David Mamet

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David Mamet Drama Analysis

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David Mamet is an ethicist. From his initial plays—Camel, Lakeboat—to those pivotal works that first brought him notoriety—Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo—and from Glengarry Glen Ross to Oleanna, Mamet explores a delicate moral balance between private self-interests and larger public issues that shape modern culture. Indeed, Mamet is at his best when critiquing the tensions between his heroes’ sense of public responsibility and their definition of private liberties. Throughout his theater, Mamet presents a dialectic that, on the one hand, recognizes the individual’s right to pursue vigorously entrepreneurial interests, but that, on the other, acknowledges that in an ideal world, such private interests should, but do not, exist in equipoise with a civic sense and moral duty. This underlying tension produces in Mamet’s protagonists divided loyalties. Such tension also gives his theater its particular unity of vision and ambivalent intensity. Mamet has often mentioned that his views of the social contract have been greatly influenced by Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and such indebtedness in part accounts for Mamet’s preoccupation with business as a sacramental world. Veblen’s work, like Mamet’s, underscores human action and response in terms of “pecuniary emulation,” imperialist ownership, primitive sexual roles as first seen in ancient tribal communities, questions of honor, invidious comparisons, and the relationship between self-worth and wealth. Mamet is a theatrician of the ethical precisely because his characters, plots, and themes map out a predatory world in which only the fittest, and surely the greediest, might survive. Hence, Mamet’s plays all are concerned with charting the moral relationship between the public issues of the nation and the private anxieties of its citizens.

Mamet seems at his best when dramatizing the way in which public issues, usually in the form of business transactions, permeate the individual’s private sensibilities. “Business,” for Mamet, becomes an expansive concept, including not only one’s public, professional vocation but also one’s private, personal existence—the problematic “business” of living itself. Under the guise of healthy competition and the right to pursue a contemporary version of the myth of the American Dream, Mamet’s heroes too often conveniently twist such business savvy to suit their own selfish needs. Further, this examination of “business” suggests, for Mamet, that people live in a Macbethean world, where “fair is foul and foul is fair,” where sharp business practice too often leads to corruption, where deception and stealing are simply regarded as being competitive within the American business world.

Mamet believes in the powers of the imagination and art to liberate, to create a liberal humanism. This is exactly what John in A Life in the Theatre and Karen in Speed-the-Plow believe. Such an attitude, however, clearly does not make sense, Mamet also implies throughout his theater, because there is little or no place for such romantic impulses in a hurly-burly business world. What makes Mamet’s heroes so theatrically engaging to watch concerns an invisible inner drama, a subtextual crisis that haunts them: Underneath the character’s hard-boiled, enameled public bravado lies a figure plagued with self-doubt and insecurities. If Mamet’s heroes try to come to some higher consciousness, as do Don in American Buffalo, Aaronow in Glengarry Glen Ross, and Karen in Speed-the-Plow, such valiant impulses to come to awareness are not ultimately to be realized. Many of Mamet’s best characters—Bernie in Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Teach in American Buffalo—simply seem unwilling or unable to understand what Mamet believes are the regenerative powers implicit in self-awareness and self-responsibility. Some of his characters—most of the men in Lakeboat , for example—do...

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not seem to understand that any form of transcendent consciousness even exists as a possibility. Perhaps this explains why many Mamet heroes lack the capacity to celebrate any experience external to the self. Instead, typical Mamet heroes seem motivated only in sexual and financial terms, blinding themselves to the larger personal or societal implications of their exploits. To be sure, some Mamet characters exude a deeper awareness, as do the Father and Daughter inDark Pony, Aaronow in Glengarry Glen Ross, or Karen in Speed-the-Plow. Others, moreover, come tantalizingly close to understanding their own essential self and the reason for their existence in a world of diminished possibilities; Lang in The Water Engine and Edmond in Edmond possess some degree of self-awareness, ineffectual as such awareness turns out to be for them.

