The Hamilton buzz came with distasteful notes of official propriety, the same dead respectability carried by such names as “Barack Obama” and “The New York Times” and “NPR”. Indeed, in my own California neighborhood, a continent away from Broadway, I was beginning to see grey-haired liberal ladies carrying Hamilton tote bags. That the play was supposedly a mashup of the American Founding and hip-hop threatened to spoil both the American Founding and hip-hop for me.

And then, one morning late in 2016, I woke to find songs from Hamilton coming from my own stereo — the official cast recording of Hamilton had become urgently popular among American 10-year-olds, and my oldest child was 10 at the time. The final barrier between me and musical theater had been breached. But I couldn’t disdain those songs as I may have wanted to, since my daughter loved them so much, and since she and her friends were singing and rapping along to them with such charming exuberance. And since, well, some of those songs, some of that Broadway hip-hop, I had to admit I kind of liked. They were like… songs, pretty good songs. There was, for example, the winning Beatles bounce of “Washington on Your Side”, and the ingenious, absurdly infectious rhythms of “Wait for It”.

What really broke my resistance, though, was Hamilton’s hip-hop side. Now, a musical about America’s first secretary of the treasury is obviously miles away, in sensibility and setting and street cred, from what is generally considered hip-hop, which was fine because so am I. What of hip-hop Hamilton does have — rapid-fire rhymes and expert word-play — it has in abundance. I can only imagine how much fun it would be to deliver such lines from a stage. What I do know is it’s consistently a kick to hear them.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2020, though, when Disney Plus released a filmed version of a 2016 stage production of Hamilton, that I saw the play as a single work of musical theater, start to finish. And my official critical assessment of Hamilton would be that, dramatically or narratively, it is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. Still, those parts are pretty great. And the individual scenes built from the dozens of fun songs, the countless witty lines and clever couplets, create their own cumulative pleasure that more than compensates for the narrative flimsiness. (This may be how musical theater works in general. I wouldn’t know.)

By then the play’s public reputation, which had been in flux for several years, was in something like a crisis. Initially, back in 2015 and 2016, it had been an object of fervent public adulation among people with real power, including Obama. Its standing was so exalted that the play’s cast felt entitled to direct a pointed, critical plea at the Vice President-elect of the United States, Mike Pence, when he and his wife attended a Hamilton performance shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory. Speaking for the entire cast after the show, one actor addressed Pence directly, expressing anxiety that “your new administration will not protect us” — the “diverse America” the mostly black cast took itself to represent — “or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights”. He went on to express “hope” that Pence would be “inspired” by Hamilton “to uphold our American values”. In its melding of patriotic boilerplate and the language of Obama liberalism, this was a very Hamilton sort of message. (In retrospect, Trump’s whining response — saying the cast had “harassed” Pence and violated the “safe place” of the theater — reads as a weirdly literal omen of how New Right Machiavels like Chris Rufo and Stephen Miller would take up the campus Left’s weepy pretexts for punishing wrong-think when the chance arose.)

Suggested Reading

Our future is AI serfdom

By B. Duncan Moench

But by the time I finally watched Hamilton on Disney Plus, not quite four years later, America was two months into the “racial reckoning” incited by the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. An unprecedented moral pageantry of protest and public kneeling and rote apologies had just been underwritten by the strange but effective teamwork of multinational corporations and urban rioters. The play’s affirming take on the American Founding, with its multicultural casting and its fond portrayal of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, had been a perfect sendoff for the Obama years, but it didn’t fit so well with this puritanical moment. Openly conjuring the Founding Fathers so as to adulate the nation they wrought was the sort of thing that could get you cancelled — and indeed, the hashtag #cancelhamilton was briefly a thing on Twitter. Miranda was accordingly scolded by Harvard students and lectured by Columbia lecturers. The 2020 backlash was not huge, but it was big enough that Miranda embarked on a minor apology tour that summer, in which he absorbed without complaint every bit of criticism that came his way and, of course, promised to do better.

In fact, a small number of people had been finding Hamilton problematic more or less from the beginning, and for reasons of simple historical fact that are pretty sound. For example, shortly after the show began its massive run at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway, in August 2015, the black novelist Ishmael Reed wrote a long and (characteristically) angry essay pointing out the historical errors and evasions that enable both Miranda and Ron Chernow, author of the bestselling Alexander Hamilton biography on which the play is based, to portray Hamilton as an early abolitionist. Hamilton does indeed seem to have disliked slavery and looked forward to its dissolution, and he was close friends with abolitionist dreamer John Laurens, and he was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society, which advocated the voluntary freeing of slaves by slaveowners. But, as Reed and others have pointed out, he married into a slave-owning family, seems to have owned slaves himself, brokered the sale of other slaves, and represented slave-owners in his capacity as a lawyer. Hamilton disliked slavery, but not enough to take a stand against it in his personal and professional life.

