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This article was originally obtained from http://www.hmreview.com/98.03/style/wagtheplay.html. You can access the Horace Mann Review Online by clicking here.
When accusations of the president's promiscuous sexual activity was brought to public attention while the country was on the brink of military conflict with a foreign power, there were no doubt many people who were shocked and concerned. David Mamet was not one of them. His attitude was sanguine; been there, done that. His script for the film Wag the Dog -- released to theatres just weeks prior -- about a presidential indiscretion that leads to a fake war to distract the public was so prescient that, for once, life seemed to mirror art.
Given the remarkable similarities between his fiction and subsequent political reality, Mamet might be forgiven for a touch of arrogance. As has been the case for much of his career, his work is suddenly everywhere. In addition to the surprisingly successful film, he has a new play, The Old Neighborhood, which has opened to rave reviews on Broadway, and has recently published a collection of three essays, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, about the relationship between life and the art of theatre.
Mamet begins by discussing man's unique need for drama. "It is in our nature to dramatize," he writes in the essay's opening sentence. He believes that we impose drama on every aspect of our lives and create stories in which we are the leading characters. Mamet looks at the weather as "an essentially impersonal phenomenon" and shows how people use in their own personal drama: "Great. It's raining," we say. "Just when I'm blue. Isn't that like life?" We make connections when none exist. We look in our lives for the same elements we look for in plays: triumphant heroes who succeed against difficult odds, and a structure which leads to a satisfying conclusion. This is why the world needs drama, Mamet writes, in the form of theater, or even politics and sports.
Mamet also has some enlightening ideas about the purpose of theater. As opposed to many of his contemporaries, he does not believe that a play should be written to alter people's attitudes, affect behavioral patterns, bring about social change, or change the world. "There's a great and very, very effective tool that changes people's attitudes and makes them see the world in a new way," Mamet writes, "it's called a gun." In Mamet's opinion, drama exists simply to delight. By this, he does not mean to entertain, but to explore what he calls "the mysteries of the human heart."
His essays, while making some fascinating observations about the human need to infuse life with drama, are pontificating, excessively ponderous, even preachy. The first essay comments on the vital connection between life and drama. How then could these essays, written by such a renowned dramatic playwright, be so lifeless? This master of short, Hemingway-like theatrical dialogue sometimes gets lost in long, wordy, convoluted essay writing. Still, plowing through all the stylistic verbiage certainly has its rewards.
If it is in human nature to construct dramas out of individual lives, David Mamet did not have to try too hard. Born on November 30, 1947, in Chicago, he had a difficult childhood. His parents' divorce when he was ten, and his troubled relationship with his father, left him with many emotional scars. Although he has refused to talk about the effect that these family problems had on him, many of those close to him say that familial conflicts impacted him profoundly. "It was a difficult family," Lynn Mamet Weisberg, the playwright's younger sister, has said, "It was a fractured family. It had a tremendous effect on David. This was an age when divorce was not out of the closet. There was a social stigma." Throughout Mamet's plays are faint glimmers of his own troubled childhood. In American Buffalo, his first major production, written when he was 27, a young man named Bobby tries unsuccessfully to please his surrogate father.
Much of Mamet's bitterness and anger can be seen in the healthy doses of profanity most of his plays include. Mamet once said, when asked where he had developed his skills for such obscenities, "In my family, in the days prior to television, we like to wile away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously. That's probably where my ability was honed."
But from that dramatic childhood has come one of the most successful and renowned playwrights in America today. David Mamet wanted to be an actor. He used to write scenes for him and his friends to practice. And from these humble beginnings, Mamet the actor was transformed into Mamet the writer. American Buffalo, produced in 1975, brought Mamet into the industry with a bang. Experiencing a little difficulty in mid-career with Lone Canoe and The Woods, Mamet always remained disciplined and focused. In 1984, his career began to lead him down the road to fame when he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award with Glengarry Glen Ross for the best American drama of the year. Mamet stood apart from the crowd in his theatrical endeavors by avoiding the hackneyed Freudian exploration of family themes. Instead, Mamet turned to a wider set of life experience, for example, a real-estate office job (Glengarry Glen Ross) and a summer on a Great Lakes ore boat (Lakeboat). Often compared to Hemingway, David Mamet does not fit into the artistic stereotypes of his generation. In his early fifties, he still resembles a blue-collar worker, complete with the close-cropped black hair. His ear for short, bullet-like dialogue and his rhythmic control of the play are still able to inspire awe in today's audience with his new Broadway piece, The Old Neighborhood.
Three Uses of the Knife offers a previously uncharted doorway into David Mamet's character and thinking. In some ways, the book itself resembles a play in three acts. While the first and third essays focus mostly on the abstract ideas associated with drama, the second, more practical one discusses the difficulty of writing a good second act and sheds some light on how he developed his famous rhythmic dialogue. "In English," he says, "we speak colloquially in iambic pentameter: 'I'm going down to the store to buy the cheese,' 'I told him, but he didn't hear a word,' "I swear I'll love you till the day I die,' 'Not now, not later, never, is that clear?'" Mamet writes, "If we listen, we can hear people in a dialogue complete the iambic line for each other. " Observe the following example: "'I saw him on the street.' 'And what did he say?' 'He said leave him alone.' 'And what did you say?' 'What do you think I said?' 'Well, I don't know.'" And in a paragraph, Mamet has brutally simplified the rhythm of dialogue that has puzzled writers for thousands of years.
Halfway through Three Uses of the Knife, the reader realizes that something about the tone is bothersome. Although Mamet claims that a playwright should not look down on his audience and try to bully it into thinking a certain way, he does not seem to mind doing that as an essayist. His declarations on the nature of life and the nature of death are made with such self-confidence that he ultimately disappoints. Halfway through, feeling on the verge of discovering the secret of life, one suddenly realizes that even David Mamet doesn't know it.
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