Boxing with Brecht: David Mamet and Bertolt Brecht

We pin our hopes on the sporting public.

—Brecht, 1926

What about Brecht? He influenced me a great deal.

—David Mamet, 1986

Masculinity as expressed through boxing is a critical feature in the work of Bertolt Brecht and David Mamet. Linking aggression with heroism, boxing demonstrates the ambivalent use of violent power to reinforce character, skill, and culture. Sharing an ideal of a transparent theatre, both Brecht and Mamet expose onstage productions to the audience, just as a boxing match exposes its opponents and their trainers in the ring. For both, boxing is an act and metaphor of manliness and competition, which Brecht and Mamet transform into forms of stagecraft. The protocols of controlled hostility in the ring parallel dramatic conflicts in the theatre.

Beyond the analogy of violence in the ring and in society, boxing confirms masculine superiority. And as a populist sport incorporated into the plays of Brecht and Mamet, boxing enhances the appeal of their work by breaking down the divide between art for the elite and for the masses. Stepping out to the theatre should be as thrilling as attending a boxing match.

This essay opens with a cultural analysis of boxing in the early twentieth-century and a description of how Brecht and Mamet assimilated boxing into their dramaturgy. The subject of the next two sections is how boxing functions critically, whether in Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities (1923) or Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow (1988), from the treatment of dialogue to the sparring for power between characters. As examined in the fourth part of this essay, “Fight City,” Chicago is the site of much of this combat, repeatedly used by Brecht and Mamet as the locale of corruption and battle. The final section identifies biographical parallels between the two dramatists and summarizes Mamet’s lifetime interest in Brecht, which began in university.

In the Ring

At first glance, Brecht and Mamet seem an odd match. The former preferred epic drama with large casts, the latter, angry conflicts with casts of two or three. Brecht was avowedly political, Mamet supposedly not. A closer look, however, reveals an important connection through their common interest in sport with specific attention to boxing as a conceit for the construction of masculine identity and social conflict. For both playwrights, boxing defined not only the essence of masculine drama but men at their most basic, framing aggression by space (the boxing ring) and time (the number of rounds). For both Brecht and Mamet, boxing was elemental, raw, and immediate, providing a form of theatre that visually intensified dramatic conflict.

With its danger and semicontrolled violence (and physical if not sexual appeal), boxing became for each playwright the means to convert conflict in social relations into concentrated action. Despite its rules, boxing—approved combat—made punishment visible, testing physical and mental will. Both playwrights incorporated boxing into their drama because it reduced conflict to essentials, while displaying discipline and preparedness, as well as determination and strategy. It reflected society’s fear of, and need for, socially acceptable violence. The masculine appeal of boxing to both Brecht and Mamet, as well as its influence on the staging of their plays, is the focus of this essay.

To attend a prize fight in the early twentieth century was a glamorous activity where the audience dressed up to witness life in its primal, adversarial form. It became an event on the social calendar. A boxing match was also a morality play with a winner (implicitly good) and loser (implicitly bad) with the rites of boxing simplifying dramatic struggle. The amateur middleweight Albert Camus summed up a boxing contest as “utterly Manichean.”¹ In theoretical terms, modern prizefighting (the term itself embodies the source of its competitiveness: money) became a metaphor for the philosophical and social condition of modern men who battle for supremacy without disguise. In the words of Gordon Marino, boxing provides “an absolute experience.”² For Brecht and Mamet such clarity became essential for their dramatic practice.

Antagonism defines masculinity for both playwrights. At the beginning of In the Jungle of Cities, originally to be...