David Mamet

DAVID MAMET

SPEED THE PLOW


Just as the plays of Anton Chekhov convey the moral and social uncertainty of life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth Century, so David Mamet's plays offer us a picture of American life at the end of the twentieth century. While writing within the traditions of Realism, with its well-made play structure, his use of language, especially rhythm, his existential dislocation, and his socioeconomic concerns push the boundaries of the style and position him as an American writer allied in spirit with the post-modern absurdists.
Mamet's work has been greatly influenced by Harold Pinter. Both writers use language as the prime weapons in the hierarchical warfare waged by their characters. When Pinter's characters speak their language seems cognitive and deliberate, whereas Mamet's characters' are more primitive and instinctual. Pinter, writing in the English tradition, uses the rich verbal heritage of the music hall and the comedy of manners to examine questions of existential identity. Mamet, writing in the American tradition, uses the kinetic energy of the streets as he explores issues of cultural and moral integrity. Mamet's salesmen are, in spirit, the direct descendants of America's most famous salesman, Willy Loman, but they think and speak in a distinctly modern, late twentieth century voice, one which bears special scrutiny.

BACKGROUND
Born in 1947 the grandson of Russian-Jewish immigrants and raised in Chicago during the post World War II economic boom, David Mamet has described his early years as a period of rootless ness and isolation: "My father grew up poor but subsequently made a good living. My life was expunged of any tradition at all. The virtues expounded were not creative but remedial; let's stop being Jewish, let's stop being poor." This drive for assimilation and economic success at any price was to profoundly influence his vision of American culture-a culture ruled by the whims of the mass media, the dictates of Madison Avenue, and the rampant materialism of the Reagan era.
His early plays were influenced by the "blackout" style of the work he saw at Chicago's famed theatre, Second City Improvisation. He spent at least 10 years, from 1974 to 1984, writing plays in a similar style: multiple short scenes, each no longer than eight minutes, each scene with a punch line at its end. "There's got to be a good payoff since there is no time for narration, only time left for drama," he has said.
His first commercial success as a writer, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, premiered in Chicago in 1975, followed that same year by the debut at the Goodman Theatre of American Buffalo. A Life in the Theatre and Edmond followed in the late 1970s. By the early 1980s, Mamet had begun to write screenplays; the experience profoundly influenced his writing style.
“In a play ... the only way you have to convey the action of the plot is through the action of the characters, what they say to each other. With a movie, the action has to be advanced narratively ... showing the audience what's happening, narrating to them the state of mind of the protagonist which is the worst kind of playwriting. You ... are taking out the elements of feeling and sensitivity, so you're relying absolutely on the structure of the script.” David Mamet.
Glengarry Glen Ross, a viscous, violent, and dark satire about scheming, avaricious real estate salesmen who stop at nothing to make a sale, was based in part on Mamet's own experiences working in a Chicago real estate office. Unsure of the play's merits, especially its structure, with its episodic first act and a narratively conventional second act, he sent the play to Harold Pinter for comment. Pinter replied that the only thing wrong with the play was that it was not in production. Glengarry Glen Ross opened in London in 1983 and in New York in 1984, where it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Recent plays include Speed the Plow (1988), Oleanna (1992) and The Cryptogram (1995).
Increasingly, Mamet has turned his attention to filmmaking, with, among others, The Verdict (Academy Award nomination, screenplay, 1984), The Untouchables (screenplay, 1987), House of Games (writer/ director, 1987), Wag the Dog (Academy Award nomination, screenplay, 1997), and The Spanish Prisoner (writer/director, 1998). He teaches acting, and as an acting theoretician has written one book, True and False, which has provoked enormous controversy with its dismissal of academic theater training and its refutation of the Strasberg approach to "The Method." A Practical Handbook for the Actor, a compilation of his teachings, has been published by members of The Atlantic Theater Company; a New York acting company Mamet was instrumental in founding.

