Word: mamet
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...nonfiction. There is some value to the incendiary nature of the questions he poses—his opposition to canonical theater artists is almost admirable in its total conviction—but the failure to effectively substantiate his claims renders this book an exercise in futility. However, to call Mamet a charlatan would be to commit the same error he does in “Theatre.” As one of the seminal theatre artists of our age, his ideas are certainly important—hopefully Mamet will heed his own advice and employ a little more...
These are lofty topics, to be sure, and he makes quite a number of lofty claims about them. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with a book taking on such a grand scope, Mamet does so without any sense of rigor. In “Theatre,” he makes a number of fascinating and provocative claims, but they are ultimately founded on flimsy arguments that are more reductive than revelatory. The end result is a read that is mostly frustrating with its self-important tone and baseless claims...
Ever the iconoclast, Mamet takes on the role of the heretic in “Theatre.” Much of the book is spent attempting to dismantle ideas that have been the foundation of theatre-making for over a century. Mamet seems to have no problem unabashedly denouncing his predecessors, but Stanislavsky unequivocally bears most of the criticism in Mamet’s book. “Stanislavsky’s trilogy is a bunch of useless gack,” he writes, “Brecht’s gibberish about the alienation effect is, as proved...
...proceeds to expound on why the emphasis on character over plot is a flawed method of theater making, but he never successfully validates his vitriolic reading of Stanislavski. To take on a figure so influential, one must do more than simply excoriate his work, but Mamet has an unfortunate tendency to make overstated claims without enough substantive proof or analysis...
Even when he praises other artists, the compliments seem oddly back-handed. In a chapter about Great American Plays, he lauds many authors, but gives special credit to Thornton Wilder for “Our Town.” Mamet has some intriguing thoughts about how the play utilizes language with verisimilitude to American dialect. The problem is that he insists that “the vulgate, the actual language of the people can be found only in the cultural anathemas known as popular entertainment.” This argument is tenuously developed to a frustrating conclusion...