David Mamet in Conversation ed. by Leslie Kane, and: Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet by Leslie Kane (review)

Reviews himself worked as an actor and director. This combination of experience makes him an ideal person to explore a play that has become the classic of the American theatre that it seemed fated to be on that first night back in 1962. LESLIE KANE, ed. David Mamet in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Pp. xiv + 248. $47·50 (Hb); $16.95 (Pb). LESLIE KANE. Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet. New York: Palgrave, 1999· Pp. xii + 404. $55.00 (Hb); $18.95 (Pb). Reviewed by David Krasner, Yale University Leslie Kane, cofounder of the David Mamet Society and editor of The David Mamet Review, has chronologically arranged a series of revealing interviews · with the famous playwright and filmmaker. In David Mamet in Conversation Mamet frankly expresses his opinions on a variety of topics, including acting, playwriting, and Judaism, among others. For instance, he bluntly describes performance art as "basically garbage, very decadent, and the sign of deep unrest" (61). Brecht's writings on theatre are "balderdash" (74), and a university theatre graduate is an "idiot who just got out of Yale Drama School" (t36). One learns nothing in school, he says, "except to pander to authority" (200). Shindler's List is '''emotional pornography' and 'Mandingo for Jews'" (137). For Mamet, Judaism is neither genetic nor necessarily theological, but rather a matter of tradition, practice, and ritual (keeping Kosher, observing the Sabbath, etc.). In Judaism, he says, "you don't have to believe in anything; you just have to do it" (122). In the debate over acting technique Mamet does a lot of hetching about bad acting teachers, which he should, but his ideas are hardly original. He detects a few crude acting skills (playing objectives, talking, and listening), but the complexity of the art eludes him. Moreover, his ideas about acting are frequently contradictowand derivative. For example, he says that actors should concentrate "on what the characters want" (70), which is straight out of Stanislavsky, but he also argues that Stanislavsky's Method, which advocates objectives, actions, and desires, is "just not necessary" (149). He asserts that "thejob ofthe actor is to tell the truth" (187), but he fails to explain from whose perspective, the actor's or the playwright's. He says repeatedly thata good actor is "one whose performance I enjoy because I find it truthful" (201), but though "truthful behavior" is the sine qua non of Method (especially Strasbergian) acting, Mamet speaks as if the term were newly minted. He wants actors to contribute to "the immediacy of the moment," what he calls the "organic 168 REVIEWS moment-to-moment, back and forth, the Ping-Pong game of the unforeseen" (202), which is fundamentally Sanford Meisner's acting technique. Mametfails, however, to credit his former teacher, Meisner, whose influential "repetition exercise" is not only the original source of his idea of "moment-ta-moment," "Ping-Pong" acting, but is played out verbatim in the playwright's own explicative-laced "Ping-Pong" dialogue. Gradually, Mamet diminishes the actor's importance, claiming, "U's not the actor's job to be interesting" (203). When discussing the craft of playwriting, Mamet is on finner ground, offering salient, albeit well-worn, advice on dramatic art. He acknowledges the influence of Pinter, Beckett, and Chekhov, but his roots are in Aristotle. Indeed, his description of playwriting appears to come straight from the Poetics: "characters are nothing but habitual action. You don't create a character; you describe what he does" (4Q). Drama deals with action and deception, and theatre, following Stanislavsky, brings to the stage "the life of the soul" (74). For Mamet, basic Aristotelian-Stanislavskian questions need to be addressed by the playwright: what does the character want? what are the obstacles to achieving that goal? and how does the character go about obtaining it? Marnet provides good commonsense wisdom when he says, "There are always trends, but basically there's nothing new in the theater. U always has been, and always will be, just actors and audiences" (37). Mamet's ideas on drama are intelligent and lucid, although somewhat oversimplified. For instance, he draws the distinction between tragedy and drama...