Sensibility and Premises

Mamet writes savage satires in which materialism is valued over friendship, intimate communication is almost impossible, and language is seemingly reduced to its lowest, and often most violent, common denominator. He alleges that there are no longer moral laws, only a system of rewards and punishments. He focuses on characters that exist within their own closed societies; in the tradition of Realism, he wants us to examine the nature of society; unlike Brecht, he does not incite us to revolution but rather to discussion and debate. His language is of the theatre; it is distilled, fiercely poetic in rhythm and linguistic structure, yet cloaked within the patina of everyday life-similar in form to Pinter, but with a uniquely American spin. The cumulative experience of a Mamet play is of being bombarded with a barrage of sounds and silences.
Mamet's salesmen, actors, academics, and producers seem suspended between action and inaction-they are depressed or hyperactive, often incoherent, usually profane. They are living in a Godless universe, without fixed structure or a concrete morality. Everything is relative, and with that relativity comes uncertainty, confusion, isolation, and despair. Note the influence of Beckett and the tradition of the absurdists. But rather than inertia, in Mamet ambition, naked or disguised, is one antidote for the terror of confronting the void. Mamet's character's feel obligated to better their lives but they can't, won't, or don't know how.
In one guise or another, all Mamet's men are salesmen. Their world is about status, position, and power. To admit the possibility of failure is to admit the possibility of death. It is rejected at every turn. There is little or no place for spirituality in this world. When it is present, usually in the form of a woman, it is seen as attractive and alluring but something that must be subjugated and conquered because it is too threatening.
In Mamet's world action exists solely in the present; there is no acknowledged future or readily identifiable past. Now-with all its possibilities-is the only time that matters. Mamet's characters are often incapable of direct communication; they substitute profanity for profundity, violence for vision. Physical, emotional, and verbal violence is the only way characters can express their frustration and rage. The potential for violence is always present, just beneath the surface; it erupts in the most casual, unpremeditated manner. Mamet cites the truthfulness of his character's desperation as the reason his plays cause such violent reactions: "No one can be forced to sit through an hour and a half of meaningless dialogue-they're (the audience) angry because the play was about them."
Mamet's voice is distinctly American. He writes plays filled with the relentless
rhythms and kinetic energy of big cities. He sees himself in the role of social critic. Business, in Mamet's world, is a metaphor for the corruption of the American spirit-success at any price, friendship and human values be damned. Spiritual redemption and higher purpose are destroyed in the relentless pursuit of money and power.
INTRINSIC DEMANDS