Mamet’s works, however, show a grimly deterministic theater in which his heroes are victims. Their victimization stems from outer forces—a ruthless business associate, an opportunistic executive, a petty thief—as well as from inner forces: the failure of self-reliance, the exaggerated claim that proves false, and characters’ obsession with money that they will never see and with relationships that will never be fulfilling. Thus, throughout his career, Mamet investigates the relatedness of one’s job, sense of fulfillment, and morality. The problem facing his characters, however, is that they struggle (and usually fail) to take responsibility, choosing instead to avoid honest communication or anything that might lead to an authentic encounter. Instead, Mamet’s heroes often commit ethically perverse deeds that only further contribute to their own marginalization. In their efforts not to confuse public and private issues, Mamet’s characters ironically distort the social contract to such an extent that humane values, communication, and love are reduced to barely felt forces.

Mamet’s theater, in sum, repeatedly returns to broader social questions about communication and community. To be sure, not every Mamet drama includes verbal tirades and physical if not psychological violence. Duck Variations, A Life in the Theatre, Reunion, The Woods, and The Shawl—to cite plays spanning much of Mamet’s career—appear as relatively quiet, meditative works whose plots and themes seem more interiorized. On the other hand, the playwright seems most comfortable, and at the height of his aesthetic power, when he replicates anger and betrayal, mystery and assault, and when he deepens social satire into private loss. From Sexual Perversity in Chicago through at least Speed-the-Plow, relationships are as ephemeral as they are unsatisfying, and a brutalizing language seems to be an attempt by his heroes to mask, unsuccessfully, their primal insecurities. There are no villains in his theater—only individuals whose world of diminished possibilities and banalities defines and confines them. The detectable optimism found throughout much of Writing in Restaurants, a collection of essays that Mamet published in 1986 concerning his theory of art, seldom manifests itself in his theater. In a Mamet play, “things change” (to use the title of a Mamet screenplay), or perhaps things do not change, his characters remaining ossified spirits, divided against the self and the other, against home and their outer world. Mamet is a theatrician of the ethical. His characters, sets, and overall situations, however, map out a predatory world in which genuine communication and authentic love remain distant forces. Hence, Barker’s lines in The Water Engine ratify, Mamet suggests, the gulf between idea and reality: “And now we leave the Hall of Science, the hub of our Century of Progress Exposition. Science, yes, the greatest force for Good and Evil we possess. The Concrete Poetry of Humankind. Our thoughts, our dreams, our aspirations rendered into practical and useful forms. Our science is our self.” Such practicality, for Mamet, prefigures a kind of spiritual death on both a cultural and an individual level.

Mamet’s following observation from Writing in Restaurants is hardly surprising: “As the Stoics said, either gods exist or they do not exist. If they exist, then, no doubt, things are unfolding as they should; if they do not exist, then why should we be reluctant to depart a world in which there are no gods?” This comment stands as the metaphysical question Mamet raises, and refuses to resolve, in his theater. The resolutions, whatever they may be, are left for the audience to ponder.

Duck Variations

Three early Mamet plays prefigure the issues discussed above. Duck Variations concerns Emil Varec and George S. Aronovitz, two men in their sixties sitting on a park bench, whose reflections and constant duologues reveal their attempt to come to terms with their own insignificance in the world. Built on numerous episodes, the play shows that the two men come too close to talking about their own finiteness, and so both replace honest conversation with banal talk, their way of avoiding their fear of death.

Lakeboat

In another early play, Lakeboat, Mamet presents life aboard the T. Harrison, a ship traveling through the Great Lakes. The men are leading death-in-life existences because their jobs have reduced their lives to deadening routines and habits. Built around fragments of conversation, the play presents ordinary men—Joe, Fred, and Fireman—leading desperate lives. To fill the void, they engage in endless talks that lead to no epiphany; like the ship, they simply sail through their lives.

Sexual Perversity in Chicago

Sexual Perversity in Chicago presents thirty-four scenes dealing with sex. The play opens in a singles’ bar, where Bernard tells his friend Danny, in graphic detail, about his recent sexual encounter with a woman. Their conversations are carnivalesque dialogues filled with obscenities and dirty jokes. Deb and Joan, the central females in the drama, seem little better off, as Bernard’s sexist remarks are matched by Joan’s hostile response to Danny. Clearly in this play, Mamet outlines a world in which eros has been defleshed and a fundamental and anxiety-producing loneliness dominates. Near the end of the play, Danny and Bernard stare at women on the beach, and when one does not respond to Danny’s coarse remarks, he screams obscenities, which outline the intensity of his frustration and his inability to deal with loss. Sexual encounters, devoid of any genuine love, account for the title and theme of this important work.

