Here are some of David Mamet's salient excerpts from my Roundtable:
"In the period when I first began to write the play, I was doing a lot of reading, and I was reading a lot of Theodore Dreiser stuff, and I had just started reading Thorstein Veblen, too.And I was playing a lot of poker with people who were very much like the people in the play. And the question which constantly arose in my mind was, 'What in the world is going on here?' The fiction, whereby we the men in this country, in the aid of which we conduct our lives -- the fiction of loyalty, the fiction of business and the fiction of self-improvement, is patently dissolving. It no longer supports us, it no longer makes us feel good. And the moral fabric, that is to say our perception, of the government, of those institutions whereon we peg, or at least give lip service to,the church and so on, we care for less and less.
"Our ideals are quite obviously completely out of line with the way in which we conduct our lives. And the area in which it most fascinated me, was in the area of business -- which as Veblen says, the myth of American business is nothing other than the sheerest mask for predatory behavior..... masking fraud and masking theft and masking death. And the things that we're taught in school, to salute the flag, and to improve ourselves under the auspices and under the wings of huge corporations. The whole Horatio Alger myth in this country that we give ourselves, is nothing other than self-enslavement and fraud -- and that's this country."
And here are some of Mamet's thoughts about structure and action in a play:
"Aristotle comes along and says that as a proscriptive formula, we have to have unity of action in a play. And Stanislavski comes along at the beginning of the twentieth century and says perhaps this is not a proscriptive formula, perhaps it's a descriptive formula. And he describes the process of perception that one goes through when one views a play. That is to say, not as any god-given fiat must we have a unity of action in a play, but solely because the audience comes in, and the curtain goes up, they see a play for two or three hours, and they come away. We're going to internalize that experience as a totality, and because of that, because of the nature of perception, you'd better jolly well make sure we have a unity of action in a play.
"I think it's absolutely essential that every beat in a play puts forward the action, that every word in a play puts forward the action. And any word of a play which does not put forward the action, must be excised from the play. And that any point in a play where the action takes too great a leap or turns back upon itself, that point in the play must be corrected. I believe that, completely, strongly.
"Those points at which the attention of the audience will lag.... no matter how brilliant the dialogue, no matter how exciting the stage action is, those points which are not essential to the action of the play -- what happens next -- must be corrected."
scenebyme--ijb
