Gender Fluidity is not fluid enough.

David Mamet shuts down play that wanted to recast his female character as a male and make a play about gender relations into one about homosexuals.

Here's a review of the production:

[First-time director Erin] Eggers made the daring decision to cast a man — Ben Parman — as a transgendered version of Carol. Mamet's script provides support for this; Carol refers to herself at one point as "of some doubtful sexuality" and as having overcome sexual "prejudices" and "humiliations."

All of which explains why Carol might view John's clumsy and paternalistic efforts to help her through gendered glasses. Parman himself takes care of the rest, embodying a Carol whose very body language — stiff, angular and uncomfortable — reflects Carol's fear and fury at an outside world she views as an implacable enemy.

The play (which I've seen in the theater and read) is about the relationship between a male and a female. It's specifically all about the male teacher/female student relationship. If it's about 2 men, it's a different story. There's nothing wrong with telling different stories, bouncing off an old text, and any given production can stand on its own merit, but Mamet owns the rights, and he has control for now. But should he have been more accommodating?

Interesting observation about changing the nature of the play.

And interesting connection to the women priests issue.

Mamet on Obama.

According to Roger Simon:

“The question is, can he run on his record in 2012, and the answer is no, because it’s abysmal,” Mamet said. “He took a trillion dollars and where it went, nobody knows. He dismantled healthcare, he weakened America around the world, he sold out the State of Israel. All he’s got to run on is being a Democrat and indicting the other fellow.”

Arriving on Kindle any second now....

....David Mamet's "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture."

Because I love conversion stories.

If you haven't had this reaction while listening to NPR...

...then you are hopelessly brain dead.

Reason on David Mamet's conversion:

The Secret Knowledge grew out of a bridge-burning 2008 essay that Mamet wrote for the left-wing Village Voice. In it, the Pulitzer-winning playwright boldly walked back his own life-long leftism and described the clinching moment in his political journey as having occurred while he was driving in a car with his wife: “We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up.”

My experience came in the late '80s after being forced to listen to one too many of the "human interest" stories that NPR played during the "morning rush" with subjects like "Aids activists teach Shakespeare to inner city children."  There just came a point when threading the politically correct cliches in order to listen to the biased news just wasn't worth it anymore.

 This is interesting in that it links Mamet's rejection of leftist utopianism with his return to Judaism and the concomitant realization that attempts to make a heaven on Earth are always doomed to boom-a-rang.

The Secret Knowledge is clearly the result of much reading and extensive contemplation. Mamet’s references range from Tolstoy and Trollope to Friedman and Sowell to Marx and Brecht and the immortally entertaining Susan Sontag. He celebrates his Ashkenazi heritage and, centrally, the Torah, which he sees as a keystone of this country’s Judeo-Christian foundation—a font of true justice, as opposed to the fashionable “social justice” he so witheringly reviles. (On hate-crime laws: “[A]s if getting beaten to death were more pleasant if one was not additionally called a greaser.”) He adheres to the “tragic view” of human nature—we are all irredeemably flawed, prone to corruption, and incapable of perfect understanding—and is thus deeply skeptical of any attempt at root-and-branch social transformation, however slickly retailed. He is especially eloquent in noting the latest instance of this evergreen political scam: “[S]hould we all simply mass behind a leader so charismatic and well-spoken as to induce in the electorate that state of bliss which, though it may momentarily be indistinguishable from madness or satori, necessitates eventual return to a world made more complicated by our surrender[?].”

The Apostate.

It looks like David Mamet is not going to be invited to all the right Hollywood parties:

With all the talk of Hollywood liberalism — the endless leftist blather from Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, the cozying up to Castro and Chavez by Oliver Stone and Danny Glover, the jejune Iranian peace-making by Annette Bening and Alfre Woodard, etc., etc — it’s fascinating that the two leading playwrights in the English language (the smart guys) — Tom Stoppard and David Mamet — identify as conservative/libertarians.


For Stoppard — born in Communist Czechoslovakia — this was natural, but for Mamet — a Chicago Jewish child of the sixties — it was a considerably longer slog. As he relates in his superb new book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, “I had never knowingly talked with nor read the works of a Conservative before moving to Los Angeles, some eight years ago.”

Mamet certainly made up for lost time. Barely ten pages into his book, you know this man has read, and thoroughly digested, the major conservative works of our and recent times, from Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman and on to Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. And he is able to explicate and elaborate on them as well as anybody.

Not that the playwright’s political transformation is such a surprise. In 2008, he wrote an op-ed for The Village Voice (of all confrontational places), “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead’ Liberal.” That article was somewhat more tentative than its title, which may have been added for dramatic effect by the newspaper’s editors.

Not so The Secret Knowledge. Mamet has come a ways in three years from a chrysalis bewildered and astonished by his new found views to an author writing in white heat. The new book is a full-throated intellectual attack on liberalism in almost all its aspects from someone who was there, a former leftwing intellectual of prominence, a Pulitzer Prize winner even (and one who deserved it, unlike the New York Times’ Walter Duranty).

Mamet's reason for "converting" could read from a thread I recently was involved with on Facebook:

We were self-taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group–irrespective of our group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty; that all people are alike, and to judge their behavior was “judgmental”; that property is theft. As we did not investigate these assertions or their implications, we could not act upon them and felt no need to do so. For we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say all humanity.

I pray that, sometime in my lifetime, the self-satisfied '60s will finally end.