Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama
by David Mamet
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Book Summary Information
Author: David MametEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2000-06-13
ISBN: 037570423X
Number of pages: 96
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780375704239
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama
Book Review: Neo-Aristotelianism
Summary: 4 Stars
Mamet explicates a compelling theory of drama that links the fine and liberal arts with multifarious forms of American religion and social experience. Though he falters into occasionally harsh prescriptivism, he offers a look at one way American dramatists can and do communicate their world to an audience--and, in many ways, how they communicate the audience's own world as well.
At the heart of Mamet's theory is his claim that all of us make drama out of the ordinary matter of our lives. The dramatist simply takes that hunger and constructs a public spectacle around it. This spectacle raises us up as human beings, and purges the emotions we harbor but which are unacceptable in our modern era. Theatre, in other words, retains its Aristotelian purpose in cleansing the soul.
But Mamet broadens the scope of drama, away from stately tragedy and into more humane territory. As he says, "a play is not about nice things happening to nice people. A play is about rather terrible things happening to people who are as nice or not nice as we ourselves are." In other words, though theatre still requires that characters have their hard-won pretenses stripped away, it is not only kings who must lose everything.
From this it's a short step to Mamet's assertion that "the purpose of art is not to change but to delight. I don't think its purpose is to enlighten us. I don't think it's to change us. I don't think it's to teach us." This is especially good advice for young writers who have been coached by public school English courses to see literature as a manifesto to be decoded. Too many young writers think their work will transform society and remake us as better people. In the name of enlightenment they inflict on audiences the dreariest dumbbell harangues mankind can imagine.
No, much better to delight first. But for theatre to have Mamet's holy purification role, we must broaden the definition of "delight" to encompass the whole range of human emotion, uplifting or otherwise. The role of art is to make us feel deeply, not think correctly. And if, in performing the former, it accomplishes the latter, so much the better, but reversing the order will create sterile, unengaging work.
Mamet's theory is based on his own works, and the goals he sets for his own writing. Therefore, easy as it is to agree with his statements about the audience, the problem play, or the MacGuffin, it's tough sledding when he says that we CAN'T commit acts he considers errors. Plainly we can, since Clifford Odets' agit-prop plays still get produced, and plays that most disdain the audience are often the ones with the biggest endowments. Yet for those who aim for Mamet's scale of accomplishment, this theory is a confident place from which we can begin our own creative process.
In a few places Mamet pitches high and outside. His claim that the forced monologue he disparages as "The Death of My Kitten" interferes with the audience's reception of the play is tough to stomach. There are reasons why we don't want to sit though maudlin accounts of old news, but Mamet says: "If we are to identify with the Hero, which is to say, to see her story as our own, she can have had no `state' before the beginning of the story."
This is palpable nonsense, and surely Mamet himself doesn't believe that. If he did, why bother mentioning Shelly's daughter in Glengarry Glen Ross? Or John's mortgage and tenure troubles in Oleanna? If we are to claim the Hero as ourselves, she must have a state, even if a dull disquisition isn't the way to illuminate it.
Similarly, his round condemnation of American musicals, packed flippantly in with his excoriation of "problem plays," doesn't fit squarely. It's true that musicals are often plot-driven and suffer with timid characters and pat endings. This is incompatible with what Mamet sees as the purpose and origin of drama, but it doesn't mean all musicals are equal or that they are a blight on the theatre. It simply means that they subscribe to a different dramaturgical theory.
But for all his high-handed pietism, Mamet offers a compelling theory of American drama in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries. His vision, though perhaps tinted by his own work, at root makes contemporary the theories that have guided drama since time out of mind. In an age when much writing drifts listlessly, with neither audience nor intention visible to the naked eye, Mamet offers badly needed direction, and hope that writers can be about something in the tricky modern world.
Summary of Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama
What makes good drama? And why does drama matter in an age that is awash in information and entertainment? With bracing directness and aphoristic grace, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross delivers a thrillingly original treatise on his art.To David Mamet, human beings are drama-creating animals who impose narrative structures on everything from today's weather to next year's elections. Mamet distinguishes true drama from its false variants, unravels the infamous "Second-Act Problem," amd considers the mysterious persistence of the soliloquy. Three Uses of the Knife is an inspired guide for any playwright or theatergoer that doubles as a trenchant work of moral and aesthetic philosophy.
Playwright David Mamet's three lectures at Columbia University are ostensibly about issues of dramatic structure, but as they unfold, and Mamet continually explores the relationship between dramatic structure and the lives we live, much broader concerns are revealed. Here, for example, is Mamet on political propaganda:
It is ... essential to the healthy political campaign that the issues be largely or perhaps totally symbolic--i.e., non-quantifiable. Peace With Honor, Communists in the State Department, Supply Side Economics, Recapture the Dream, Bring Back the Pride--these are the stuff of pageant. They are not social goals; they are, as Alfred Hitchcock told us, the MacGuffin.... The less specific the qualities of the MacGuffin are, the more interested the audience will be.... A loose abstraction allows audience members to project their own desires onto an essentially featureless goal.
Although occasionally academic, the overall tone of the lectures is consistent with Mamet's no-nonsense manner of speech. He has no time for obfuscation and little time for repetition, save when he must absolutely employ it for emphasis. He is passionate about good theater, and passionate about the truth. 3 Uses of the Knife makes an excellent companion piece to his True and False, which addressed similar philosophical matters in the form of advice on the actor's craft.
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