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Three uses of the knife : on the nature and purpose of drama

The purpose of theater, like magic like religionids to inspire cleansing awe. With bracing directness and aphoristic authority, one of our greatest living playwrights addresses the questions: What makes good drama' And why does drama matter in an age that is awash in information and entertainment' David Mamet believes that the tendency to dramatize is essential to human nature, that we create drama out of everything from today's weather to next year's elections. But the highest expression of this drive remains the theater. With a cultural range that encompasses Shakespeare, Bretcht, and Ibsen, Death of a Salesman and Bad Day at Black Rock, Mamet shows us how to distinguish true drama from its false variants. He considers the impossibly difficult progression between one act and the next and the mysterious function of the soliloquy. The result, in Three Uses of the Knife, is an electrifying treatise on the playwright's art that is also a strikingly original work of moral and aesthetic philosophy.

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  • "Three uses of the knife"@en
  • "Uses of the knife"
  • "Three uses of the knife"
  • "3 uses of the knife"@en

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  • "The purpose of theater, like magic like religionids to inspire cleansing awe. With bracing directness and aphoristic authority, one of our greatest living playwrights addresses the questions: What makes good drama' And why does drama matter in an age that is awash in information and entertainment' David Mamet believes that the tendency to dramatize is essential to human nature, that we create drama out of everything from today's weather to next year's elections. But the highest expression of this drive remains the theater. With a cultural range that encompasses Shakespeare, Bretcht, and Ibsen, Death of a Salesman and Bad Day at Black Rock, Mamet shows us how to distinguish true drama from its false variants. He considers the impossibly difficult progression between one act and the next and the mysterious function of the soliloquy. The result, in Three Uses of the Knife, is an electrifying treatise on the playwright's art that is also a strikingly original work of moral and aesthetic philosophy."@en
  • "What makes good drama? And why does drama matter in an age that is awash in information and entertainment? With bracing directness and aphoristic grace, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross delivers a thrillingly original treatise on his art. To David Mamet, human beings are drama-creating animals who impose narrative structures on everything from today's weather to next year's elections. Mamet distinguishes true drama from its false variants, unravels the infamous Second-Act Problem, and considers the mysterious persistence of the soliloquy. Three Uses of the Knife is an inspired guide for any playwright or theatergoer that doubles as a trenchant work of moral and aesthetic philosophy. - Publisher."
  • "Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, poet, essayist, and director, David Mamet celebrates the absolute necessity of drama - and the experience of great plays - in our lurching attempts to make sense of ourselves and our world. In three tightly woven essays of characteristic force and resonance, Mamet speaks about the connection of art to life, language to power, imagination to survival, the public spectacle to the private script. The essays in the book are an eloquent reminder of how life is filled with the small scenes of tragedy and comedy that can be described only as drama. Mamet also writes of bad theater; of what it takes to write a play, and the often impossibly difficult progression from act to act; the nature of soliloquy; the contentless drama and empty theatrics of politics and popular entertainment; the ubiquity of stage and literary conventions in the most ordinary of lives; and the uselessness, finally, of drama - or any art - as ideology or propaganda. Self-assured, filled with autobiographical touches, and attentive to the challenges to theater presented by a media world of simulacra, this book is a bracing call to art and to arms, a manifesto that reminds us of the singular power of the theater to keep us sane, whole, and human."

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  • "Electronic books"@en

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  • "Trois usages de la lame : nature et fonction du théâtre"
  • "I tre usi del coltello : saggi e lezioni sul cinema"
  • "I tre usi del coltello : saggi e lezioni sul cinema"@it
  • "Vom dreifachen Gebrauch des Messers : über Wesen und Zweck des Dramas"
  • "Three uses of the knife : on the nature and purpose of drama"
  • "Three uses of the knife : on the nature and purpose of drama"@en
  • "3 uses of the knife : On the nature and purpose of drama"
  • "Los tres usos del cuchillo : sobre la naturaleza y la función del drama"
  • "Los tres usos del cuchillo : sobre la naturaleza y la función del drama"@es
  • "3 uses of the knife : on the nature and purpose of drama"@en
  • "3 uses of the knife : on the nature and purpose of drama"
  • "3 uses of the knife on the nature and purpose drama"
  • "Los Tres usos del cuchillo : sobre la naturaleza y la función del drama"
  • "Los tres usos del cuchillo : sobre la naturaleza y la función del drama / David Mamet ; [traducido por María Faidella Martí]"@es
  • "Three uses of the knife"
  • "Three uses of the knife on the nature and purpose of drama"@en

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