm a tragic view of life in their work. True, a panda is undeniably black and white, but most bears are a subtle blend of browns.

Mamet’s lectures reflect a veteran teacher’s ingrained habits, long experience, favored techniques, and nursed grudges. I tell my literary friends to read Theatre for correspondences with the businesses of poetry and prose.

“Drama is not an attempt on the part of the dramatist to clarify,” he writes, “but rather to present, in its unfiltered, disturbing form, the hunt of the individual (the protagonist) such that, in its perfect form (tragedy), the end of the play reveals the folly of the hero’s (and so the audience’s) assumptions about the world and himself” (“Hunting Instincts”). It then follows that “the human condition is tragic: We are doomed by our own nature, but grace does exist” (“Totalitarian Tendencies”).

Heaping abuse on Stanislavsky and the Method, Mamet dismisses them as the residue of totalitarian regimes: “His ability to stage works of actual content – that is, works addressing the underpinnings of human life: loss, desire, fear, greed, and their consequences – was limited by both the acts of the censor and by concern about the possibility of such acts.” He decries the “intellectual and moral savagery” of deconstructionism and existentialism in which “there is no meaning in anything save that which the individual elects to bring to it.”

The Method asks an actor to establish the “inner life” of a character. Mamet says the Method represents “a rejection of the text: For the good dramatic text is nothing but a succession of incidents (as per Aristotle) in each of which the hero is engaged in a clear and important goal. That’s all there is. There is no character absent this, and to ratify the study of the non-existent and unquantifiable … is to admit both fools and scoundrels into the theatre and invite them to hijack the text.”

And this: “It is the immemorial dream of the talentless that a sufficient devotion to doctrine will produce art.”

Mamet’s correctives are delightfully sharp, such as “1. Never ask the actor or the student to do anything more complicated than opening a window” and “2. The actor and the student should be helped to the understanding that every moment may and can occur naturally, easily, without taxing either the intellect or the soul.” Is there a better definition of talent than Mamet’s “idiosyncrasy and ease”?

The main fault in Theatre isn’t stridency but redundancy. Mamet once told Susan Stamberg on NPR that any line in a script that doesn’t move the play forward should be struck, but Mamet-as-teacher/scourge wants to ensure we get the point. There are other odd elements as well. “Drama” first signifies the theatre as a whole, but then gets reduced as a term for a second-rate sub-category: “The theatre exists to present a contest between good and evil,” he writes in “Theatrical Forms.” “In both comedy and tragedy, good wins. In drama, it’s a tie … Drama, then, which at its best is a sad exploration of the fact that ‘life is just like that,’ may progress in degeneracy through wish fulfillment (the action film) and whining (the victim play), into nihilism (performance art and deconstructed texts).”

Ultimately, Theatre comprises a teeth-baring defense of the playwright. Directors presume to “impose upon the audience a view more advanced than that of the author.” Actors ought to read their lines and think about other things when not on stage. Mamet has no patience for any consideration, especially imposed by victim mentality, beyond the writer’s intent:

“I was, latterly, teaching a class on dramatic structure at a Great University, and to my shame allowed the class to be hijacked by a young fellow who insisted that no teaching on the subject that did not insist upon the right of two homosexuals to kiss on stage could have meaning. Shocked by the kid’s Jacobin vehemence, it did not occur to me to inform him that immemorial dramatic wisdom cautions against anyone kissing on stage. It’s not interesting, and can only signal the conclusion of the play. The correct answer to him should have been, ‘Try it, watch the box office, and get back to me.’”

Theatre finds Mamet honoring his craft with Talmudic-like asseverations. “The job of the actor,” he says, “is to perform the play such that his performance is more enjoyable – to the audience – than a mere reading of the text.” It’s a spine-stiffening fundamentalism, and a prod to any writer or performer to review one’s job description and check in with the audience. (Mamet had nothing useful to say here to me about poetry per se. Some of it is just inane. What exactly does he mean by the “faux-artisan poetry, which was inflicted upon us by Walt Whitman”?)

In Mamet’s “American Buffalo” (1975), Teach says, “It’s kickass or kissass, Don, and I’d be lying if I told you any different.” In his essays, Mamet has come to kick ass. One wonders, though, if Mamet is now self-confirmed beyond the point where he is capable of questioning “assumptions about the world and himself.”

 

[Published by Faber & Faber/Farrar Straus & Giroux on May 13, 2010. 155 pages, $22.00 hardcover]