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.The stage version retains the radio station conventions of the time, thedrama being partly enacted in front of microphones.The action intercutsbetween the studio, a lawyer s office and the World s Fair.The voice of achain-letter mixing promises and threats is intercut with that of asoapbox speaker analysing national decline, an elevator operator whosestaccato statements offer an ironic commentary on the action, and anewspaperman truth-teller and myth-maker combined.In effect he stagesa debate about an America which is scarcely less fictional than the characterswho implicitly define it.As the soapbox speaker remarks, Where is America?I say it does not exist.And I say that it never existed.It was all but a myth.Agreat dream of avarice.The dream of a Gentleman Farmer. 40 The Fairitself is a fiction, a myth of American progress which, like the othercompeting myths in the play, emphasises the evident need for story. 188C.W.E.BigsbyThere is an irony, however, unstated but present.The company whichpresents this radio drama is itself a part of the commercial world which itindicts.Indeed a companion piece, Mr Happiness, added to the Broadwayproduction, features a radio agony aunt, close kin to Nathanael West s MissLonelyhearts, who, following an apparently sincere and humane programmeof advice to the lovelorn and the suffering, most of whom are trying toabsolve themselves of responsibility for their lives, ends up with a sales pitchfor his book.Mamet wrote Lakeboat in 1970.It was a decade before it was staged.Itis a cross between an early O Neill sea play and a series of sketches fromChicago s Second City.A play in twenty-eight scenes, it offers an impressiveaccount of shipboard life on a Great Lakes boat as seen through a series ofconversations.These slowly create a portrait of the private lives of those forwhom the society of the ship becomes an image of a wider world.Thelanguage is frequently banal or self-cancelling.Thus one sailor, whose job itis to make sandwiches, remarks that I don t want to make these sandwiches.Not that I mind it.I just fucking hate making sandwiches. 41 When a crewmember fails to turn up one of the characters insists that he knew him but Not overly well. By the end he is asserting that he knew him very well.very well.Another sailor denounces the missing man as a gamblingdegenerate while celebrating the purity of the racetrack.A former cook isdescribed as not married by a man who thirty seconds later insists that he isor has been.Their language is by turns bathetic and obscene the Mafiabeing a very property-oriented group and women soft things with a hole inthe middle.But beneath the male camaraderie and pointless banter isanother world.Slowly we learn that one sailor is divorced, while another,who has a blind mother and a father killed by drink, is himself suffering painswhich lead him to consider suicide, admissions which ring no response fromhis colleagues.They are more interested in the fantasies they elaborate fromthe movies or the dramas which they invent for themselves.When notdeveloping their sexual fantasies they construct a story to account for themissing member of their crew.In the course of the play he becomes in turn aderelict gambler robbed by a prostitute, a high-spending gambler attacked bythe Mafia and a man who has to be silenced by the FBI.He is injured or, morelikely, killed.There is no evi dence for any of this.The reductive truth is thathe had overslept and missed the sailing.The fictions which they elaborate,and which they subsequently abandon without regret, are their protectionagainst boredom.Like Beckett s tramps they pass the time by talking.Mamet s plays tend to be predominantly male.There are no women inLakeboat, as there are none in Duck Variations, American Buffalo, A Life in the 189David Mamet: all true storiesTheatre or Glengarry Glen Ross [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.The stage version retains the radio station conventions of the time, thedrama being partly enacted in front of microphones.The action intercutsbetween the studio, a lawyer s office and the World s Fair.The voice of achain-letter mixing promises and threats is intercut with that of asoapbox speaker analysing national decline, an elevator operator whosestaccato statements offer an ironic commentary on the action, and anewspaperman truth-teller and myth-maker combined.In effect he stagesa debate about an America which is scarcely less fictional than the characterswho implicitly define it.As the soapbox speaker remarks, Where is America?I say it does not exist.And I say that it never existed.It was all but a myth.Agreat dream of avarice.The dream of a Gentleman Farmer. 40 The Fairitself is a fiction, a myth of American progress which, like the othercompeting myths in the play, emphasises the evident need for story. 188C.W.E.BigsbyThere is an irony, however, unstated but present.The company whichpresents this radio drama is itself a part of the commercial world which itindicts.Indeed a companion piece, Mr Happiness, added to the Broadwayproduction, features a radio agony aunt, close kin to Nathanael West s MissLonelyhearts, who, following an apparently sincere and humane programmeof advice to the lovelorn and the suffering, most of whom are trying toabsolve themselves of responsibility for their lives, ends up with a sales pitchfor his book.Mamet wrote Lakeboat in 1970.It was a decade before it was staged.Itis a cross between an early O Neill sea play and a series of sketches fromChicago s Second City.A play in twenty-eight scenes, it offers an impressiveaccount of shipboard life on a Great Lakes boat as seen through a series ofconversations.These slowly create a portrait of the private lives of those forwhom the society of the ship becomes an image of a wider world.Thelanguage is frequently banal or self-cancelling.Thus one sailor, whose job itis to make sandwiches, remarks that I don t want to make these sandwiches.Not that I mind it.I just fucking hate making sandwiches. 41 When a crewmember fails to turn up one of the characters insists that he knew him but Not overly well. By the end he is asserting that he knew him very well.very well.Another sailor denounces the missing man as a gamblingdegenerate while celebrating the purity of the racetrack.A former cook isdescribed as not married by a man who thirty seconds later insists that he isor has been.Their language is by turns bathetic and obscene the Mafiabeing a very property-oriented group and women soft things with a hole inthe middle.But beneath the male camaraderie and pointless banter isanother world.Slowly we learn that one sailor is divorced, while another,who has a blind mother and a father killed by drink, is himself suffering painswhich lead him to consider suicide, admissions which ring no response fromhis colleagues.They are more interested in the fantasies they elaborate fromthe movies or the dramas which they invent for themselves.When notdeveloping their sexual fantasies they construct a story to account for themissing member of their crew.In the course of the play he becomes in turn aderelict gambler robbed by a prostitute, a high-spending gambler attacked bythe Mafia and a man who has to be silenced by the FBI.He is injured or, morelikely, killed.There is no evi dence for any of this.The reductive truth is thathe had overslept and missed the sailing.The fictions which they elaborate,and which they subsequently abandon without regret, are their protectionagainst boredom.Like Beckett s tramps they pass the time by talking.Mamet s plays tend to be predominantly male.There are no women inLakeboat, as there are none in Duck Variations, American Buffalo, A Life in the 189David Mamet: all true storiesTheatre or Glengarry Glen Ross [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]