Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama [Paperback]

David Mamet (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 037570423X | ISBN-13: 978-0375704239 | Publication Date: June 13, 2000 | Edition: 1st Vintage Books ed

The purpose of theater, like magic like religion…ids to inspire cleansing awe. With bracing directness and aphoristic authority, one of our greatest living playwrights addresses the questions: What makes good drama? And why does drama matter in an age that is awash in information and entertainment? David Mamet believes that the tendency to dramatize is essential to human nature, that we create drama out of everything from today’s weather to next year’s elections. But the highest expression of this drive remains the theater.
         With a cultural range that encompasses Shakespeare, Bretcht, and Ibsen, Death of a Salesman and Bad Day at Black Rock, Mamet shows us how to distinguish true drama from its false variants. He considers the impossibly difficult progression between one act and the next and the mysterious function of the soliloquy. The result, in Three Uses of the Knife, is an electrifying treatise on the playwright’s art that is also a strikingly original work of moral and aesthetic philosophy. 

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Playwright David Mamet's three lectures at Columbia University are ostensibly about issues of dramatic structure, but as they unfold, and Mamet continually explores the relationship between dramatic structure and the lives we live, much broader concerns are revealed. Here, for example, is Mamet on political propaganda:

It is ... essential to the healthy political campaign that the issues be largely or perhaps totally symbolic--i.e., non-quantifiable. Peace With Honor, Communists in the State Department, Supply Side Economics, Recapture the Dream, Bring Back the Pride--these are the stuff of pageant. They are not social goals; they are, as Alfred Hitchcock told us, the MacGuffin.... The less specific the qualities of the MacGuffin are, the more interested the audience will be.... A loose abstraction allows audience members to project their own desires onto an essentially featureless goal.

Although occasionally academic, the overall tone of the lectures is consistent with Mamet's no-nonsense manner of speech. He has no time for obfuscation and little time for repetition, save when he must absolutely employ it for emphasis. He is passionate about good theater, and passionate about the truth. 3 Uses of the Knife makes an excellent companion piece to his True and False, which addressed similar philosophical matters in the form of advice on the actor's craft. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

One of America's leading living playwrights has crafted three short essays beginning with the premise that it is "our nature to dramatize." The belief in the centrality of drama to our daily lives and the centrality of our daily lives to good drama is the recurrent theme of his ruminations here. While he disdains the current vogue for "problem plays," he avoids attacking any of his contemporaries or their works. And without offering a how-to guide for aspiring playwrights, he provides some interesting thoughts on the inevitable difficulty in creating a convincing second act. Known and respected for his ability to create hyperrealistic dialog, Mamet ultimately reveals the theoretical justification for the sort of drama he writes so well. The text reads a bit like a lecture and never quite convinces the reader that this is a fundamental redefinition of drama. Still, it will be compelling to students of theater and serves as a good companion to Mamet's advice to actors, True and False (LJ 10/1/97). Recommended for academic and large public libraries.?Douglas McClemont, New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books ed edition (June 13, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037570423X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375704239
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.2 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,781 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #83 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Drama > British & Irish

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Like Mamet... Even if he is Unbelievably Opinionated, December 15, 2001

By 

Thor Vader "Herr Director" (Beverly Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama (Paperback)

I think that this book follows Mamet's M.O. to a tee - It is very erudite, yet I find myself laughing. His writing is very thought provoking in this essay on using your writing to convey meaning. It is not his best book, but it is certainly worthy of the 1 hour it takes to read.

I think this book, as other Mamet books, benefits by his ironclad belief that there is one way to do things. He may actually argue that his POV is not consistent with my last sentence, but he is such an ornery S.O.B., that it is simply a pleasure to listen to him go off on his tirades and tangents.

Will this book allow you to write better? - Maybe. Will this book thoroughly entertain you and enlighten you with Mamet's POV on the issue? - Absolutely. It reads almost like fiction.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Neo-Aristotelianism, May 6, 2009

By 

Kevin L. Nenstiel "omnivore" (Kearney, Nebraska) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama (Paperback)

Mamet explicates a compelling theory of drama that links the fine and liberal arts with multifarious forms of American religion and social experience. Though he falters into occasionally harsh prescriptivism, he offers a look at one way American dramatists can and do communicate their world to an audience--and, in many ways, how they communicate the audience's own world as well.