Structure

Mamet has likened a play's structure to that of a joke. In the joke, he says, narrative detail is unimportant-everything is relegated to correctly structuring the joke for maximum impact. You need know only what you need to know to make the joke work. The teller compresses and condenses detail to drive inevitably towards the joke's climax; nothing else matters. The hearer fills in the missing details based on his own experience. This form of empathy sets the audience up for the full emotional impact of the "punch line."
Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Life in the Theater, Edmond, as well as the one acts and radio plays written in the early period are all constructed in his "blackout" style. Short scenes, sometimes only 4 to 8 lines long, are juxtaposed one against another, building the narrative in a linear, sequential fashion. These plays have the rhythm and feel of short stories; incident piles up against incident to create a fragmented yet unified vision. The drama seems to unfold on its own; it does not build in a great sweeping arc to a climax and resolution. Rather, it moves from incident to incident, creating an emerging picture of emotional isolation, so that the gulfs and valleys between the characters slowly reveal themselves.
In 1984 Mamet began writing in a condensed and compressed, narratively linear manner. "I finally had the will to write a second act. I wrote a million episodic plays. I can write them with my left hand. So what? Who cares? Fortunately, I got sick of it before (the audience) did.-4
The later plays all share a more conventional, well-made play sensibility: the inciting incident-usually a betrayal of trust-is identified early on and the conflicts are clearly defined and build towards an inevitable climax. Ironically, once the climax is reached, the action does not automatically resolve to leave the audience fulfilled; rather, the play hangs suspended, creating an unsettling, disturbing after-effect. Since Mamet wants to provoke discussion and debate, these unresolved endings seem entirely appropriate.
While building on his early themes, the later plays expand into a deeper examination of the complexities of the American social system and its effect on character. Glengarry Glen Ross is a diatribe against the American way of business with its success-driven ethic and the complete lack of compassion and understanding for the human condition. The salesmen in Glengarry live only to sell; they have lost touch with their own compassion, their own sense of humanity. This theme is expanded and developed in Speed the Plow and Oleanna. While individual characters search for spiritual meaning in their lives, their self identity is at the mercy of their social function. They are who they know how to be, nothing more, nothing less.
There is always a strict division between the sexes in Mamet's world. Men exist in the marketplace and play by the rules of the jungle. They have no private lives. In Mamet's world, the male culture is competitive, ruthless, and ruled by the social expectations of manhood. A man lives by an external, culturally condoned image of what one should be or wants to be, but rarely what one is; that is, Mamet men want to be the perfect lover, the successful businessman, the paternalistic and beloved professor, and the "killer producer."
These men are disconnected and estranged from their softer, vulnerable sides. They have great scorn and contempt for women-just as they have great scorn and contempt for anything which makes them vulnerable, flawed, or exposed.
Mamet's women carry within them a sense of hope, of compassion, and of emotionality. They tend to be more mysterious and enigmatic. Increasingly, as Mamet's theatrical career has progressed, his women have started to enter the marketplace. But equality never exists in a Mamet play, and the women are either outwitted or overpowered.
The characters do not reveal themselves, layer by layer, until their core is exposed at play's end. Rather, the mystery of motive and unstated intent-Mamet's use of deliberate ambiguity, subjugating all to the play's action and allowing the audience to decide for itself the play's meaning-creates the raw ambiance that infiltrates a Mamet play in production. Physically, due to the text's strong rhythms, each play's impact is immediate and visceral; but long after, intellectually, one has to decipher and decode a Mamet work to get at its meaning. There are no tidy endings in Mamet's world, just unresolved and unsettling action.

Time and Space

Mamet's spaces are pressure cookers. And in keeping with Mamet's aesthetic philosophy, his stage directions are deliberately spare and to the point. His scenic descriptions read "Don's Resale Shop," "Gould's Office," "John's Office." Mamet provides only what is needed to set the action in motion, nothing more, nothing less. The exact nature of the environment is deliberately ambiguous, left to the imagination of the reader.
In Mamet, the physical world is either spare and fragmented-raw, unformed, awaiting definition, as the characters are in their lives-or filled with the detritus and waste of society, a chaotic jumble of discarded artifacts of former times, former lives, and former systems of order and control now deemed useless.
Mamet's rooms are barriers: they keep out the outside world, with its concerns and possibilities, and keep in the status quo. In Mamet, the outside world is always dangerous:
1. In Oleanna, the telephone is a constant reminder that John has a life outside his work yet he seems incapable of leaving his office.
2. In Glengarry Glen Ross, the windows of the ransacked real estate office are boarded up, making it almost impossible to see out or in.
3. In Speed the Plow Karen, the office temp and lone Hollywood "outsider" challenges all of Charlie Fox's beliefs by her mere presence.

In these, his later plays, Mamet compresses the action so that there's no time to think or reflect; the stage action is a relentless barrage of language and imagery, pounding away until the full portrait of the waste and despair in the character's lives has been created.