In his biography, Chernow deals with these inconvenient facts by laboring to discover a sort of heroic ambivalence in Hamilton’s heart for which, in the documentary record, evidence is scarce. Miranda deals with them by briefly, glancingly, playing up Hamilton’s anti-slavery side and otherwise rushing past the whole topic. In a cabinet debate over government debt, Hamilton mocks the Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson: “A civics lesson from a slaver. Hey neighbor/Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor.” And earlier, in the rousing anthem “My Shot”, Hamilton identifies himself and his fellow rebellious New Yorkers, and Laurens, as “A bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists”. The couplet’s second line — which clinches a killer bit of wordplay — is heading elsewhere in a hurry: “Give me a position, show me where the ammunition is.”

For Hamilton’s harshest critics, though, invoking the play’s historical evasions and exaggerations is merely a way of prosecuting a deeper case against it. Miranda’s undergrad critic from Harvard accuses him of “blindly ask[ing] BIPOC performers to act in a piece detailing historical events benefiting their oppressors”. (That “blindly” is a very undergrad touch. The notion that contemporary actors are being oppressed by men from the 18th century nicely illustrates the collapsed version of historical time that operates in the minds of certain progressive commentators on race in America.) For Ishmael Reed, Hamilton’s historical characters are so fundamentally defined by their involvement in slavery that it should blot out all other ways of talking about these men.

In other words, it’s the implicit optimism of the play that is unacceptable to these critics. Historical details about Hamilton merely confirm this prior conviction. In the event that someone like Miranda stirs up a hopeful mood about America, a battalion of academic historians stands on call to provide these details, with angry writers ready to send them through their megaphones. Cornily, Miranda grants American Founder Alexander Hamilton the liberal honor of being an “immigrant”, because he came from a different part of the British Empire, and he lets the word “abolitionist” hang in the air like a sort of Kantian cologne for Hamilton and his revolutionary friends to pass through and bear the smell of for the rest of the play. And then the historians and professional pessimists step in to say: Wrong! Racism! Slavery!

But many of Hamilton’s admirers already knew it was wrong, or at least a happy distortion of a darker history. The play’s most famous and powerful admirer, Obama, was surely not duped into beliefs contrary to the historical record after seeing it, formed as he was by the more radical traditions of black thought and black struggle. But I imagine that, as president of the country whose founding was being portrayed in that delightful and hugely successful musical, Obama welcomed the opportunity to indulge the happy distortion for as long as the inertial forces of public discourse would allow. I imagine him thinking, “It’s healthy and useful to think about it this way for a while. No doubt we’ll have to go back to thinking about it the other way at some point.”

That is, the warm reception given to Hamilton by influential and historically savvy people like Obama, and indeed the writing of the play by the Puerto Rican phenom Miranda, are examples of what Benedict Anderson calls “memory and forgetting” in Imagined Communities, his great book on the origins and moral logic of nationalism. Since nation states were typically put together and solidified through enormous violence, often fueled by ethnic or racial hostility, they bear these injuries and outrages as undeniable facts of their national histories. But — unlike the multinational agglomerations known as empires — the nation state carries a civic and communal promise, in its very form, to all those contained within its borders, including those who were gathered in and politically domesticated through conquest and violence: “You are members of this national community, brothers in nationhood.” Because this promise and this history are radically at odds with each other, those who generate the legitimating stories of these nations are forced into an almost comically impossible task. They can’t simply engage in perpetual remembering of the formative outrages, since this contradicts the unifying conceit of nationhood and threatens to undo this work of unifying and legitimating. But they can’t simply forget these outrages since they’re too well-remembered, especially by the groups whose ancestors bore this formative violence, and they remain communally important for those groups. And so the nation’s legitimating stories, and everyone who imbibes them in moments of national affirmation, do both. They forget and remember at the same time, or they forget and then later they remember, or vice versa.

Anderson’s great example comes from his own people, the English, whose founding hero arrived from a different country and indeed bears this alienness in his name: William the Conqueror. But the name is rendered blurry in national myth, so that one can imagine William, touched with some primordial Englishness back in France, conquering not England but someone else on England’s behalf. As Anderson writes, the sobriquet “‘the Conqueror’ operates as [a] kind of ellipses… to remind one of something which it is immediately obligatory to forget”.

“The American national myth,” I wrote in that earlier article, “reflects an even more vigorous effort of memory and forgetting, in which… the enslavement of Africans serves as mere prelude to their emancipation into civic brotherhood.” Yes, the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of black people was a founding fact of American history, but so was their eventual, inevitable emancipation into membership in this great nation, thanks to the elevated sentiment and noble political philosophy of founding Americans like Hamilton. Yes, our greatest Founding Father George Washington owned slaves at Mount Vernon, but, in an almost perfect working-out of this mythic logic of founding and emancipation, he also freed those slaves when he died. It feels almost Christ-like in the national telling, as if Washington died in order to free his slaves. This is how it works.

