Stephen's got Theatre biggie David Mamet. He wrote a book, too. It's called Theatre, and the review in the WaPo says it's "a cranky collection of essays that take on pretentious directors and subsidized productions." The Boston Globe claims:
You could say that David Mamet’s "Theatre’’ is about a theatrical master laying down his theses about what’s wrong with the profession. Or, you could say that Mamet’s collection of essays is about a theatrical child throwing a tantrum about what he doesn’t like. I would lean strongly in the latter direction, as these pieces are among the most scattershot, poorly reasoned, demonstrably dopey pieces about theater you’re likely to read...
..."Theatre" is not without its insights... But Mamet’s one-size-fits-all condemnations of directors or university support of the arts, along with his ideological attack on ideologies, make "Theatre’ one of the sillier books you’ll read about theater. No matter how you spell it.
Hmm. Turns out that, of all the reviews I found, the only ones that aren't negative are pretty damn bland (though not without swipes) -- Library Journal says
Mamet is a superb playwright, and the ideas he shares would have made an excellent journal article. As a $22 hardcover, this is recommended only for die-hard Mamet disciples and exhaustive theater collections with large budgets.
Here's another thoughtful response:
David Mamet’s concise and consistently frustrating book, Theatre, informs even while it infuriates, arguing for throwing out babes with the bath water as if theatre could, or should, make a splash without them. Get your towels out....For Mamet, a pox on teachers of acting, designers, directors, and, good grief, audiences...
...Of performance art, pre-text character, and propaganda, Mamet will have none. Performance art is to him the equivalent of nihilism. I trust that hard-working street sweepers, stage hands, and bewildered passers by would agree...Is intellect really the antithesis of entertainment? If "drama is about finding previously unsuspected meaning in chaos," as Mamet claims, then the mind is definitely in play. Human beings, and they are the audience, seem incapable of not finding meaning in just about everything.
For example, it is hard not to read Theatre and, amid its good sense, note head-whirling contradictions. After political messages are cast aside as worthless, there follows Manet’s stagestruck anthem to theatre as an inspiring artistic exercise in American democracy. Nothing like one chapter to flip the previous one on its not mindless head, with truth an acrobatic equilibrist...
It gets better:
David Mamet’s latest book about the theatre may be amusing (if you’re in the right mood) or annoying (if not), but it’s a little difficult to take seriously as a guide to theatre. For one thing, Mamet is an intellectual whose book amounts to an attack on the intellect’s (or reason’s) importance in art. He wants to be both a philosopher (which he calls himself) and an instinct-revering noble savage at one and the same time...
At the heart of the collisions and absurdities in Theatre is a right-wing agenda. Mamet, a recent convert to all things conservative, is, evidently, eager to prove his bona fides. He has been reading the work of Thomas Sowell, Paul Johnson and Milton Friedman. From Sowell and Johnson, he has taken the dislike of left-wing "intellectuals." From Friedman and Sowell, he has adopted a free-market absolutism. And with this book, Mamet tries to adopt both stances in a discussion of what theatre is or, rather, should be.
The book mostly reads like the jottings of a true believer. (Substitute left-wing ideas for right-wing ideas and this book could have been written by a politburo functionary responsible for the people’s theatrical culture.)...
...in order to assert that theatre is a simple market transaction, he has to get rid of as many "middle men" as possible. He denigrates directors, designers, even producers in order to bring everything down to "play + actors + a paying audience = theatrical transaction." Naturally, he has things to say about the audience as well. It must be a paying audience at an institution that has not been subsidized by government spending. He doesn’t even like subscription audiences. His reason? The subscriber having already paid to see the production will not bring with him the necessary attitude (an attitude best described as "entertain me or I’ll walk"). The subscriber will, in Mamet’s world, always be disappointed, uninvolved, not a full or entirely willing partner in the transaction because he or she has not actually had to line up for the ticket. This entirely nonsensical bit of hard blowing ignores the idea that an artistic director (Brecht at the Schaubuhne, say, or Max Stafford-Clark at the Royal Court) can have a theatrical vision that an audience wants (fervently) to experience. If theatre is not a marketplace in which a tangible product (a play) is sold to buyers (an audience), Mamet thinks it beneath contempt...
..If you’ve read Sowell and Friedman, you’ll already be familiar with the ideas Mamet parades here. He brings nothing new to them. And when Mamet speaks of things beyond his field of expertise – as Sowell suggests intellectuals ought not to do – he sounds ridiculous. But he manages to sound ridiculous when discussing things he should know about, as well...
I liked this one, too:
Does David Mamet Go To The Theatre?
That's the question I couldn't help but ask myself upon reading this excerpt from his latest book in the Guardian. David Mamet was once a good playwright, an okay screenwriter and a mediocre director, but he's always been a fairly shoddy essayist, and as his skills in all of the above categories of writing have declined, so too has his essay writing to the point where he just kind of embarrasses himself.
Case in point are these excerpts, where Mamet laments in the first excerpt that theatre (which he oddly equates with Broadway) is no longer made with his specific demographic (Middle Class Jews) in mind, and then in the second excerpt laments the rise of identity politics in theatre. It's good to know that Mamet subscribes to the Bender Theory of Discrimination...
The "Bender Theory of Discrimination" would be this:
There's an episode of Futurama where acoholic kleptomaniac robot Bender Bending Rodriguez attempts to buy a pack of gum and is denied an armed forces discount on the grounds that he's not, you know, in the armed forces. Bender exclaims, "This is the worst kind of discrimination: The kind against ME!"
And a comenter at that last site has this:
There are two diseases Mamet displays symptoms of in his essay: "My-shit-don't-stink"-ism and "Shit-was-better-back-then"-ism. As usual, his obliviousness to irony is outrageous: his last two Broadway plays were about a lame-duck-president and a racially-charged criminal trial, and yet he has the cojones to rail against "political theatre?"
Stephen could make this a good interview.
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