David Mamet by C.W.E. Bigsby (review)

446 Book Reviews of labor. "It would be naive,'.' he writes, "to think that [the director and actor] occupy the same place in the creative process, [although) I do not make a distinction of hierarchy" (p. 55). One senses, however. that Liubimov would be a hard man to oppose in a struggle over artistic turf: he admits his authoritarian nature, and notes the necessity of "battling" with actors because the good director is an expert in the actor's artjust as he is an expert in the art oflighting, sound, decoration,costuming, and all the other aspects of Ihe siage (p. 96). The index includes a detailed chronology of Liubimov's life and career to 1985. a catalog of his productions, and a selected bibliography of works in five languages (primarily Russian). Liubimov's memoirs are the important document of an anist whose impact on Russian theater in time will rival that of Meyerhold and Stanislavsky, and whose world-wide reputation will cenainly assume a place of privilege as we come to know him better. JOHN FREEDMAN, HARVARD UNIVERSITY C.W.E. BIGSBY. David Mamel. London: Melhuen, 1985. pp. 142. $5.95. In his A CriticalIntroduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, Vol. JIl, C.W.E. Bigsby devoted an entire chapter to David Marnet, with less than satisfying results. While his general overview of Marnet was provocative, his analyses of individual plays were thin, not always convincing. With DavidMamet, however, Bigsby thoroughly and convincingly tackles Mam~t's theater. The book covers thineen selected plays (Marnet has penned over twenty-five), from Lakeboat and Duck Varjalions to Glengarry Glen Ross and The Shawl. Bigsby's study is as analytically rigorous as it is sensitive to the subtleties of Marnet's often-misunderstood aesthetic and, accordingly, contemporary theater scholars will find this book a stimulating and welcome addition to modem drarnatic criticism. Marnet yokes together the public and private worlds of his characters through language. In text and performance, his technical virtuosity emanates from an ability to capture - in elided street talk, in glib business jargon - the values, personal politics, and (usually limited) perceptions of his heroes. Most of Marnel's characters seem imprisoned within a world largely invented, and confined, by their own distorted use of language. So it seems entirely fitting that Bigsby concentrates on the playwright's language throughout the book. "Virtually all of his characters continue to sense the need for something more," Bigsby argues , "for some meaning which their language cannot encompass, but which they struggle to articulate in a hand-me-down vocabulary that hints at humane values and a liberal faith lost somewhere back in an American past plundered for its rhetoric but denied as the source of values" (p. 17). Since language stands as one of the most conspicuous features of Marnet's plays, critics have praised or condemned Marnet for his "realistic" dialogue. But, as Bigsby points out in each chapter, Marnet's language is not realistic; it's poetic, it's exaggerated Book Reviews 447 for theatrical purposes. Marnet is not "a simple realist whose accomplishment [lies] in capturing and reproducing a particular kind of urban aphasia" (p. 15). Although Marnet clearly dramatizes "the externals of American life - speech patterns, social class, physical detail" (p. IS), he also stages the inability ofcertain characters to communicate honestly, what the existentialists would call authentically, with the self and the other. Thus Bigsby also considers the thematic dimension ofMamet's theater, observing that what most engages Marnet is "the inner life of the individual and the nation" (p. 15). What the theatergoer discovers, according to Bigsby, are characters who "recycle language, repeat distorted and fragmentary banalities picked up from the media" and "expose their own emptiness" (p. 136). The beauty of Mamet's artistry lies in his ability to transform common speech and "fragmented banalities" into art: "For if he pins America dispassionately to its conuptions and treasons, if he chooses to dramatize the results of a wilful surrender of national purpose and personal meaning, he also forges poetry out of the slug of language left behind by a century and more of public lies and private collusions" (p. 16). Scholars familiar with such...