More from this author

How DEI killed the race debate

By Matt Feeney

Critics accused Miranda of ignoring or downplaying slavery in Hamilton, of forgetting it if you will. This was true, sort of. He definitely didn’t dwell on it — except that, in the small matter of casting his play almost entirely with descendants of its victims, and having them perform in a musical style invented by other such descendants, he was very much remembering American slavery. The play wasn’t about slavery in its text, but in the subtext or metatext of its casting and music, it was about slavery quite powerfully, and quite obviously. In this way, Hamilton is one of America’s most pointed and elegant and self-aware achievements in memory and forgetting.

Of course, this is what its critics dislike about it. The funny practice of memory and forgetting, even if it contains ample portions of regret and self-critique, generally sustains the national myth and thus serves the national project. Otherwise, it would just be memory, bitter remembering as perpetual critique, cynical rebuke to the claim of belonging. (You might say that America’s racial pessimists are “all memory”, in which case Trump, who recently complained that America’s national museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was”, would accurately be described as “all forgetting”.)

And, of course, this balance of symbolic influences, along with those songs and that quasi-hip-hop wordplay, was another reason why I liked that corny musical when my daughter started playing it on my stereo. It felt like a healthy antidote to the dominant way of thinking about race in America at the time — the post-Ferguson years when activists had turned their flamboyant pessimism into an ongoing business, latching onto ambiguous individual tragedies as iron confirmation of a sort of paranoid metaphysics of racist oppression. It’s a convenient and profitable circularity, in which murky events, interpreted according to those invidious assumptions, are pointed to as proving those assumptions. In casting the American Founders in his hip-hop musical with black actors, Hamilton conveyed that adopting such blanket convictions about America’s “structural” and “systematic” — and thus permanent, unchanging, and inexpugnable — racial guilt was a political choice, and that other choices were available. There were other ways for black Americans to look at and inhabit their country.

And these ways are better. It’s not that the stance of pessimism and stubborn aggrievement has nothing behind it. This attitude must be especially hard to shake for a satirical writer like Reed. The satirist’s state of inflamed skepticism has an easy foil in America, with its vanity and vaulting ideals, on one hand, and its much less ideal history and sometimes ridiculous present, on the other. The satirical novelist looks upon such a nation and sees nothing redeemable, only a rich cast of targets — everyone appearing a clownish agent of racist evil or patriotic delusion or both. This harsh outlook serves the satirist, as it serves the activist with her hands out for the philanthropy of racial guilt, but it’s hard to imagine that it serves the material interests of everyday black people.

I’ll give an example of what I mean. At a middle school I’ve visited for my children’s football matches, a school in the poor and violent “Deep East” of my town Oakland, an exterior wall is adorned with a quotation. The quotation — an official message or motto of the school itself, though it’s spray-painted in a graffiti-style script — is from Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, who said: “Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lies advertised around them.” This is the perverse endpoint of racial cynicism, a middle school’s leadership sending a hopeless message about school itself to their impressionable students — many of them restless boys who, like me at that age, are already looking for reasons to shed the burdens of school and to avoid caring about anything but themselves.

The pedagogical and political wisdom of Hamilton lay in rejecting this dispiriting attitude while allowing the history behind it to function as musical suggestion and visible specter. It took the material Reed turns into bitter satire and made something much less bitter of it. In doing so it revealed that, despite the cynicism dominant in commentary about America by high-status black figures, most black Americans would prefer to inhabit their country uncynically, at least some of the time. They loved Hamilton as much as everyone else. The black Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed was one of the scholars who felt compelled to remind everyone that Hamilton was less of an abolitionist than Miranda implied, and yet she also loved Hamilton. “Evidently,” she wrote in 2016, “many of us enjoy feeling good about America.” “It makes perfect sense,” she went on, that people would want “to celebrate” as well as “to complicate” their national story. It makes perfect sense that black Americans — like everyone else who seeks a citizen’s spiritual home in a flawed nation — would find it worthwhile to forget sometimes, even as they remember.

To mark the release of his memoir, Everywhere an Oink Oink, Florence Read spoke to Mamet about the death of storytelling, antisemitism in America and his zeal for Donald Trump. Here is a selection of his comments.

ON THEATRE:

In addition to having a Director, they have a Managing Director, and the Director is now called the Artistic Director. What was he before, if it wasn’t artistic? […] The theatre is not only dead, it stinks. […] It’s “culture”, right? Nobody likes culture. It’s nonsense. Now we have political commissars who say, in addition to the Artistic Director, in addition to the Managing Director, we have to have a Director of Diversity, who’s on top of everything. And we’re all going to pay attention to this person who tells us, you don’t have enough black women in the play, or you don’t have enough trans people. Whether you’re black, or trans, or gay, you have the right to hear a story. If somebody’s not telling you a story, then that theatre stinks.

