Reviews for Toward a theater of the oppressed

The average rating for Toward a theater of the oppressed based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-09-02 00:00:00 Jim Kitts This book is a bit of a muddle--Mamet constantly moves back and forth between different ideas without any real cohesiveness--but there are a couple of great ideas in this book on the nature of drama. The best one I think is when he talks about the difficulty of writing 2nd Acts, that writing second acts is a bit like living 2nd acts; in order to write the mid-life crisis, you have live through the mid-life crisis, which many people are loathe to do. They want to write the script without having to go through the pain that the characters in the story experience'and yet that is exactly what they must do. This is pretty much the same idea that he talks about in his book on acting, "True & False." And yet I think it's even more important in the field of writing. A lot of actors become actors because they are already masochists'they want to be hurt, they want to relive prior hurts. Whereas I know a lot of writers who don't realize that to be a writer of any dramatic narrative means being a sado-masochist. You must be sadistic to your characters, put them through hell'and then experience what those characters are feelings, i.e. be masochistic. I think Mamet as a writer is much more of a sadist than he is as a masochist and that's why you get some terrific drama in his plays and films but not a lot of "feeling" from these characters. Ah well. We can't all be Shakespeare. In the meantime, we can write essays on writing, or write reviews on essays on writing. But I should go back to the real writing. Please excuse me, I have a few darlings to kill.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-05-29 00:00:00 Greg Finney There was interesting trivia in this book but overall I found it to be rambling and incoherent. The second section was so jumbled that it reminded me of the paragraphs created by the predictive texting game on the smartphone.