Sunday, February 13, 2011

Time by David Mamet



The mystery of drama is time: how to use time, how to exploit the human perception of time and its ordering into cause and effect. The rejection of this intolerable burden, our human specialty, is the goal of the religious mystic, the yogi, the lover, and the drug addict.- to live in a world without time, to achieve nonbeing.


The examination of this urge and its avowal and the confession of its tragic impossibility is the subject of all drama.


All plays are about lies. A misimagined or misdescribed situation is presented to the hero, and he must uncover the lie that engendered it or strive to create those lies which he thinks will extract him from the situation. When the lie is revealed, the play is over: the work of the repressive mechanism has been explored and the audience has experienced both its power and its weakness, and has seen it defeated. Though the play may have not dealt with his particular dilemma, the affected viewer leaves refreshed to find a vicarious victory over the species of torment he shares with the hero (consciousness).



In politics, however, the lies are rarely uncovered, or even when uncovered not allowed to a have a determining effect in the formulation of future policy; they are quickly 'swept under the carpet". Repressive mechanisms and the objective conditions of the hegemony of the 'elite' in America are suffered to remain obscure. It is only on the basis of new lies and unexplored repressions that 'the public' is suffered to be refreshed by the vicarious victory of events such as the Egyptian people's uprising against their American supported tyrant.

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