ON AUDIENCES:

Broadway had a huge audience that was largely middle class and Jewish. And they were people who worked and lived in the city. So the only plays that were put on were those that reflected their experience. They only endorsed the plays that reflected their experience. But all those people have moved away. There is no more audience in New York. So who comes? People from out of town. So the two things that they can see are either trash or filth. They can see pageants. I don’t want to go to Disneyland to see a thoughtful roller coaster. Right? I want to go to Disneyland for a thrill. So New York is now Disneyland. I don’t want to see a play which is thought provoking. What the hell do I care? I want to have either a thrill or a dog-treat. And the dog-treat is diversity. Please, tell me I’m not a racist. I’m not a transphobe. These people are shaking the audience down.

Suggested reading

The self-delusion of secular Jews

By David Mamet

ON CRITICS:

Critics have always been a bunch of brainless whores.

The national press is completely co-opted — it’s Pravda. It’s absolutely Pravda. No one’s going to put on a play that’s not going to be approved by the press. And the press is there to approve the play. Right? What they’re doing is the equivalent of the Stalinist plays “Me and My Tractor”. One doesn’t have to worry about criticism, because nobody is going to put on a play which is not going to get a good review. And so what happens is the people on the Left enjoy having differences about minor points of doctrine. Because that makes them feel that they’re intellectually independent.

ON POLITICS:

In America, there’s no such thing as an independent voter. An independent voter is a liberal speech defect.

Western culture is completely bifurcated. What’s happening now is that the conservative side has said, “wait a second, what’s wrong with the Judeo-Christian ethic? What’s wrong with the laws? What’s wrong with judging people?” Martin Luther King said he had a dream that people would be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin. It was his dream and that dream came true to the largest extent. And then the wokists came in and said “no, we must judge people by the colour of their skin”. And the conservatives said, “you know what, I’d rather vote with Dr King”. The conservatives are done with the Left. We’re not looking for anything from the Left because there’s nothing there.

ON CANCEL CULTURE:

It’s called fascism. It’s my way or the highway. And cowardice is contagious, because we’re herd creatures. […] So if everyone is saying “Jesus Christ, x, y, or z might limit my ability to get ahead, I’m gonna hold my tongue”, we start limiting the things we can say. And then because we don’t want to feel like hypocrites, we start limiting the things we think.

Relationships are broken off in Hollywood, people lose your number. Your manager, your agent, they just go away. That’s unfortunate. Hollywood is dead.

Suggested reading

Will Hollywood strike back?

By David Mamet

ON HOLLYWOOD:

It’s a phoney-baloney business. The movies have always been about putting images up on a bedsheet and selling popcorn. Right? The whole idea that there’s any sagacity in the movies is nonsense. There were a few magnificent works of art made in a hundred years, a whole bunch of really good movies and a lot of crap.

ON FILM SCHOOL:

Film school is warehousing. You learn nothing in film school. The only thing it fits you to do is to be an executive. Which is to say somebody who doesn’t know anything, hoping rather than to make a good movie to get the job that some other executive has. Because that’s what bureaucrats do.

ON ISRAEL:

If Hamas had not been voted in, Gaza would be the richest city in the world. It would be Singapore. What are the Jews doing to Gaza? Nothing. They said, take it. PS, they said, if you need medical help come across the border. PS, if you guys are gay, go to Tel Aviv, we’ll welcome you. We aren’t going to kill you, we’re glad to have your business. Gaza is at the end of the Mediterranean, and it’s right off the Suez Canal. It’s the most valuable real estate in the world. And they want to kill the Jews. It doesn’t make sense. The Jews are, and have always been, so happy to say: “For God’s sake, let’s be partners.” […] The most diverse country in the world is Israel. And they want to kill it. Because it works. The answer is “from the river to the sea”. You all have to die.

ON JUDAISM IN AMERICA:

We were second-class citizens. We always existed at the mercy of the country. […] So our answer was always to work harder. […] We had to figure out a way to do the thing that nobody wanted to do, because that was the only thing that was left. A good example is family law. And a good example is the movies. Jews have always been outsiders. What always happens, going back to the fall of Jerusalem, is that when things get tough, people turn on the Jews. It’s the equivalent of kicking the cat or screaming at the secretary.

I don’t see the Jewish culture anymore. People got into the habit of going to the temple the same way they went to the dentist. […] Go to an evangelical church, or go to a black Baptist church. Those people are praying to God ecstatically and with their whole hearts. So when you go back to these assimilated Jewish synagogues, it’s like taking a bath with your socks on and no water. They’ve got so effing woke. We don’t need some rabbi to tell us to be kind to black people.

