“All I describe is theatre even where theatre is not the subject.” The blind alleys and cul-de-sacs down which many theatre writers wander result in a quick loss of energy: all that spinning in place dizzies and tires one. Perhaps it is a matter of time — all that theatregoing, writing and socializing leave little room for reading and thought, even if we’re constantly told that we make room in our lives for what is important to us. In the past six months, two books of essays by two very different American dramatists of some stature — David Mamet’s Theatre and Wallace Shawn’s Essays — have been published to little notice among theatre critics and reviewers, and one would have thought their appearance would be some cause for celebration, let alone meditation. (Would the same silence greet similar books from Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill, for example?) Here are two playwrights with substantial bodies of work holding forth, from quite distinct perspectives, on what theatre and drama mean to culture: and not merely the culture of the rehearsal room and the auditorium, but outside those as well. These are not especially books of theory — Mamet describes his own essays as “the otherwise incathectable expression of love for an ever-widening mystery” — but of meditations on their work. I hope to review them both here soon, but for now they demonstrate that some American dramatists, at least, still see the need for contextualizing their work, even if it’s only for themselves, and for doing so in the public forum of the hardcover book.

The possibilities and mysteries of imagination are limitless, the exploration of these possibilities and mysteries perhaps the radical basis of theatrical production itself. There is always more to write about, and for those dramatists for whom the theatre is as much a part of their bodies and wills as their limbs, every moment broadens the canvas, in both their prose and their plays. The human is infinite in the theatre and the drama, but quite finite within the allowable confines of behavior and interest dictated by the limited social culture and the theatre permissible there. Anything can be an “event” as Alain Badiou describes it — a “rupture of being” in which the subject finds a new truth — the birth of a child, a marriage, a death; that this rupture is experienced as a catastrophe makes it the food of drama and theatre for dramatist, performer and spectator alike. But the culture which cannot accept these ruptures limits the autonomy of the individual imagination that circulates within it: so most theatre, and theatre writing, remains small and unambitious. Still, the signifying dance of language gives expression to these events and the imagination. When one writes about the theatre, one writes about the self in full. In passing through the inevitability of time and place, the dramatist always finds more to write about.

There is a sense that being bored with theatre and live performance is being bored with one’s own body; in a culture of screens, the fascination is with the mere two-dimensional image of the self, however false (and however many prefer it) …