Word: mamet
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...can’t live your life believing every ten-penny self-proclaimed teacher, critic, agent, etc.,” writes David Mamet in “True and False,” his 1997 treatise on acting, “Your first and most important tool is common sense.” Mamet’s words of advice for the young actor are wise. A veteran playwright and director, he knows as well as anyone else that there is a lot of pabulum passed off as legitimate acting technique or theory. More importantly, he knows that even some...
Like most of Mamet's plays, Race is a relatively slight affair: three scenes, four characters, one unnecessary intermission. It opens with two principals of a law firm, one white (James Spader) and one black (David Alan Grier), quizzing a prospective client (Richard Thomas) who has been charged with raping a young black woman. In Scene 1 the lawyers badger him mercilessly, scoffing at his claims of innocence, dismissing his naive hopes that the legal system might exonerate him. By Scene 2, however, the white lawyer has done a nifty 180 (and managed to negate virtually all of his Scene...
Almost none of this is plausible, or even logically consistent. In old Mamet, themes and character revelations bubbled up naturally, almost imperceptibly, out of the rambling dialogue--that miasma of indirection, euphemism and profanity that has been dubbed Mametspeak. The new Mametspeak is more like Mametshout: thematic statements imposed from on high and delivered with an epigrammatic stun gun. Racism is universal and unavoidable. ("I didn't do anything." "You're white.") Justice is an illusion. ("The legal process is only about three things. Hatred, fear or envy.") Free will is a joke. ("Why does he want to confess...
...turning point for Mamet's theater work, it now appears, was Oleanna, his 1992 play in which a college professor's patronizing efforts to help a female student lead to an unjust charge of sexual harassment. Though the staccato dialogue was Mametspeak at its purest, a political agenda drove the characters in a way it never had any of Mamet's previous slimy, but at least self-directed, small-time crooks or real estate sharpies...
...Oleanna seemed to grow out of the authentic passions of a particular time (just after the Clarence Thomas hearings), when sexual harassment and political correctness were ripe issues. Race, by contrast, seems like a relic of another era. The advent of Barack Obama may not have invalidated Mamet's cynical view of race relations, but it has made it seem shockingly glib and opportunistic. "This isn't about sex. It's about race," goes the exchange that brings down the curtain in one scene. "What's the difference?" Make sense of that line, and you just might be able...