ON DONALD TRUMP:

Trump was the best president since Abraham Lincoln. […] He brought peace to the Middle East. He closed the border. He made us an energy exporter. He had the best rating among African Americans of any president ever. And the country was at peace and prosperous in the world. All of a sudden, he gets kicked out. And the world is a mess. But because the liberals cannot defend their position, all they can do is indict Trump. He’s not generating anger. He’s talking to reason.

He’s got a big mouth, so do I. The question is, who do you like in a fair fight with your back to the wall? Who would you rather have: Joe Biden, who’s a senile old bag-man, or Donald Trump, who’s a scrapper and loves his country.

Suggested reading

The naked persecution of Donald Trump

By David Mamet

ON FREE SPEECH:

I don’t think any speech should be banned. […] And it’s my right to make up my mind about what you say. […] The question is, who gets to say what counts as hate speech? That’s where the power is. […] The most terrible thing in the world was the idea that there were certain crimes which are hate crimes. The question is not what did the person do, but what do we think about their motives in regard to certain societal norms which we have today. There’s no such thing as a love crime. All crimes are hate crimes, right?

If you gave me all the fame and power, it’s still poison, it’s tainted. In return for what? In return for my conscience, in return for my soul, in return for whatever it has pleased God to give me as a gift for making up stories. I say thank you. I’ll play these.

What was her objective? We actually don’t know. She seems to be enjoying toying with the notion of loss. And we may enjoy her antics, as they are part of a series of serio-comic sketches. The Cherry Orchard does not have a plot.

Death of a Salesman is a series of sketches on a theme equating regret with loss. What is Willie Loman’s problem? He is not a very good salesman. Arthur Miller wrote of De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves that it was as if someone had photographed the human soul. But, for all its worth, one cannot say the same of Death of a Salesman. We come away having seen a play about The Other (with the exception of the scenes with Biff). This Other’s problem is that he’s a bad salesman, and we may, if we like, feel sorry for his state. But which of us actually has sympathy for another’s problems? (Part of the attraction of the Problem, Illness, or Diversity play is its invitation to convince ourselves that we do.)

The southern writer can present his regional emotionality as a party turn (Thomas Wolfe), or it may be the genius outpourings of an actual tortured soul, like William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. Mark Twain wrote that Ivanhoe was the book which ruined the South. This most famous of knightly tales grew out of the romances of the Jongleurs, Lancelot, Roland, and their mélange by Walter Scott into his creation of The Lost Cause. His was the eradication of Scottish Culture in the defeat of the Stuarts. The Southerners (Scots-Irish in the main) grafted that tragedy onto their own.

When Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in Mississippi, many veterans of the civil war were still alive. His parents’ generation all suffered under Reconstruction. They, additionally, were descended from Huguenots, French Protestants exiled in the 17th century; and, to conclude the entertainment, he was — for that time necessarily — a closeted gay man. And a poet.

More from this author

Race is a delusion

By David Mamet

In A Streetcar Named Desire, which debuted on Broadway 75 years ago this week, what does Blanche long for? An imaginary past. What is her particular problem? She longs for an imaginary past. And she’s a whore.

Do the events in the play amount to, or are they structured around, a plot? Not particularly. But the poet is pregnant of his cause, and we are the beneficiaries, moved, if I might, not by the tragedy of Blanche, but by that of Tennessee.

Freud wrote that music is polymorphous perversity, which I understand to mean it moves us through the progression of notions which have no referent in logic: although the feeling they engender is exactly like that created by an enlightening syllogism.

The highest paid production staff in vaudeville were the Routiners, who would structure the evening’s seven acts into a whole emotionally similar to that of an actual drama: The opening production number, the duet, the rope-twirler, the slapstick clown, and so on, culminating in the headliner and the serio-comic act to send us on our way. That’s what Chekhov does in The Cherry Orchard.

Streetcar is less abstract. It is a melodrama. Here the characters are assigned qualities by which we may recognise them (white hat vs black hat; red nose indicating the drunk; ample form and high-flown speech, the Matron, flightiness, the Ingénue, and so on), given the theme of sexuality, and then allowed to play.

I never understood the plays of Eugene O’Neill. It was explained that his father was a drunk and his mother a dope fiend, and I began to understand his concerns; but I didn’t care, as the plays bored me.

More from this author

How fear consumed American theatre

By David Mamet

He paid his obeisance to that form no doubt taught by Professor Baker in his Harvard Drama course. But what did Professor Baker ever write? Nothing that I know of. But he had read a lot, and, no doubt, imparted his theories to O’Neill, who discharged the debt by the compliment of becoming academic.

Chekhov’s progenitors were the comics of the music hall, and the short stories he read and famously wrote. With the growth of wide-circulation magazines, the late-Victorian era created a grand market for the short-story writer, Chekhov and Tolstoy among them. Chekhov’s plays are, each, more similar to a collection of short stories with the same characters, than they are to conventional drama. He was creating — consciously or not — something which he had enjoyed, and practising it in a different form.

