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Conversation 2:

Listen to a conversation between a student and his professor.

Student: Professor Anderson, I really don’t want this to come out sounding all wrong, like I really appreciate you seeing me, taking the time and everything… Professor: What is it, Michael?

Student: Well, it’s about the modern drama course.

Professor: Ah, yeah, well, there’s a lot of work in that class. I hear about it all the time from students so let me guess, is the reading too difficult, assignments too long?

Student: No, it’s just, I thought we would be reading different stuff, like more modern.

Professor: What we are reading is very modern, quintessentially modern, I mean, don’t you think Samuel Beckett’s works are modern?

Student: Frankly, no. I mean, I think he is more modern than Chekhov, but he wrote his best stuff over 50 years ago.

Professor: Oh, I see. So by modern you mean…

Student: Like David Mamet. I mean, he is alive and writing right now.

Professor: I think what you mean is you would like to read more contemporary playwrights, is that it?

Student: Yeah, contemporary, modern, basically the same thing, right?

Professor: Well, we do use them interchangeably in everyday speech, but in terms of the history of drama, modern generally means the early and mid-20th century, the first six decades or so, but really it has less to do with the span of time and more to do with the work of a few very important playwrights.

Student: I can see that these people may have been revolutionary artists for their times, but are their ideas, like, still relevant today? I mean, aren’t they, like, old hat?

Professor: Well, I think that if you take a closer look at contemporary playwrights like David Mamet, you’d realize what he is doing is not all that different from what, say, an earlier playwright like Beckett, or even Chekhov, for example, was doing. It’s almost impossible to imagine that David Mamet could be writing the way he does if it hadn’t been for those earlier playwrights.

Student: Can you give me an example?

Professor: Mamet’s use of language, and the rhythm of the dialogue, like Beckett, rhythm was an important element in his dialogue. There is one particular play written by Mamet called The Cryptogram, which is a great example of this. Let’s just say that Beckett looms behind all of Mamet’s plays, but this one, The Cryptogram, well, it’s not only Mamet’s language that recalls Beckett, but also the predicament in which Mamet’s characters find themselves.

Here, really, Michael, I don’t think the course description is misleading. This is a course on modern drama and that is what we are reading. I mean, if you are interested in contemporary

ramatists, then you can if you want to write your first paper on a contemporary playwright, but only if it’s a comparison with the work of an earlier playwright. I think that would be a good exercise, and it might even help you resolve some of the problems we talked about today.

t: You’d go? Ah, that’ll be great!