The Long Con

Enter Theatre, Mamet's latest collection of essays: Mamet has certainly earned the right to codify his wisdom, but having already written separate mini-textbooks on acting, writing, and directing, he cannot realistically expect his slim new volume to supersede his body of work. The ambivalence of his earlier work has now solidified into something forceful. His essays in Theatre are worth assessing as a crude and wrongheaded but ideologically fascinating polemic, the place where Mamet's reactionary ideas about culture and politics converge in earnest. Vibrating with rage and resentment, they might represent the most sustained argument against intellectualism ever published by an American belletrist.