Tennessee’s forebears were The Romantic Poets, and he may be said to be the last of their line. There exist some few works about not the ineffableness, but about the agony of loss. Tragedy cleanses, as it affronts us with the human condition; which, here (as opposed to mere drama) we recognise unavoidably as our own. But no one feels sorry for either Othello or Desdemona. They are mechanical parts of a tragic progression. One would, as soon, be reduced to tears by Beethoven, and then feel sorry for the violin.

But we feel the loss of Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, and that of Frederic Henry at the death of Catherine in A Farewell to Arms. Does one feel sorry for Blanche? We may go as far as “too bad”, but that’s as far as we’ll go. Does one feel sorry for the author, a creature of Loss? I don’t think so, as he got to write a magnificent play, and to reap all the benefits on offer thereby.

Suggested reading

Bob Dylan has no philosophy

By Geoff Dyer

Streetcar, like The Sorrows of Young Werther, concerns a hero who is (one or both) just of too fine sensibilities to live in the world, or has a screw loose. But romanticism seems to be compounded of Love, Longing and Death, written by the non-artist we’re left with a love story, about a Jock who Cried.

Tennessee, by his own admission (to me) was addicted to rough trade — as if it required a ghost from the grave to tell us that. The addiction is an unquenchable longing for that imagined-as-male. Whether this is the male one feels he can never become, or him he can never have, is moot — one is not going to find this love in the arms of a whore, and, so, one is doomed to perpetual repetition, failure and loss.

Tennessee-as-Blanche imagines males with their clumsy, rough fingers, as raping, beer-swilling, poker-playing bowlers. She is, at once, the longing vessel and the professional — the rough-trade.

Gay drama in straight drag was taken up by Truman Capote 14 years later as the romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and two years earlier than Streetcar, in Noel Coward’s drama Brief Encounter. The first ends in a marriage possible as the couple is presented as heterosexual; the second, in a heart-rending abandonment of the affair as the couple (in underlying truth) are not.

At the end of Streetcar, Blanche goes nuts, which is neither a victory over her situation, or fate, nor an acceptance of her failure — it is a convenience allowing the play to end. The end of the play is the continuation of the Poker Game, or “men go on, amusing themselves with a male game not only in spite, but in ignorance, of the depth of women’s anguish”.

I beg pardon for the psycho-sexual dismemberment of a great play. Streetcar is dated, but at some point it will cease being dated.

The theatre, and tragedy particularly, offers a median between outright confession and conscious, rational (which is to say flawed or at least untrustworthy) understanding.

The tragedy is like the story around the campfire and, just like the joke, frees us from rational consideration. In listening, we are transported into another world. “Once upon a time”, just like “there were these two guys”, not only reassures but instantly bypasses our, necessary, quotidian concerns with our own position, well-being, and self-image.

In hearing these mystic incantations, we relax, because we know the story is not going to be about ourselves. Should we suspect, in our unprotected state, that we are actually listening to a cautionary tale (that is to say, to an advertisement), the spell is broken, and we must bring our self-protective capacities to bear.

Here we are like the radio listener, as the host describes the humiliation of some public figure, when he segues, unannounced, into a commercial for internet-image protection and we realise we were hearing an ad.

When we thought we were getting a bedtime story.

The bedtime story exists to address the child’s fear of the night and his understanding of his own frailty. He is not called upon to face it and to deal with it through reason (“There are no such things as monsters”), but he is soothed by a mechanism bypassing his frail consciousness, and his equally frail capacity to be soothed by the same. Which frailty the child shares with us all.

To address his fears by saying, “So remember, never be changed into a wolf”, is to make the same error as putting on plays with a “message”. These are a terrible misuse of the theatrical moment. As are the “talk-backs”, transforming an evening at the theatre into an English class.

More from this author

Ukraine has split the far-Right

By David Mamet

As free speech disappears like Jimmy Hoffa, producers and theatregoers are left with fear. Not only has a mechanism for relief been suppressed; the art form has been pressed into service of the repressive mechanism.

The theatre has long been turning and now, on its (potential) revival, will be found to have turned into the arena for the proclamation of right-thinking. The proclamation, that is, of the reign of the goddess Reason, that is, of mob rule.

We have seen, on Broadway, the usual forms of comedy, drama, and tragedy supplanted by the pageant. A pageant is a celebration of human accomplishment, intelligence, grace, or luck — finally of human power over nature or circumstance. It exists to celebrate a person (the birth of Galileo), a place (the founding of Des Moines), or an idea (National Farm Week, the Munich Rally).

It is a perfectly reasonable excuse for a performance and addresses our need for togetherness. But it is the opposite of the drama. Finally, it’s just, for good or ill, “the high school play”. We attend to applaud the notion presented in the pageant’s title. We will not and cannot experience those emotions nor, then, that catharsis for which the theatre has always existed. We will not leave the pageant cleansed, calmed, surprised, laughing, weeping, thoughtful, or disturbed. And we will not leave having had the burden of our consciousness momentarily laid aside.

