In a way, I am a student of David Mamet.
When I returned to New York last year and began dusting off the cobwebs of my theatrical career, my best instincts told me to get back into training before I started looking for work. It had been years - decades, in fact - since I had been to an acting class, and the training I had was mostly squishy and vague. So I was determined to send myself to boot camp - to find a training program that would help me become a more disciplined, more intentional, more muscular artist.
Because of its reputation, name recognition, and geographic convenience (it being five blocks from where we live), I gravitated to the Atlantic Theatre Company’s Acting School, which purports to teach the acting technique developed by founders David Mamet and William H. Macy. Muscular artists, indeed. At its core, the technique exhorts actors to stop trying to pretend to be people (characters) they are not, but rather to walk onstage or in front of the camera with no other intention than to accomplish the objectives of the character in the story, using the words of the playwright. No displays of false emotion. Less “acting,” more “action,” with the belief that what an audience really wants when they pay their money is the experience of watching the actor’s dynamic striving to accomplish something important, something difficult. And in so doing, the audience and the artists collaborate in accomplishing the most heroic goal of all: to contribute to the increase of human understanding.
The classes were agonizing the way your first few trips to the gym after years of sloth can be agonizing. One of my teachers there last fall, Jordan Lage, fairly personified the stoic, no-nonsense approach to acting and dramaturgy Mamet preaches, and a tougher drill sergeant you could not find in a New York acting studio. Meaner, less intelligent, and less talented, maybe, but none tougher. And the first chance I had to put these new techniques to the test in an audition situation, I got the part. Boom. Wow. Thanks, Mr. Mamet. And thank you, Jordan and Tamara.
When you take class at Atlantic, you are invited to read some of the essays on drama, acting and philosophy Mamet has authored over the years, and I ate most of it up with a spoon. I loved what he said in True and False, for example, about the pretension and disingenuousness of many theatre academics. I knew from experience the terrible results of hack drama teachers (and directors) inflicting their half-baked pseudo-psychological oversimplifications of Stanislavsky, or Strasberg, or you-name-who, on fragile and impressionable young hearts and minds. I shared his disdain for these people.
I had just begun reading his Three Uses of the Knife when Mamet published his recent essay in the Village Voice, titled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” I became aware of the piece only after reading Charles Isherwood’s piece in last Sunday’s New York Times, awarding Mamet’s current Broadway offering, November, the title of “Most Irritating Play of the Season.” In his column, Brantley could not resist a reference to Mamet’s previous piece in the Voice, in which (he said) Mamet had come out as a conservative.
When I read the title of the piece, my first reaction was to ask whether Mamet ever a “brain dead liberal?” I had never thought so, and I’ve read a lot of his essays and plays, and seen many interviews with him as well. He always seemed to be too intellectually rigorous and logical a thinker to be a brain-dead anything. I also found him to be a person of some faith, and was happy to hear he walked a spiritual path, something I could relate to in his life. It also gave some human warmth to his otherwise cold, logical, utterly unsentimental Spockish affect (is it just me, or does he look more like Leonard Nimoy with every photograph?). And as he says himself in the Voice, he never followed liberal orthodoxy or wrote about people who did.
I agree with one point Mamet makes in his essay, or at least one I think he makes, namely that most ideology is really prejudice masquerading as reason. To be a reactionary ideologue, no matter what your stripe, is to be brain-dead indeed - and there are plenty of those around.
A great thesis, but unfortunately almost no synthesis ever followed. The promise of an “election season essay” worthy of David Mamet went utterly unfulfilled, and I am sorely disappointed. What we got instead sounded irritatingly like a caller on a right-wing talk show complaining about his property being rezoned, his taxes raised and his money being confiscated by a meddling and intrusive government. Mamet could have made a groundbreaking argument for a kind of postmodern, post-conservative libertarianism I suspect he really espouses, but instead he just sounds like a guy who always pretended to be a liberal because all his intellectual, artistic friends were, but who simply got too tired of thinking too hard and gave up (or, in the words of a close friend of mine, he simply accumulated enough “fuck-you money” that he no longer needs to care). After all, it’s a lot easier to give in to the greed and self-interest Mamet has now embraced as natural and “human” than to continue to work for something better. Some of us think of that effort as building the dominion of a loving and just God on Earth, but regardless of how you look at it, the arc of the moral universe is long, and it is our duty as human beings to traverse it as best we can, rather than giving up and grabbing every individual advantage in the process.
Mamet say he is no longer a liberal because he has given up on the notion that human beings are basically good at heart. What a bizarre statement. Since when did anyone become a liberal or a progressive (or what have you) because they thought that? Speaking for myself, I believe in teaching and preaching a social gospel, and electing a progressive, active, enlightened government precisely because I know human beings are prone to greed, lust for power, and all the other evils Mamet seems to think a good conservative should embrace as part of the natural order.
Mamet also attacks liberals for being anti-military and anti-corporations. It is truly a brain-dead liberal that sees things in such absolutes, I will concede. But Mamet is equally brain-dead in his critique, since most “liberals” I know would never advocate dismantling the military or dissolving all corporations. It is the power that these institutions have amassed in this country that we progressives work to curtail. Not the use of military power to bring about lasting peace (as in Central Europe, for example) nor the promotion of healthy economic competition and fair dealing (as shown by the long-term peace and prosperity we enjoyed when Democrats held the White House). To say that you are no longer a liberal because you’ve learned to love the military and the corporation is to deny a self-evident truth: that these institutions must be carefully monitored, managed and regulated because history tells us they tend toward absolute power, oligarchy, feudalism and fascism - products of the greed and self-interest that is, yes, unfortunately part of our broken humanity.
My friend Les is fond of saying that the difference between a liberal and a progressive is that a liberal sits in his living room grieving for an imperfect world, while a progressive goes out and tries to change it. Some see this dichotomy writ large in the current Democratic Presidential primary. Whatever the case, Mamet doesn’t seem to have ever been either one, really. He claims to have had a change of mind, but goes on to admit that anyone who has read his plays probably knows he was pretending all along.
I applaud anyone who points out the shortcomings of the self-righteous and the hypocritical, especially their own, and in his critique of liberalism Mamet does make some valid points. But when he includes a reference to his nickname for National Public Radio (”National Palestinian Radio”), he betrays not a philosophy, but a prejudice. Not a change of mind, but an admission of guilt.
And that is very disappointing.