American Buffalo

These three earlier plays stand as examples of Mamet’s interest in portraying people whose lives have almost been reduced to nothingness, a motif that he continues to refine in American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, and Oleanna, plays that most theatergoers and critics believe represent his best work.

American Buffalo concerns small-time thieves who find a buffalo nickel in Don’s junk shop (where the play unwinds), motivating them to rob the man from whom Don supposedly purchased the coin. Don orchestrates the robbery plans, which the younger Bob, who eats sugar, soda, and drugs, will try to accomplish. Teach, a nervous man with a swagger, insists that he, a man, do the job; Teach cannot believe that Don would let Bob, a boy, try such a robbery. A long honor-among-thieves conversation ensues, in which Teach’s lines brilliantly reflect Mamet’s vision, a vision suggesting the extent to which ethics have been devalued and stealing has been elevated to the status of good business savvy. Free enterprise, Teach lectures Don, gives one the freedom “[t]o embark on Any . . . Course that he sees fit. . . . In order to secure his honest chance to make a profit.” He quickly adds that this does not make him “a Commie” and that the “country’s founded on this, Don. You know this.” The robbery never takes place, but near midnight, Bob returns with another buffalo nickel. Don seems embarrassed, and Teach becomes agitated, hitting the boy several times. Bob reveals that he bought the coveted nickel, made up the story about a rich coin collector, and suggested the burglary. Suddenly, whatever friendships exist among the men temporarily evaporate: Teach attacks Bob and trashes the entire junk shop. A precarious friendship, however, still remains. The play ends when Teach regains his composure and readies himself to take the injured Bob to the hospital; Bob and Don exchange apologies, and the curtain falls. If the characters do not realize how much they have buffaloed one another, the audience certainly does.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Glengarry Glen Ross extends Mamet’s preoccupation with business as a sacramental world. The play dramatizes the high-pressure real estate profession as seen through the plight of small-time salesmen. Greed lies at the center of the play, for the characters’ directing force in life is to secure sales leads, to close deals with clients, and to rise to the top of the board, the chart announcing which man in the sales force wins the ultimate prize—the Cadillac. The losers will simply be fired. Glengarry Glen Ross, like The Water Engine, Mr. Happiness, and American Buffalo, relies on the myth of the American Dream as its ideological backdrop. The title refers to Florida swamps, not the Scottish Highlands, which indicates just how much the playwright wishes to make experience ironic in this drama. Whereas the characters in Lakeboat, Reunion, and even The Shawl lead lives of quiet desperation, those in Glengarry Glen Ross scream out two hours of obscenity-laced dialogue. Levene may be the most desperate, for his business failures of late lead him to crime: Through a Pinteresque unfolding of events, viewers learn that he robs his own office to secure precious sales leads. Moss is the most ruthless, masterminding the robbery while Aaronow simply seems bewildered by his cohorts’ cheating. Williamson is the office manager, whose lack of sales experience and pettiness earn him the scorn of all. Ricky Roma, however, is different.

Roma emerges as the star of the sales team. He also appears as the most complex. Youthful, handsome, Roma exudes a certain panache that sets him apart from the others. Whereas the others talk about their past conquests and how, with luck (and deception), they will rise to the top of the sales board, Roma produces. If Levene and Moss radiate a frenetic pursuit of customers, Roma appears soft edged. Roma, indeed, nearly succeeds in swindling an unsuspecting customer, James Lingk, who nearly gets locked into buying suspect real estate. Ironically, Williamson reveals to Lingk the truth, and Roma loses his prized commission when Lingk cancels the deal. When Roma hears this, he screams obscenities at Williamson and adds: “You just cost me six thousand dollars. (Pause.) Six thousand dollars. And one Cadillac.” More than losing a sale, Roma loses what ethical perspective, if any, he possesses. Roma, of course, cannot comprehend this. Like Levene and Moss, Roma has no conscience, no sense of the boundaries of business ethics. Like the characters throughout Mamet’s theater, Roma and his colleagues distort language and action to justify their work. The play ends with Levene’s arrest; Mamet suggests that, after Levene’s and perhaps Moss’s arrests, life will go on, business as usual.