Suggested reading

Escaping American tribalism

By William Deresiewicz

We know that he who rises refreshed from his prayers has had his prayers answered. Our prayers have, similarly, been answered in leaving the magnificent ballet, concert, or indeed football game: our burden had been lifted for a time. The pageant, however, answers not our prayers but the prayers of others. They, for good or ill, for whatever reason, civic pride, the hope of gain, the quest for adherents, have staged what is, finally, a demonstration.

The pageant has long supplanted the drama on Broadway, for the reasons following. Seventy-five percent of the Broadway audience are tourists. They come, legitimately, seeking an experience. They come to Broadway exactly as they come to Disneyland. As in that happiest place, they do not come to risk their hard-earned cash on a problematic event. (They might not like the play nor appreciate being “challenged”; they might just want a break after a day of shopping.) But no one need doubt that the teacup ride will function as advertised.

The knowledgeable Broadway audience, in the days of Odets, Miller, Williams, et cetera, is long in their graves, and their grandchildren basking in Scottsdale.

The middle-class New Yorkers (and the working class) supported the growth of the American drama. The tourist is not paying to do so, any more than he would pay to go to an amusement park with thought-provoking roller coasters.

Most plays are no damned good. The only way to write a play is to write a lot of plays. One learns through putting it on in the garage, in the storefront, off-Broadway, et cetera, trying and failing in front of a paying audience. There is no other way to learn how to write a play.

Suggested reading

American education needs a revolution

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Off Broadway, off-off-Broadway, are no more. The regional theatres have long devoted themselves to developing a subscriber-ship, “outreach”, “social consciousness”, and other means of destroying the possibility of attracting actual, ardent audiences.

No one says to his or her spouse, “Look online and see if there are any plays supporting the notion that (FILL INTHE BLANK) are people, too.” Or, “Get dressed, because, though you wanted to stay home and have a beer, it is the third Tuesday in the month, and we have to go use our subscription tickets to see some play.”

(By the way, what greater pleasure than recognising, of whatever event, that one is, at the moment, happier at home, and the tickets, whatever they cost, can go hang?)

Finally, to write a good play requires talent. There is not a lot of it around.

It was, I believe, Milton Friedman who, stunningly, said that the free market must exist to entice the able to reveal their abilities. If one has no possibility, in the theatre, of doing anything but staging platitudes, the talentless will (and do) step up, but the inspired have no reason to do so. The reward of the talented is unfettered creation.

Suggested reading

How artists lost their courage

By Jess De Wahls

The painter or composer may work in solitude. The creation of the dramatist is complete only with the addition of an audience. He is writing for them. To create, in them, a transformative experience (the laugh, the gasp, dead intent silence, or tears) is the greatest of thrills.

The hack is unaware of the existence of talent. He may happily take his pointless facility to producers happy to put on a show of no more actual worth than the monochrome canvases beloved of museum curators.

The New York Times, our newspaper of record, and the liberal media, in conjunction with the schools and colleges, insist that nothing shall be said or staged which does not express “right thinking”, that is, statism.

Outreach, education, diversity, and so on are tools of indoctrination. So, for example, are marine boot camp and the Bar Mitzvah. But art is the connection between inspiration and the soul of the observer. This insistence on art as indoctrination is obscenity, denying and indicting the possibility of human connection to truths superior to human understanding, that is, to the divine.

This is an extract from Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of A Free Lunch by David Mamet. 

© David Mamet 2022

But in his stories of the lowlife gangster milieu of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression — the snatchers and the shooters, the dimwits and the dolls, the potatoes and the players in Broadway’s “hardened artery” — Damon Runyon invented the main character of the late twentieth century: the good bad guy.

We’re so steeped now in anti-heroes that it hardly seems bold or daring for a writer to dive into the beating heart of a man who kills or kidnaps for money. Badly behaved men — and they are usually men — as the half-sympathetic moral centre of a story have been a staple of serious literature since the Fifties: amoral murderers like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley; everyman adulterers like John Updike’s “Rabbit” Angstrom; and distilled misanthropists like Joseph Heller’s Bob Slocum (“The world just doesn’t work. It’s an idea whose time is gone”).

The good bad guy moved from literature to film in the Seventies, and two decades later came into our homes on TV. You don’t have to look far to see the flowering of this quality in our culture. Indeed, it’s not going too far to say that without Runyon, there would be no Godfather, no Tony Soprano. Martin Scorsese would still be trying to think of something to make films about.

Suggested reading

Tony Soprano: villain or victim?

By Rob Henderson

But when Runyon wrote his stories in the Thirties and Forties, he was bringing us news, softening us up for the century to come. He made us fall for the guy who is dubious in business and negligent in his home life and his love life.