Language/Rhythm

Mamet characters love to talk and to impress one another with their ability to talk. Every Mamet character is selling something, and as "salesmen," their job is to create a need for whatever it is they have to sell, be it self-image or property. The quintessential Mamet character is a hustler-and as such, he uses all of the tactics of a hustler to gain dominance and control of his "mark." He will praise, belittle, cajole, harangue, twist words, and deliberately misinterpret in order to control his listener's attention and make his "sell." When a Mamet character doesn't talk the silence is intentional-omission and evasion is used as tactics of power and creates the necessary rests in rhythm for characters to refuel before speaking. These tactics are rarely planned or intellectual; rather, they are instinctual tools used in times of desperation and under great pressure. They exist below the spoken surface of the text and manifest as displays of dominance and claims of emotional territory.
As we mentioned earlier, all Mamet characters live inside pressure cookers. They have a great deal to say, but often they can't say it. Their sense of frustration and impotence only makes them try harder. Characters search for words, for a way to express themselves. They may not have the skill, but they never give up. Here's Charlie Fox in Speed the Plow contemplating his future:
Fox. Okay. The one, the one, the one thing, I was up all night; I'm sorry, I should be better at these things, I don't know how to say it, you know how you do? You stand and think, you think, and, the only thing, one hand you say: "Am I worthy to be rich?" The other hand, you, you know, you feel greedy; so, it's hard to know what's rightfully yours ... Bob: when we said, when we said: yesterday: we were talking, when you said "producer;" what we meant, what we were talking about was, I understand it, that we were to "share" above-the-title, we would co-produce, because ... that's right, isn't it? And the other thing; I'm sure you thought of this; to say to Ross, to, that we, as a team, you and I, this is only the beginning, for, if we brought this (I'm sure you thought of this) it's fairly limitless, we can bring more ... those two things, only, are what I wanted to say to you.
Charlie quite literally hammers away at Bobby Gould. Here, as elsewhere in Mamet, rhythm and character are one. Fox is smart, quick to react, adept in his gamesmanship, overextended, and exhausted yet energized. He can't stop talking. His mind is in overdrive; he can't speak fast enough to complete one thought before he's on to the next, so he continually interrupts himself-another favorite Mamet device.
Fox begins by apologizing for himself. He lowers and debases himself in deference to Gould ("I'm sorry, I should be better at these things"); then he aligns himself in a position of equality (the continued use of "We"); then he tacitly compliments and elevates Gould ("I'm sure you thought of this") and realigns himself ("we, as a team, you and I") until he assumes he's made his point with clarity and precision. At the same time he's oblique in his manipulation, self-serving in his objective, relentless in its pursuit.
Mamet characters speak in one of two contradictory styles: either in short, punchy sentences or in long, pulsing arias. The short jabs-rapid thoughts which elicit quick responses-create a pulsing rhythm; the characters quite literally try to beat each other into submission. The long aria, in which a character, overripe with feeling, spins out of control, is never lyric; rather, it's a character's attempt to release internal pressure, a ploy to regain the high ground of dominance and control by impressing the hearer.

Fox. It’s only words, unless they’re true. It’s alright now. I’m sorry I got frightened. Forgive me. I’ll explain it to you. (pause). A beautiful and ambitious woman comes to town. Why? Why does anyone come here…? You follow my argument? (pause)
Everyone wants power. How do we get it? Sex. The end. She’s different? Nobody’s different. You aren’t, I’m not, why should she? The broad wants power. How do I know? Look: She’s out with Albert Schweitzer working in the jungle? No: she’s here in movieland, Bob, and she trades the one thing she’s got, her looks, get into a position of authority – through you. Nobody likes to be promoted; its ugly to see, but that’s what happened, babe. I’m sorry. She lured you in. “Come up to my house, read the script…” She doesn’t know what that means? Bob: that’s why she’s here.
Punctuation is, as in Pinter, crucial in defining rhythms. In Mamet, the parenthicals (used primarily in the early plays) work to intensify or deepen the thought; the comma, Mamet's most frequent means of punctuation, connects fragments of thought; the colon is a way of driving the action forward without break, rest or pause. The only specified rests in the texts are the deliberately marked pauses. Unlike Pinter, Mamet's pause does not create menace or threat; rather, it is a signal for regrouping and a change of direction in thought and action.
Mamet compresses and condenses language. The character's say only what is absolutely necessary. In creating a spare and economic writing style, Mamet deliberately writes elliptical language. It is often obscure or ambiguous. The missing word is implied and further compresses the thought within the line. Like Shakespearean verse, the thoughts are so full they do not need every word for sense and meaning; the overfull line, with its "felt" meaning, carries sufficient impact. The intent of the line is to sound natural, truthful to character-yet it is meticulously crafted to create the effect of spontaneity.
Profanity in a Mamet play is commonplace because words no longer have impact and meaning. It is also the one form of language that cuts across all social barriers; it becomes a shorthand between people. When used repetitively and mindlessly it has no true meaning-it merely creates rhythm, pattern, energy, and movement. Mamet's writing is consistently invigorated with propulsive speeches in which the characters spew and vent; if we are uncomfortable, then Mamet has succeeded.
PERFORMANCE DEMANDS

