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Customer Rating:
Summary: fundamentalist brainstorm
Comment: This reads like a weekend brainstorm into the dictaphone, or party-chatter with metropolitan
friends. First glance - you've got the large font, wide-margins and generous line-spacing to pad
these notes out into a book. Then you notice that nearly every paragraph includes several
parenthetical thoughts (like I just had another way-outer to squeeze in here, okay?), plus quoted
after-thoughts (sorry, couldn't find "the right words" just then, you know?) - and foreign phrases
swept in from every part of the old country - like this gem: "This pronunciamento can be taken as a
jejune promise". Footnoted brain-sprinkles complete the overall intellectual profile of this
work.

The reader doesn't get any help to piece it all together. Eventually, you might suspect
Mamet has something to say about the "three acts" of theatre (no other dramatic structures
apparently exist). Mamet dips here and there into the function of drama, his bold thesis being that
theatre is magic. Theatre, he declares, is a place of wonder, and no place for popular entertainment
or politics. We are to walk out of theatres with "cleansing awe", knowing we are "sinful and
worthless".

Mamet never considers any ideas apart from his own. He draws heavily on the Old
Testament and a primer on Freud for back-up, but no theatre theorists ever get a mention - apart
from Brecht, with a single word, namely: "problematic".

Most of "Three Uses" is actually nothing
to do with theatre. It's an outpouring of quotables about statesmanship, the "Information Age", the
psychology of the masses, the causes of gambling ... all argued with arrogant inconsistency: Mamet
rails against "centralisation by the body politic", and then derides all manner of extremism; he
argues against "avant garde nonsense" with absurd phrases like "In endorsing a blank canvas, or the
Domino Theory, the individual becomes like a King Canute". For Mamet, "good art" is no more than The
Bible, Shakespeare and Bach, plus an American work - "Death of a Salesman", of course. There are no
surprises in the ideas, however much they're dressed to impress with showy associations and stiff
fundamentalism. Too bad that the result is more like a freshman's freewheeling weblog on "life",
than anything from the likes of Brook or Grotowski on "the theatre". American critics equating it
with such works is no more than chauvinism.

One use of the knife Mamet forgot was editing. Then he
might have been able to communicate something useful here - into 3 or 4 pages. But there's no
holding back the primary process exhibitionist. You have to get out the knife and do the editing
yourself.

Oh, yes, the knife. Nice title, and it's the substance of a few lines near the
end, which Mamet cares - and seems only able - to explain by offering more curly metaphor: "the
knife is the dramatist's bass line". Meaning? Dramatists are misanthropes who basically want to kill
their audiences? Who knows, but the meandering content and grandiose style of this work sure
suggests Mamet's fundamental contempt for the reader.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Premium content, distractingly poor typography.
Comment: I just got this book this morning and these are preliminary reactions.
First of all, the content
rocks!
Mamet suggestivey points out how we dramatize our lives in our banal exchanges with each
other about impersonal things like the weather. In doing so we endow our lives with significance.
The insight reminds me of how charged the world once was when I was in love for the first time. I am
sure that the access that this small volume gives to an interesting mind repay reading and reading.
This is one of those books that makes you think and makes you feel clever for the thinking the
thoughts it guides you to.
Unfortunately, I find the poor word-processed typography is
distracting. One line has the the initial capital of a sentence squeezed up against the period of
the preceding one. The next line has wide open spaces between the words. Paragraph after paragraph
finishes with the dangling ends of hyphenated words. I would rather pay a dollar more for a clean
view of a remarkable mind.
Surely a respected publishing company can do better than just feed the
author's data file to a poorly automatic compositing application and then print the results
unperused by human eye?

Customer Rating:
Summary: An artistic credo well worth reading
Comment: While Mamet's booklet is essentially an exposition of opinions with little or no discourse, it is
extremely thought provoking and provides ample fuel for thinking about drama - and art in general -
as lying at the edge of reason.

In a treatise that mirrors the three act structure he discusses,
Mamet eloquently puts forth the idea that much of political drama, by instructing us what to think
and feel, is mere melodrama and that "the theatre exists to deal with problems of the soul, with the
mysteries of human life, not with its quotidian calamities." He assails avant-garde artists for
taking "refuge in nonsense" and electing themselves "superior to reason," yet also criticizes the
"hard-bitten rationalist who rails against religious tradition, against the historical niceties,
against ritual large and small."

"Three Uses of the Knife" is a book that will be read quickly,
but will stick to the back of your mind for sometime afterwards.

Customer Rating:
Summary: The only sane man in America.
Comment: Mamet is a playwright savant. He finds sanity in an industry where sanity has no right to exist, and
in this slender, essential volume, he points out various truths about not only the nature of drama,
but of human experience.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Arrogant over-simplifications
Comment: It's rare that I regret buying a book, but I'm not happy that I spent money on this one.

I don't
argue that Mamet is a good playwright. Glengarry Glen Ross is brilliant, and American Buffalo isn't
too bad, either. But reading this book makes me wish Mamet would stick to playwriting and not
impose his narrow ideas on others.

Essentially, the book oversimplifies matters in astonishing
ways. For instance, Mamet dismisses the American musical out of hand. Many successful playwrights
cringe at the thought of watching The Music Man or Kiss Me Kate one more time, but does his comment
apply to more intense productions like Cabaret? That's a major distinction that Mamet fails to
make, and it's not the only one. Also, lumping together all political theater as an automatic
failure, and excusing Brecht from the rest by claiming that Brecht didn't know what he was talking
about when he called his own theater political? The logic escapes me.

As far as Mamet's
self-aggrandizement goes-- well, I can't say I didn't know it was coming. But that he lets it
interfere with the construction of solid arguments is troublesome. For a book on how to construct
or read a play, look at Louis Catron's book, or even go back to Stanislavski or Chekhov. They will
be much more helpful to the working writer.