A Playwright's Life

A few years ago I wrote a review of David Mamet’s Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. The review, “A Playwright's Life”, was published at Liberty Fund’s excellent Law & Liberty. It is available online at the Law & Liberty website.

The book was a very strange one. An assemblage of essays on common COVIDtide right wing frustrations in an AM talk-radio register written in a sophisticated modern style. There are also illuminating biographical nuggets throughout:

Sigmund Freud is a bit of a recurring character throughout Recessional and is both praised and criticized in different aspects. Still, I do not believe that the claim on page two was a Freudian slip but rather an example of what the psychotherapist Alfred Adler called “compensation”: a mechanism by which feelings of failure in one field are counterbalanced by achievement in another.

In the chapter, “Demotic, A Confession,” Mamet details his time at his alma mater, Goddard College, from which he graduated in 1969, and where he taught in the early 1970s. He confesses that the men there, including himself, “were hiding out from the Vietnam War, and we (myself included) excused our cowardice (in sitting it out and not going to jail) by busing to Washington once or twice and standing in a group.” There, he first encountered the Black Power movement, radical feminism, and most startlingly, “Two of my friends, unknown to me, were Weathermen and involved in the Eleventh Street bombings in New York City in 1970 and went underground for thirty years, and the school and the Plainfield community were the Walmart of the Northeast’s 1960s drug trade.”

There is genuine and moving contrition in this. The chapter also discusses his role in normalizing profane speech in his early theater work and the acknowledgement that “the violation of norms will, eventually, lead to chaos.” It seems that the chaos in our public life today is a chaos Mamet is especially sensitive to and for which he feels some responsibility: “I find myself today in a beach chair with a Negroni, my reminiscences leading me to a similar wonder, ‘What have I done?’”

Beneath the often-overheated political rhetoric is a wounded and sensitive conscience trying to understand and come to grips with a deeply troubled nation.

Full review available here. Enjoy!