David Mamet's publication record challenges the widely accepted falsehood that the value of a playwright's professional stock plummets if he is perceived as prolific. Over the past three decades, Mamet has written more than twenty original full-length plays. In addition, he has published numerous adaptations, two volumes of prose fiction, two poetry collections, several children's books, eight volumes of nonfiction, and fourteen screenplays. In 1999 alone, he premiered a new play and published a collection of poetry, two screenplays, and his fifth collection of short essays, Jafsie and John Henry.¹ He also directs feature films.

Mamet's short essays focus on a fixed constellation of topics: drama, masculine pursuits (card playing, hunting, drinking, friendship), the American Jewish identity, and childhood memories. He has further developed his observations on theater and movies in On Directing Film (1991), the provocative acting manual True and False (1997), and Three Uses of the Knife,² an examination of “the nature and purpose of drama.”

In a 1984 interview, Mamet asserted that the well-made play imitated the structure of human cognition. The author expands on this point in Three Uses of the Knife. “Dramatic structure,” he writes, “is not an arbitrary—or even a conscious—invention. It is an organic codification of the human mechanism for ordering information. Event, elaboration, denouement; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl; act one, two, three.” His anti-Foucauldian view of cultural norms (he claims they have biological rather than sinister or arbitrary origins) is rooted in a naked desire to please the audience. Drama, Mamet concluded long ago, is good for one thing only: telling a story. And people are naturally receptive to a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The only people who do not conceive of stories in this manner, he notes, are experimental, anti-mimetic playwrights.

Mamet's considerable experience in theater, filtered through the theses of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, has led him to conclude that the theater artist's task is to ease the disparity between the conscious and unconscious minds—“to cure a raging imbalance”—and so achieve peace. Dramatic form facilitates this task. It permits the playwright to address questions the conscious mind is incompetent to deal with. Ideally, when dramatic structure is employed expertly in a play, it brings the subconscious and conscious into alignment, at which point the audience feels it has to hear what happens next.

By contrast, a didactic play—a drama that poses a question we can answer rationally, like “Are black people deserving of respect?”—makes us feel diverted but not fulfilled. “It might make a good tract, it might make a good political platform, it might make a good speech. But it can't be art,” Mamet writes. By appealing only to the rational mind, the “problem play” fails to grip audience members at a deeper level of consciousness. At most, it instills in them a sense of superiority to those characters whose actions they recognize as morally repugnant.

These are ideas Mamet has been developing for some time. In On Directing Film, he wrote: “People have tried for centuries to use drama to change people's lives, to influence, to comment, to express themselves. It doesn't work. It might be nice if it worked for those things, but it doesn't.” In True and False, he offered this bit of heresy: “Our theater is clogged with plays about Important Issues; playwrights and directors harangue us with right-thinking views on many topics of the day. But these are, finally, harangues, they aren't drama, and they aren't fun to do. The audience and the actor nod in acquiescence, … but it is a corruption of the theatrical exchange.” It is tempting to suggest Mamet became a prolific writer through sheer repetition, but I welcome his doggedness on this issue, which is heresy, and which explains the paradoxical situation contemporary theater finds itself in. By addressing “relevant issues,” theater risks making itself irrelevant to the human psyche.

“Always do things in the least interesting way,” Mamet wrote in On Directing Film, “and you make a better movie.” By that, he meant attempts to tart up a character—assigning adverbs in the script or mugging on stage—merely distract attention from the story, which is of paramount interest. Mamet's appreciation for simplicity is evident in his plays, which read briskly, in part because he does not invite cheap histrionics from performers. Everything is on the page: in the story and in the language. Canvassing Mamet's dramatic oeuvre, however, I found passages where the author places perhaps too much faith in pure narrative, which a literate audience might fully anticipate, particularly in the strictly Aristotelian form Mamet favors, tragedy. It may be impossible for Mamet to bring the audience's conscious and unconscious minds into alignment if audience members have grown impatient with the characters.

“Endings in tragedies are resolved,” Mamet explained to Matthew C. Roudané in 1984. “The protagonist undergoes a reversal of the situation, a recognition of the state, and we have a certain amount of cleansing. This is what Don experiences in American Buffalo. But this doesn't happen in Glengarry Glen Ross. So the structure is different. It's not as classical a play as Buffalo, and it's probably not as good a play.” Anyone familiar with both works knows, in fact, that Glengarry Glen Ross is far superior to American Buffalo, a tragedy whose resolution demands a stubborn obtuseness from its characters. For instance, Don, the pawnshop owner who is planning a minor heist, has failed to notice that one of his poker buddies—the one who keeps winning—is a habitual cheater. Don also lacks even ballpark knowledge of the value of rare coins passing through his store and can't be bothered to investigate their worth. In Mamet's work, the more urgent the dramatic point, the more implausible the set-up. In Edmond, the title character's abrupt descent into poverty, hopelessness, and murder rests on his gullibility and a convenient lapse into insanity.