The stand-out quality of both Runyon and his characters is that they’re funny. Runyon’s anonymous narrator is a lower-rent, warier version of P. G. Wodehouse’s tireless storyteller Mr Mulliner, and indeed Wodehouse is the writer Runyon most resembles stylistically. His rhythmic patter fits Wodehouse’s description of his own work as a “musical comedy without music”.

Runyon’s narrator trades in nicknames, neologisms, mock-formality, a language devoid of contractions and a perpetual present tense. When he tells us that “when Dave the Dude takes a guy out for an airing, the guy very often does not come back”, the threat is softened by the stilted idiom — but not too much. The same goes for the cracking line, “I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her”.

Comedy lowers the reader’s guard and enables the writer to slip in other things. We get unexpected moral complexity, in the story The Lily of St Pierre, in which a tragic woman suffers a death “that happens to a million dolls before and will happen to a million dolls again”. And there is a truly psychopathic viciousness in Sense of Humour, which begins with the aptly-named Frankie the Ferocious killing the family members of an associate who played a practical joke on him, and gets worse from there.

Suggested reading

How The Office ruined comedy

By Gareth Roberts

Runyon used comedy as a balance to danger, then; his inheritors developed this, using it as a source of danger, too. In the famous scene in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Joe Pesci’s Tommy turns laughter — “Do I amuse you?” — into blood-chilling fear. Like Runyon’s stories, like any good portrayal of the good bad guy — like any good art — it operates in multiple registers.

Connected to this is another strength of Runyon’s good bad guy: he is real. Runyon certainly knew the world he wrote about, both from his work as a newspaper reporter covering sports, politics and murder (which he called “the main event”) and from personal connections: he knew, among others, Al Capone. His portrayal of gangster culture in his stories was an exaggeration, usually for comic purposes, but it’s the authenticity that provides the frisson: Runyon’s biographer said any decent New York detective would recognise most of the crooks in his fiction, from Harry the Horse to Nicely-Nicely Johnson.

And so reading about, or watching, a good bad guy is like a rollercoaster ride: a brush with danger within a safe environment, all the more so when we are strapped to his viewpoint. We can’t help but come round to his way of thinking when we watch the serial killer’s serial killer Dexter Morgan in Dexter, or read Alex’s own words in A Clockwork Orange. After all, to paraphrase one Runyon character, many legitimate guys like you are interested in the doings of tough guys.

More from this author

Why does the literary world mistrust success?

By John Self

The guys and dolls come and go in Runyon’s stories, but his world is held together by that constant narrator, a bystander to the action (“I am known to one and all as a guy who is just around”) who rubs comfortably alongside the criminal underworld, even if he is not strictly part of it, and gently expresses theoretical disapproval of, say, kidnapping. “Snatching is by no means a high-class business, and is even considered somewhat illegal.” (Then again, we get the sense that he would help out if they were busy, and occasionally he provides a turning point in one of Runyon’s clockwork plots.) But the intimacy of the first person narrative makes us want Jo-jo and Spanish John and Dave the Dude to succeed — because reading is an act of empathy, but also because we see them within their own community, where they don’t seem so bad at all. They are, like Puzo’s mafiosi in The Godfather, bound by their own code of honour, however twisted.

The novelist Howard Spring summed up this appeal by describing Runyon’s people as “jungle-dwellers, hateful and horrible men and women, who yet please us because they are alive and completely integrated.” Fictional violence, in other words, is thrilling, and all the more so when we’re made to care about the characters dishing it out. In The Sopranos, the most simultaneously beloved and bloodthirsty of Tony’s henchmen was Paulie Walnuts, who murdered more people than anyone else, but was also a comic figure, cladding his furniture in plastic and forever repeating his jokes to impress Tony. In Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, when Daniel Day Lewis’s Bill the Butcher delivers a theatrical “Whoopsy-daisy!” as he “misses” while chucking his knives at Cameron Diaz’s Jenny, we feel the same sense of uneasily disrupted danger that Runyon detonates in his darker stories.

In capturing the Broadway gangster era, Runyon created it, just as Fitzgerald did the Jazz Age — which operated at the same time but in a different world. But Runyon’s influence goes even further: he prefigures the wisecracking Noo Yawk idiom of countless sitcoms. And by offering a gangster environment that was fundamentally comic in nature, he opened a gap between his creations and the traditional villain for others to fill, and fill it they did, forming characters who flatter our appetite for complexity by being good only in parts.

After Runyon’s death in 1946 — from a lifelong smoker’s throat cancer — a plane was flown above Manhattan and his ashes were scattered over Broadway, the avenue he dusted with his own peculiar genius. It was a tribute befitting either a city grandee or a legendary crime boss — and therefore perfect for the man who in straddling both worlds created his own, and laid the path for ours.