At the heart of Mamet's theory is his claim that all of us make drama out of the ordinary matter of our lives. The dramatist simply takes that hunger and constructs a public spectacle around it. This spectacle raises us up as human beings, and purges the emotions we harbor but which are unacceptable in our modern era. Theatre, in other words, retains its Aristotelian purpose in cleansing the soul.

But Mamet broadens the scope of drama, away from stately tragedy and into more humane territory. As he says, "a play is not about nice things happening to nice people. A play is about rather terrible things happening to people who are as nice or not nice as we ourselves are." In other words, though theatre still requires that characters have their hard-won pretenses stripped away, it is not only kings who must lose everything.

From this it's a short step to Mamet's assertion that "the purpose of art is not to change but to delight. I don't think its purpose is to enlighten us. I don't think it's to change us. I don't think it's to teach us." This is especially good advice for young writers who have been coached by public school English courses to see literature as a manifesto to be decoded. Too many young writers think their work will transform society and remake us as better people. In the name of enlightenment they inflict on audiences the dreariest dumbbell harangues mankind can imagine.

No, much better to delight first. But for theatre to have Mamet's holy purification role, we must broaden the definition of "delight" to encompass the whole range of human emotion, uplifting or otherwise. The role of art is to make us feel deeply, not think correctly. And if, in performing the former, it accomplishes the latter, so much the better, but reversing the order will create sterile, unengaging work.

Mamet's theory is based on his own works, and the goals he sets for his own writing. Therefore, easy as it is to agree with his statements about the audience, the problem play, or the MacGuffin, it's tough sledding when he says that we CAN'T commit acts he considers errors. Plainly we can, since Clifford Odets' agit-prop plays still get produced, and plays that most disdain the audience are often the ones with the biggest endowments. Yet for those who aim for Mamet's scale of accomplishment, this theory is a confident place from which we can begin our own creative process.

In a few places Mamet pitches high and outside. His claim that the forced monologue he disparages as "The Death of My Kitten" interferes with the audience's reception of the play is tough to stomach. There are reasons why we don't want to sit though maudlin accounts of old news, but Mamet says: "If we are to identify with the Hero, which is to say, to see her story as our own, she can have had no `state' before the beginning of the story."

This is palpable nonsense, and surely Mamet himself doesn't believe that. If he did, why bother mentioning Shelly's daughter in Glengarry Glen Ross? Or John's mortgage and tenure troubles in Oleanna? If we are to claim the Hero as ourselves, she must have a state, even if a dull disquisition isn't the way to illuminate it.

Similarly, his round condemnation of American musicals, packed flippantly in with his excoriation of "problem plays," doesn't fit squarely. It's true that musicals are often plot-driven and suffer with timid characters and pat endings. This is incompatible with what Mamet sees as the purpose and origin of drama, but it doesn't mean all musicals are equal or that they are a blight on the theatre. It simply means that they subscribe to a different dramaturgical theory.

But for all his high-handed pietism, Mamet offers a compelling theory of American drama in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries. His vision, though perhaps tinted by his own work, at root makes contemporary the theories that have guided drama since time out of mind. In an age when much writing drifts listlessly, with neither audience nor intention visible to the naked eye, Mamet offers badly needed direction, and hope that writers can be about something in the tricky modern world.

24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Arrogant over-simplifications, April 30, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama (Paperback)

It's rare that I regret buying a book, but I'm not happy that I spent money on this one.

I don't argue that Mamet is a good playwright. Glengarry Glen Ross is brilliant, and American Buffalo isn't too bad, either. But reading this book makes me wish Mamet would stick to playwriting and not impose his narrow ideas on others.

Essentially, the book oversimplifies matters in astonishing ways. For instance, Mamet dismisses the American musical out of hand. Many successful playwrights cringe at the thought of watching The Music Man or Kiss Me Kate one more time, but does his comment apply to more intense productions like Cabaret? That's a major distinction that Mamet fails to make, and it's not the only one. Also, lumping together all political theater as an automatic failure, and excusing Brecht from the rest by claiming that Brecht didn't know what he was talking about when he called his own theater political? The logic escapes me.

As far as Mamet's self-aggrandizement goes-- well, I can't say I didn't know it was coming. But that he lets it interfere with the construction of solid arguments is troublesome. For a book on how to construct or read a play, look at Louis Catron's book, or even go back to Stanislavski or Chekhov. They will be much more helpful to the working writer.