When I say the audience grows impatient with the characters, I do not mean the audience can predict the precise details of the reversal the protagonist will undergo. But they know he will undergo a reversal of some sort—they've read Aristotle, too. And they know it will not be triggered by an arbitrary cataclysm beyond the protagonist's control, as in a melodrama, but rather by the protagonist's own actions, à la Oedipus. Too often, Mamet resorts to a simple slip of the tongue. In The Cryptogram, Del tells Donny her husband gave him a knife as a memento on a camping trip, which Donny knows is a lie. In Glengarry Glen Ross, Levene chews out his boss on behalf of a colleague, and in so doing implicates himself in an office burglary. Mamet strains the audience's credulity by placing too much weight on this Freudian crutch. (Levene: “I'm halfway hoping to get caught.”) In the most extreme cases, we get an I-Just-Can't-Help-Myself-I-Have-to-Blurt-This-Out scene. Karen, the conniving temporary office assistant in Speed-the-Plow, is asked by an angry professional rival if she would have slept with her boss had he not approved her film proposal. “No,” she admits. “No.” The problem is not simply that Karen instantly converts to a life of self-defeating honesty—she loses the film deal as a result of her answer—but that the other characters fully expect her to. They seem sympathetic to the bind the author is in, and are willing to play along.

The problem Mamet faces is not merely one of formalist exhaustion. The weakness of implausibility was inherent from the very beginning of drama, even in Aristotle's model of the tragic form, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. As a character in Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain comically notes, “[I]f some oracle told you you were going to kill your father and marry your mother, wouldn't you just never kill anybody and stay single? … Wouldn't you be smart enough to, like, avoid older women?” Characters in tragedy are never smart enough, and in Mamet's plays they are downright imbecilic. (Don in American Buffalo: “What are you doing here?” Bob: “I came here.”) This is, in part, because real human beings act self-destructively (that is, stupidly) and because drama takes its logic from dream narrative. The protagonist's actions are driven by a vertigo-like pull, inevitably drawing the character over the side of a cliff. This is not smart behavior, but it is dramatic.

Still, the implausibilities and irritations remain. Mamet acknowledges that third act problems are nearly inevitable in playwriting and he pleads for understanding: “It is much easier to write great dialogue … than to write great plots.” Mamet's disjointed dialogue is the most renowned feature of his writing, and I believe it stems from problems inherent in his work. The following exchange between two real estate salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross is not exactly typical of Mamet's dialogue, which is not as relentlessly elliptical and choppy as some think, but it is prototypical:

AARONOW:
We're stuck with this …
MOSS:
We're stuck with this fucking shit …
AARONOW:
… this shit …
MOSS:
It's too …
AARONOW:
It is.
MOSS:
Eh?
AARONOW:
It's too …
MOSS:
You get a bad month, all of a …
AARONOW:
You're on this …
MOSS:
All of, they got you on this “board” …
AARONOW:
I, I … I …
MOSS:
Some contest board …
AARONOW:
I …
MOSS:
It's not right.

Mamet describes his dialogue as “poetic,” “musical,” “tailor-made for the stage.” It is indeed all those things. But my concern is the extent to which educated or street-wise characters are forced to sound incoherent to lend plausibility to their ignorant, self-destructive actions. Mamet's characters stutter in the service of tragic form.

Mamet's staccato language surfaces in his nonfiction as well, in the blunt, single-sentence paragraphs his essays often comprise. Perhaps because he developed his recent theorizing on drama to book length in Three Uses of the Knife, Mamet's latest collection of short essays, Jafsie and John Henry, includes relatively few observations on theater. Mamet focuses instead on the tendency of Jewish Americans toward self-loathing, the male-female divide, and his nostalgia for youth from the vantage point of middle age.

In a previous collection, Mamet said of specifically masculine activities like boxing, gambling, and shooting: “I have sought them out and enjoy them all vastly. They are times that I cherish.” He has also asserted that men and women do not want the same things, and that female colleagues, in his professional experience, have consistently demonstrated the cruelest and most arrogant behavior, because they are less fearful of censure from peers. In his latest collection, Mamet balks at the sloppy use of the word macho to mean anything male and, therefore, “degenerate and ludicrous,” and he condemns attempts by women to infantilize men by demanding they become “emotionally responsive.” Statements of this ilk have won Mamet numerous detractors, as has the fierce language of his volatile male characters (“Southern bulldyke asshole ingrate of a vicious nowhere cunt”). But he has his defenders as well. British playwright Rebecca Prichard, considering the recent crop of arbitrarily violent male plays in London, notes that those works owe little to Mamet's dramatic writing, which does not celebrate nihilism or even masculinity, but which explores the link between society's values and its brutality.

