A sharp knife, a spotlight

“All the world is a stage” is repeated so often it has become a cliche.  Shakespeare’s monologue from “As You Like It” opens with this: 

Concerning that stage, Nietzsche argued the apex of artistic achievement and high point of civilization was achieved on stage in Classical Athens by the tragic dramatists, particularly Aeschylus and Sophocles.  When their Apollonian and Dionysian met in balance – order, form, reason commingling with chaos, passion, ecstasy – the citizens of Athens confronted both the suffering of life and the majesty of its beauty, experiencing an integrated whole comprising the breadth of the human condition.  

But how, precisely, does the stage work?  

Who better than a playwright from Chicago’s south side to make plain the inner workings of the stage?  David Mamet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, playwright on Broadway and member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame, screenwriter for Hollywood, author of 223 books, published in 1998 “Three Uses of the Knife: on the nature and purpose of drama.” 

He wrote, “It is in our nature to dramatize.  At least once a day we reinterpret the weather – an essentially impersonal phenomenon – into an expression of our current view of the universe: ‘Great.  It’s raining.  Just when I’m blue.  Isn’t that just like life?’  The weather is impersonal, and we both understand it and exploit it as dramatic, i.e., having a plot, in order to understand its meaning, for the hero, which is to say for ourselves.”

Drama’s structure plays out in three acts.  “In act 1 Our Team takes the field and, indeed, prevails over its opponents, and we, its partisans, feel pride.  But before that pride can mature into arrogance this new thing occurs: Our Team makes an error, the other side is inspired and pushes forth with previously unsuspected strength and imagination.  Our Team weakens and retreats.”

And so begins act 2, the play’s midlife crisis.  Conflict is present, a new set of problems arise.  Our attention narrows toward climax, denouement and conclusion, but a challenge must be overcome while the playwright holds the audience’s attention.  Again Mamet, “Joseph Campbell calls this period in the belly of the beast – the time in which the artist and the protagonist doubt themselves and wish the journey had never begun.”  The ease of act 1 becomes complex.  

On rarified occasions, in an auditorium, drama achieves that pinnacle of insight and cultural healing.  But more often the drama is bawdy and common, played out on the street, a vaudeville stage or in the daily news. 

“The stoics wrote that the excellent king can walk through the streets unguarded.  Our contemporary Secret Service spends tens of millions of dollars every time the president and his retinue venture forth.  

“Mythologically, the money and the effort are spent not to protect the president’s fragile life – all our lives are fragile but to protect the body politic against the perception that his job is ceremonial, and that for all our attempts to invest it with real power – the Monroe Doctrine, the war powers act, the “button” – there’s no one there but us.

“Our Defense Department (sic) exists neither to ‘maintain our place in the world’ nor to ‘provide security against external threats.’  It exists because we are willing to squander all – wealth, youth, life, peace, honor, everything – to defend ourselves against feelings of our own worthlessness, our own powerlessness.”

What to the Christian mystics is the Trinity, to the German philosophers was thesis, antithesis, synthesis and to playwrights and poets from the dawn of time has been the 3-act structure; the “Rule of Three” as an axiom of psychology and communications provides clarity and order to simplify decision making, to navigate life.  

Given conflict, act 3 moves us into climax and resolution.  The hero finds within themself the will and strength to continue.  What Sophocles called the tragic flaw, Shakespeare termed “this mortal coil,” Nietzsche saw an absurd void, while Mamet writes of “our own worthlessness, our own powerlessness.”  Such is our conflict.  But reason cannot resolve this.

“The purpose of theatre, like magic, like religion…is to inspire a cleansing awe….Most great drama is about betrayal of one sort or another.  A play is about rather terrible things happening to people who are as nice or not as nice as we ourselves are.  

“But reason, as we see in our lives, is employed one thousand times as rationale for the one time it may be used to further understanding.  And the cleansing lesson of the drama is, at its highest, the worthlessness of reason.  In great drama we see this lesson learned by the hero.  More important, we undergo the lesson ourselves, as we have our expectations raised only to be dashed, as we find that we have suggested to ourselves the wrong conclusion and that, stripped of our intellectual arrogance, we must acknowledge our sinful, weak, impotent state – and that, having acknowledged it, we may find peace.”

If reason wants to reduce life to an either/or, the dramatist knows that life is a both/and proposition: the apex was reached in the perfect balance between Apollonian order and Dionysian ecstasy.  Nietzsche argued that it was art that allowed humans to overcome the absurdity, and so too Mamet:

“It is our nature to elaborate perception into hypotheses and then reduce those hypotheses to information upon which we can act.  It is our special adaptive device, equivalent to the bird’s flight – our unique survival tool.  And drama, music, and art are our celebration of that tool, exactly like the woodcock’s manic courting flight, the whale’s breaching leap.  The excess of ability/energy/skill/ strength/love is expressed in species-specific ways.  In goats it is leaping, in humans it is making art.”

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Photo credit goes to Elena.