Unlike Tennessee Williams or Anton Chekhov, in the Realistic tradition, Mamet is not necessarily concerned with psychological portraiture; rather, like Brecht, his concern is with the social system which creates the psychology rather than the psychology itself. He leaves any discussion of psychological motivation to the audience to decipher. As we have said earlier, Mamet is ambiguous by design. This does not mean that the actor may be ambiguous in approaching the text. Just the opposite-the actor must be extraordinarily clever in ferreting out all the clues buried in the text, expand upon them imaginatively to create actable given circumstances, and then use those givens to qualify and condition the playing of action.
At the same time the actor must edit anything which does not convey information to move the narrative forward. The actor's first and primary responsibility in Mamet is to tell the story without commentary, editorializing, or making moral judgments of the characters. Mamet wants the characters to stand and speak for themselves. Let the audience judge their relative merits.

Status

All Mamet plays deal with power and issues of control. For the actor, a thorough understanding of status- the moment to moment positioning of one character in relationship with another-is crucial in uncovering the structure of a Mamet scene.
Status works on the seesaw principle: when I raise you I automatically lower myself, and conversely, when I lower you I automatically raise myself. We raise and lower through compliments and insults, open or disguised. A "gap"-the psychological, social, and emotional space between characters-exists in every relationship. In a master/servant relationship, the gap is at its widest; due to the extreme nature of the polarities in the relationship, we refer to it as a master gap. When characters are closer to one another on the social scale, i.e., intimate friends, colleagues, etc, we refer to the space between them as a mini gap. In the course of any transaction, the gap between the characters widens or narrows according to the dictates of the text.

Movement

The pressure cooker nature of Mamet's scenes-tight spaces and strict time limits-creates a need for playing with speed and mental dexterity. Mamet’s characters quite literally think on their feet. The actor must not only have the technical facility to handle the demands of the text but the mental agility to shift tactics in a heartbeat.
Because the verbal style is spare, compressed, and condensed, the actor's task in Mamet is to create an analogous physical reality, one which keeps the focus on the word and not on extraneous physical movement. While individual movement must have the appearance of spontaneity it needs to be carefully organized and choreographed around a psychological "spine" from which all action-the verbal as well as the physical-springs. The dissemination of information about character is crucial in creating the Mamet mask.
Since Mamet's characters are warriors they carry their history on their backs. They are beleaguered and hassled men who resist the pressure they feel from the outside world. They respond intuitively to one another rather than with preplanned deliberation. In analyzing Mamet's characters as intuitors rather than thinkers, we are referring to a system of character typology defined by Carl Jung, the noted Swiss psychologist, who categorized personality into basic types:
• The introvert, who is quite often perceived as impenetrable, taciturn, or shy, more at home in the world of ideas than in the world of people and things. Introverts bottle up emotions and guard themselves carefully as high explosives.
• The extrovert, who is perceived as a doer. Extroverts are seen as expansive and less impassioned; they unload their feelings and go on.
Introversion and Extroversion are two generic categories which can be further
broken down into four subcategories, or types:
• The sensing type, who faces life observantly, craving enjoyment. Sensors are imitative, wanting to have what other people have and do what other people do; they are dependent on their physical surroundings.
• The intuiting type, who faces life expectantly, craving inspiration. Intuitors are inventive and original, indifferent to what other people have and do, and independent of their physical surroundings.
• The thinking type, who values logic above sentiment. Thinkers are usually stronger in executive ability than in the social arts, and suppress, undervalue and ignore feelings which are incompatible with the thinking judgments.
• The feeling type, who values sentiment above logic. Feelers are usually stronger in the social arts than in executive ability, and suppress, undervalue and ignore thinking that is offensive to the feeling judgments.