If Mamet acquits himself on gender, he has less success with the issues of Judaism and the American Jewish identity, which seem only to make him crabby. It is instructive, considering Mamet's distaste for melodrama, to read his dismissal of Schindler's List as “an exploitation film” and “emotional pornography.” But pronouncements like “We are a beautiful people and a good people” do not belong among the mature writings of a significant literary talent. They are the Jewish rejoinder to Kwanzaa propaganda, and are better left to educators, the talentless, and the well-intentioned.

Similarly, Mamet makes occasionally airless declarations about popular culture that echo the work of our laziest academics: Disneyland is best understood as a totalitarian state, for example. The author has written of his wasted undergraduate years at a college with an unstructured curriculum where, essentially, no learning took place. He still suffers from lost time. This is especially obvious in his essays on economic matters—works informed almost exclusively by the theories of Thorstein Veblen. For years, Mamet's dramatic writing triumphed by tapping into a theatrical zeitgeist that was similarly ill-informed. Mamet's most successful works can, I believe, be fairly encapsulated thus: sex workers, pawnshop owners, pimps, and “legitimate” salesmen of all kinds use coercive techniques to bilk the customer. And they are willing to abandon even the thin patina of legality and resort to violence if necessary. The heartless economic system forces them to do so. Mamet has long been fascinated and unnerved by “the American myth,” which he defines as the expectation of getting something from nothing and which he views as the basis for our economic life. “And this also affects the spirit of the individual. It's very divisive. One feels one can only succeed at the cost of someone else.”

Mamet's sentiments closely resemble “the European myth” espoused for decades by the Social Democratic Left, who insisted that the prosperity of an individual arose inevitably at the expense of the collective. Mamet is right about one thing, at least: a significant number of Americans have long held what Europeans considered the naive notion that affluence is generally beneficial, which recent economic developments worldwide now seem to confirm—a point no longer lost even on the Social Democrats. The most important question looming over Mamet's career concerns this altered zeitgeist: Will the author conform subsequent dramatic works to a post-Thatcherite world of New Labour and “Third Way” economics?

I hope Mamet continues in his nonfiction to serve as a thoughtful amalgamator of theories first espoused by others—Aristotle, Eisenstein, Bettelheim, even Stanislavsky, whose acting method Mamet now dismisses. But the author is clearly in a transitional period in his dramatic work, both regarding his primary choice of media—he works more frequently in film now than theater—and in subject matter. Mamet's plays from the nineties, including The Cryptogram and The Old Neighborhood, suggest the author is drawing upon childhood for inspiration and plot material. That's fine, as long as it is a sign of aging and nostalgia, not of timidity or confusion. Mamet may voice questionable generalizations about society, but the fierceness of his convictions is what lent his earlier dramas their energy. His small sin was to misdirect his ire at a faceless political and economic establishment that could not reasonably be expected to rescue characters bent on classically tragic self-ruin. It is a graver sin—and an unsavory spectacle—for the playwright to redirect his venom toward his parents now that our general economic predicament appears less dire.

If Mamet needs material for a socially engaged drama in the post-Cold War economy, I suggest he consult some of the more vital passages in his own nonfiction for inspiration. “Our undeniable Puritan society can countenance chastity and pornography, but little in between,” he writes in “Scotch Malt Whisky Society” from Jafsie and John Henry. “It seems we have a problem with the issue of control.”

In Three Uses of the Knife, he states, “The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.”

And in the preface to Jafsie and John Henry, he affirms the artist's wish not to embarrass himself. Paradoxically for a playwright, this means resisting the social contract and saying the unacceptable. Things get complicated, however, if the rebellious author wins attention and acclaim. “Success ratifies the iconoclast, and places him or her in the strange position of having been endorsed for being a detractor,” Mamet notes.

I can think of no subject matter more vital to today's theater than this inverted social contract. A playwright ingratiates himself to the establishment these days by screaming curses at the powers that be. It is nearly impossible to voice something unacceptable anymore unless one remains doggedly square and sober. Mamet would seem to be the perfect playwright to grapple with this material, having had the bad taste in the past to dismiss performance art and “women's writing” as decadent and elitist, and having gone on record bemoaning the effects of government arts funding. The author is clearly at a professional crossroads. I cite as evidence his most recent film [The Winslow Boy], an adaptation of Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy, which Mamet describes as “a work of melodramatic genius.” That one of America's most prolific and original writers should resort to filming an adaptation in a genre he openly deplores suggests confusion.

Or perhaps it signals a change of heart. Perhaps David Mamet has loosened up and is willing to ease his adherence to a strictly Aristotelian approach to drama. Perhaps we can expect articulate, plain-speaking characters from him in the future—intelligent people to whom bad things occasionally happen, rather than ignorant louts who keep mucking up their own lives. If so, David Mamet is my choice to lead American playwrights through the wilderness of political and bureaucratic confusion, face up to the surprisingly benign nature of our economic system, and point us toward a new century of American drama.

Notes

1. Mamet, David. Jafsie and John Henry: Essays. New York: Free Press, 1999. ＄22.00; 171 pp.

2. Mamet, David. Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. ＄21.00; 87 pp.