“The mystery in drama is time.” –David Mamet
A plot is an arrangement of action and episode held together by the causal glue that Aristotle calls “probability and necessity.” Once it is decided that only a nuclear warhead will serve to destroy Godzilla and the other creatures he is fighting with, then whatever is required to fire such a warhead at the monsters “necessarily” follows. It doesn’t follow by strict necessity. After all, these are actions of human beings, which can always take a willful diversion. But given the end desired, the actions taken to obtain it follow by a kind of “necessity” that Aristotle tries to capture with the made-up phrase, “probability and necessity.”
A plot pictures movement through time, but in doing so it paradoxically seeks to wrest the characters out of time. In the final essay in his book, Theatre, David Mamet writes that “the rejection of this intolerable burden [i.., time], our human specialty, is the goal of the religious mystic, the yogi, the lover, and the drug addict–to live in a world without time, to achieve unbeing.”
To seek a world beyond time is also the goal of the dramatist. Aristotle famously says that tragedy is more philosophical than history because it seeks the universal in the particular. In the preface to 3 Plays Thornton Wilder echoes Aristotle when he contends that the theater’s special ability is to tell the truth both of the particular individual and of the general truth:
“It is through the theater’s power to raise the exhibited individual action into the realm of idea and type and universal that it is able to evoke our belief.”
Accordingly, Wilder disdains the tendency of 19th-century theater to “load the stage with specific objects,” objects meant to ground the action in the particularities of time and place. “So it was by a jugglery with time that the middle classes devitalized the theater. When you emphasize place in the theater, you drag down and limit and harness time to it. You thrust the action back into past time, whereas it is precisely the glory of the stage that it is always “now” there. Under such production methods the characters are all dead before the action starts. You don’t have to pay deeply from your heart’s participation.”
So a piece of drama meant for the stage shows us human beings in action, and thus movement through time, but at the same time it aspires to place that action against the backdrop of that which exists outside of time. The past and future of action is illuminated by the always “now.” For this reason the theater audience is better able to contemplate the eternal truth in the particular.
Mamet concludes his essay by saying, “The examination of this urge [to transcend time] and its avowal and the confession of its tragic impossibility is the subject of all drama.”
Tragic action, surely enough, reveals all that is humble and time-bound in the human condition. But Mamet is incorrect to say that such action is the subject of all drama. For the human mind also has its comic mode, which seeks that which transcends time–and finds it.