Speed-the-Plow

Speed-the-Plow extends Mamet’s business plays. Set in Hollywood, the play centers on Bobby Gould, the recently promoted head of production for a Hollywood film company, and Charlie Fox, a friend who shows him a “buddy prison” film script. They sense a hit because of a macho star who will fill the lead role. In a dialogue that by now is regarded as vintage Mamet, the two celebrate their future fame and money (that surely will be certified by casting the macho star in the film) through a litany of obscenities. The plot thickens when they have to read a serious novel for cinematic possibilities and when a temporary secretary, Karen, enters and Charlie bets five hundred dollars to see if Bobby can seduce her. Karen, however, preaches the truth to Bobby (“Is it a good film?” she asks), who decides to replace the “buddy prison” script with a film based on a novel on radiation. An outraged Charlie verbally and physically assaults Bobby when he hears this and rages at Karen. After Karen says that she would not have gone to bed with Bobby, Charlie throws Karen out, and he and Bobby become friends again and produce the banal “buddy” film. A lack of trust animates this play, in which these Hollywood men are the spiritual kin of the men in American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross.

Oleanna

Oleanna, a play that in part concerns sexual harassment, represents the playwright’s response to the Anita F. Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy. In act 1, a male college professor, John, and a female student, Carol, are in his office, she there because of difficulties in understanding his class. John, who is under tenure review, offers to help. The complacent professor, who is happily married and is negotiating a deal on a house, listens as she confesses, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand what anything means . . . and I walk around. From morning til night: with this one thought in my head. I’m stupid.” He offers Carol some advice and a consoling hand. While the audience senses an impending catastrophe, act 1 gives little hint at—depending on one’s point of view—just how distorted the interpretation of the seemingly innocuous events of the first act will become.

The hurly-burly of act 2, however, makes for sparkling drama. Carol registers a complaint, accusing the professor of sexism, classism, and sexual harassment. He calls her back to the office in a failed attempt to clear up any misunderstandings. For John, she is dealing with “accusations”; for Carol, he has to face “facts.” A campus support group helps Carol, and the play presents her growing sense of power and John’s loss of control over events for which he may or may not be responsible. By the final scene, John loses more than the house and tenure. The college suspends him, and he may be facing charges of rape. Reduced to a groveling, pathetic figure, John appears in stark contrast to the suddenly articulate and holier-than-thou Carol.

In Oleanna, Mamet returns to a world in which the gaps between words and deeds remain. The play is theatrically powerful precisely because its author never fills in such gaps. Instead, theatergoers might ask: Is Carol framing John? Are her accusations legitimate? Is Carol simply the first to have the courage to challenge a patronizing and, perhaps, womanizing male teacher? Is John so much a part of an inherently misogynistic world that he seems blithely unaware that his well-meaning actions are in fact highly sexist? Mamet invites viewers to respond to these and many other questions (issues of censorship, political correctness, battles of the sexes, representations of women in theater, and so on). Thus, this 1992 play continues Mamet’s exploration of a world that remains a battleground of the sexes, where primal feelings of trust and rational human discourse between women and men remain problematic at best—if not impossible. The title of the play, taken from a folk song, alludes to a nineteenth century escapist vision of utopia. Oleanna reminds the audience of the impossibility of such vision.

