[2013-23-10] Portnoy's Complaint

We met to discuss the second chapter of Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. After a brief intro about the author, we opened a discussion, starting with my personal favorite quote: “We would have manufactured all this mustard”. 

Philip Roth (1933 - )

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 19, 1933. He was the second child of Bess and Herman Roth, first generation of Jew immigrants. He graduated from  Newark's Weequahic High School in 1950.

DAVID MAMET (1947 - )

David Mamet is an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, on November 30, 1947, in a Jewish family of a Polish descent. Mamet’s grandparents flee from Europe to pursue the American Dream at the very beginning of the 20th century. Mamet was raised in a typical American middle class family. Like many other immigrants, his parents built their status on denial of their Jewish past and were very much focused on acculturation. Although it may not seem like it at first glance, Jewishness, Jewish experience and identity are very important in Mamet’s work both on screen and on the page.

Mamet came to writing via acting. As a child actor he would appear, in instructional dramas on radio and television. When he went to Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, in 1965, he studied theater theory as well as acting. Moreover, during his year off from the university, in 1968, he studied drama at the Stanislavsky-influenced Neighborhood Playhouse School in New York. Then, after graduating from Goddard, he worked as an acting teacher and cofounded the St. Nicholas Theater Company (later re-formed in Chicago as the St. Nicholas Players), which produced much of his early plays. Mamet has also taught acting and theater theory at the Yale Drama School and New York University. Though he never claimed to be a real actor or to have any capacity for it, the performance itself has become a central trope of his work.

The first play to put Mamet on the map was Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974). First staged by the Organic Theater, voted best Chicago Play of the season, it was later transferred to Off Off and Off Broadway where it picked up an Obie Award. American Buffalo (1975) was staged on Broadway, with Robert Duvall, two years after its Chicago premiere.  It is the first of  what he has called his ‘gang tragedies,’ and it is about a group of tricksters who are conspiring to steal a coin collection from a wealthy man. For this play Mamet received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Also, the play was adapted for a 1996 film which starred Dustin Hoffman. However, his most popular play appeared almost ten years later. Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) deals primarily with the time in American history when succumbing to the rigid rules of brutal capitalism was being advanced as moral virtue. At first it did very little business in the US but when it opened to much praise in London, in 1983, New York producers picked it up and staged it at John Golden Theater. Then it  was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and, as a consequence, run on Broadway for 378 performances. From that moment onwards, Mamet’s career opened up with revivals of his earlier work and a string of successes in the theater and the cinema. Also, he became more exposed to criticism. Mostly by feminists who accused him of being misogynist, not really including women in his work. Apparently, he took this criticism seriously since, in the 1990s, he did manage to include more female protagonists in his work. Speed-the-Plow (1988) and  Oleanna (1992) both explore female experience to some extent. The latter successfully registering contemporary debates over gender roles, political correctness and the idea of sexual harassment. His latest work includes plays titled November (2007) and Race (2009). Also, in 2011 Mamet published a controversial book titled The Secret Knowledge: On Dismantling of American Culture, in which he explains his recent conversion to conservatism. In December 2012 his new play The Anarchist will have its world premiere.

All in all, Mamet wrote 36 plays, 29 screenplays and several books on theater theory and criticism which makes him one of the most prolific dramatists in contemporary America. As Chistopher Bigsby puts it, "he is best known for his distinctive linguistic facility, his fascination with the brittle relationship between the sexes, the figure of the confidence trickster, and his concern with the moral vacuity at the heart of much experience.”

by Sylwia Chlebowska

selected sources:

The New York Times

The Village Voice

Broadway.com

CO-MIX. Art Spiegelman: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps

Museum Ludwig, Cologne

22.09.2012 – 06.01.2013

A major retrospective of Art Spiegelman’s entire oeuvre is on show at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. 

ART SPIEGELMAN (1948 - )

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and author Art Spiegelman is best noted for his two-volume graphic novel series "Maus," whilch Dale Luciano described in the Comics Journal as "among the remarkable achievements in comics." An epic parable of the Holocaust that substitutes mice and cats for human Jews and Nazis, the work stands in contrast to much of Spiegelman's works, which have ranged from designing chewinggum cards to editing comic-book anthologies. Prior to creating "Maus" he was most well known in underground comics circles as publisher of the comix anthology Raw, which he produced with his wife, Françoise Mouly, beginning in the early 1980s. However, he has been a significant presence in graphic art since his teen years, when he wrote, printed, and distributed his own comics magazine.