The Cryptogram

Mamet’s The Cryptogram concerns John, a ten-year-old boy who is afraid to fall asleep and who wonders where his father is. Donny, John’s mother, expresses frustration throughout the play because she has often tried in vain to persuade John to go to sleep. On the first night in the play, John refuses to go to sleep, making the excuse that he is awaiting his father, who has promised to take him camping. Del, a friend of the family, who seems to be romantically linked with Donny, tries to calm John down and coax him to go to sleep, yet he also appears to be distracting the boy, trying to hide from him the fact that John’s father has left the family for good. Del tells Donny and John about a camping trip he took with John’s father the previous week, yet Donny discovers subsequently that the camping trip never took place and that the father was actually using Del’s abode to commit adultery. Donny feels betrayed by Del, thus terminating any opportunity for Del to have a permanent romantic relationship with Donny, which had been possible with Donny’s husband out of the picture. A month later, feeling guilty that he has betrayed both Donny and John, Del gives John one of the boy’s father’s most prized possessions—his German pilot’s knife. John, as usual, refuses to go to bed and only agrees to do so if he can sleep with a stadium blanket, which he cannot obtain because it is already packed (Donny, upset by her husband’s decision to leave her and by Del’s betrayal, is moving). Del gives John the knife as a memento of his father and also to cut the twine so that he can open the box containing the blanket. John takes the knife and walks toward the box, talking about voices that he hears in his bad dreams, voices that keep calling him. Hearing John say that the voices are calling him, Del hands him the knife and says, “Take the knife and go.” The play ends chillingly as the audience is left to ponder what exactly John will do with the knife.

The play is entitled The Cryptogram because John keeps asking about his father and trying to solve the mystery surrounding his disappearance. Del and Donny refuse to tell him where his father is (actually, they, themselves, do not know) or that his father has left his mother, ending the marriage and breaking up the family structure. In fact, the conversations between Del and Donny are so cryptic that the audience experiences great difficulty in discerning what event has happened. The audience discovers that Del and Donny, the only characters who know what has transpired, keep secrets even from each other. However, it is Mamet’s deft use of language that leads to the suspenseful nature of the mystery. Although Mamet is a dramatist, his plays manifest that he is a poet. His plays are very much about language itself. In The Cryptogram as well as his other dramas, Mamet excels in his use of dialogue; he exhibits an excellent ear for dialogue, whether it involves the two adults in this play who strive to maintain their secret from John about his father’s decision to leave the family, the working-class dialogue of Teach, Bob, and Don in American Buffalo, or the middle-class realtors in Glengarry Glen Ross. Mamet adeptly uses dialogue to portray realistic characters with realistic language. In The Cryptogram, when Del asks John what he means when he mentions, “I could not sleep,” John is confused because he believes that his comment is self-explanatory. Del denies that it is, remarking, “It means nothing other than the meaning you choose to assign to it.” Del’s comment concerns the power and the use of language, but it also is meant to confuse John. The dialogue between Del and Donny is also telling. As in many of Mamet’s plays, the characters know each other so well that they finish each other’s sentences and interrupt each other, which leads to the confusion and the cryptic and suspenseful nature of the events. Language becomes a code. Mamet leaves it for the audience to figure out different strands in the play, such as the mystery of the torn blanket. The intensity builds in the last scene, which is evident by the increasing wrath of Donny as she attempts to convince John to go to sleep and by John leaving with the knife, hearing voices that beckon him as he is without his male protector, his missing father.

Reunion

Two other Mamet plays that merit discussion are Reunion, a play whose title might better read as “disunion,” and Edmond. In Reunion, Bernie tells Carol that, although he comes from a broken home, he is “a happy man” who works at “a good job,” but his uneasiness remains, particularly when one sees the contemporary world in which he and Carol live: “It’s a . . . jungle out there. And you got to learn the rules because nobody’s going to learn them for you.” Thus, true knowledge about the soul and the universe can, in Mamet’s world, only be purchased, as the almost poetic lines continue: “Always the price. Whatever it is. And you gotta know it and be prepared to pay it if you don’t want it to pass you by.” Out of such everyday as well as sensory experiences, Mamet implies throughout his canon, emerge no epiphanies. Rather, his characters merely internalize the messy inconclusiveness of their misspent lives, without the reassurances of some higher consciousness.

Edmond

In Edmond, the title character is a racist, sexist, homophobic who leaves his “safe” marriage and embarks on an urban quest to find meaning to his fragmented world. Encountering violence, murder, sexual frustration, and so on, he winds up in jail, sodomized by his black cell mate. If Edmond learns anything from his quest, it is that he accepts his own plight as an acquiescent victim in the jail cell. He becomes the compliant partner with his cell mate.

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