The Water Engine & Mr. Happiness

by David Mamet

Set in a radio-station studio in 1934, Mamet's dramas focus on a poor young factory worker who invents an engine that runs on water and a radio-show host who helps listeners with their personal problems

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre

87 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

David Alan Mamet is an American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. His works are known for their clever, terse, sometimes vulgar dialogue and arcane stylized phrasing, as well as for his exploration of masculinity.

As a playwright, he received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).

Mamet's recent books include The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and antisemitism; and Bambi vs. Godzilla, an acerbic commentary on the movie business.

Reviews

[Sandi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read "The Water Engine" as a cold reading at KU--an interesting an odd play that left me thinking quite a bit about the anxiety that comes with creativity. The play is subtitled "An American Fable" but might as well read "nightmare," at least for the creative spirit.

The plot is basically that an honest guy invents something revolutionary: an engine that runs entirely on water. The applications are so enormous that the play need not dwell on it—it's clear that the main character, Lang, has hit on the million-dollar idea. He goes to a lawyer to get a patent, and though he thinks he's being careful, the lawyer and his cronies conspire to discredit and intimidate him and steal the invention. Lang refuses to budge and he and his sister end up at the bottom of a lake.

The backdrop of the action is the Chicago World's Fair and there are interjections throughout the play of carnival barkers talking about American progress and ingenuity interspersed with an opposing voice of the chainletter that emphasizes opposing theme of luck/fortune as determining fate. The chainletter would play a key role at the end, as it gives Lang the idea to pass on the plans to his invention before he is killed.

When first reading through, I had an ambivalent impression of Lang--I thought that he had been presented as a rather odd everyman as he comes off as somewhat reserved at points and philosophical at others. He tries to protect himself and is suspicious of the lawyer from the start, but is still deceived. On thinking of it now, though, I'm not sure that Lang is even supposed to be an everyman--he is much more a character of American myth (the solitary genius inventor) than the cheating lawyers, and in that way, he seems less real and less identifiable. We, as an audience, feel his bitterness and frustration, but aren't really shocked to hear that he's been killed, even in a callous, off-camera fashion.

This was an interesting play for what it said about the creative process. Lang is beset with some measure of anxiety from the start that someone would steal his idea which is what had him seek a patent from the shady lawyer. Ironically, it's his seeking legal protections for his idea that leads to it being stolen, and it strikes me that this is an irony at the heart of the issue of intellectual property. Once an idea is shared, you can't fully protect it, no matter how many legal protections are in place. If an idea is compelling enough there will always be knock-offs, counterfeits, inspired work, parodies, and commentaries. It's both in the nature of humans to copy, and the nature of good ideas to compel this copying, but, of course, this always robs the creator of control, and there's something very scary about that--one's ideas running around like Frankenstein's monster able to be manipulated and bent to malicious (or whatever!) design.

Aside from the control that inventors lose when they share an idea, it is particularly interesting to me that this control is so connected with authorship, over and above profit. Lang could have sold his patent to the crooked lawyers, but there was something inherently right in his mind (and ours) about it belonging with him (whether he makes money on it or not), and offensive that they might be able to distort or question his authorship. In the course of inventing his machine, Lang made use of his company's tools, and the lawyers use this fact to argue that the company can claim authorial rights to his design. This is a brilliant part, stinging something more fundamental than even Lang's pride when the lawyer says about his machine, "It is a work of genius. Whether you are able to establish ownership is quite another matter."

Ouch--that the legal system would rob rather than grant authorial rights is a nice twist of the knife and it's one that I think gets at our paranoia, an anxiety of authorship that has nothing to do with self-doubt and everything to do with doubt in the fidelity of our audience. To the inventor, who wants to improve mankind, that mankind would want to reject and dismiss its improver is a bitter stroke (as well as familiar trope: Jesus, Prometheus).

My grandfather used to dabble in inventions in his garage, making things with bicycle parts that I still don’t understand. As an architect he would have been entirely familiar with the patent and copyright systems, but also with how often designs could be stolen—and not in huge ways, either, but by altering a detail or two, making it “genuwine” rather than genuine. When I was in middle school and he would show my sister and I his designs, he would explain that he didn’t want to show the general public or sell them because of thieves and copycats, seemingly lurking around every corner. As a young person in college, I picked up some of the same paranoia and wondered if my own poems would be stolen when I sent them out to publishers.

This doubt can be freezing—it makes you question why in the world you are creating anything in the first place if you won’t get the credit for it, and that, perhaps worse, the product of your own mind could be misused, distorting your intent.

This is where I think Mamet’s “fable” subtitle comes in. It’s natural, I think, to think you are a genius whenever you do something new—write a poem, invent of machine, come up with a new idea. And then, there is a fear that comes with it that we externalize. Instead of thinking that our idea isn’t good or that we aren’t geniuses, we think that everyone else is a hack who needs our ideas to piggyback off of—they’ve been lying in wait all this time just for us to think of that new killer idea. Of course, this is silly. Number one, there are very few “water engine” quality ideas out there. By and large, most good ideas are just mediocre, not revolutionary ideas. Number two, though plagiarism and copying exists all over the place, the real stealing of an idea most often happens over time, as authors/inventors gradually lose control over it into the public domain (if lucky) or into obscurity (if lucky in another sort of way). Nevertheless, anxiety over that golden ticket idea, whether you actually have one or not, is a real American fable. That’s not to say that it doesn’t exist—a well-meaning loner in a garage has invented things before and will again—but whether you fit that model or not, invention is often more complicated, less melodramatic, full of revisions and incompletions. Basically, invention is a process much more messy than the output of a water engine, and *usually* no one dies.

[Nick Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two minor David Mamet plays. The Water Engine is the longer and more substantial work. It was originally a radio play and its structure is interesting. Set in a 1930s radio station, the actors perform the play. The play works on three levels - the actors on the stage, the actors in the 1930s radio studio and the characters in the play - and I presume it moves between these ‘realities’ in a fluid way. Otherwise the play is quite fun but fairly straightforward: an inventor has created an engine that will run on water, the powers that be are out to destroy it. I’m not sure if the typical Mamet themes can be found lurking in the shadows. Mr Happiness is a very short play for one actor. Again set in a 1930s radio station, the central character is an ‘Agony Aunt’ responding to listeners’ letters and their problems. I’m not sure it does that much, but with the right actor I’m sure it can be fun.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little more hopeful than a lot of the Mamet I've read, in that it suggests not every single character in his/our universe is irrevocably self-involved. That said, in The Water Engine, contemporary corporate culture's baser instincts toward greed loom overpoweringly large, but the fact there is any fight at all gives a kind of hope that feels unusual for this author. The second piece, Mr. Happiness, is also interested in highlighting the difference between what should be done and what fear and any one person's limited point of view leads them to do, but it's all of limited narrative interest since it's staged as a guy talking on the radio. Not much trajectory there.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minor Mamet. But he's always interesting and has a great ear.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of David Mamet's lesser-known plays, probably because it doesn't contain the word "fuck," The Water Engine is, as Mamet put it, an "American fable" about an idealistic man who invents an engine that runs on water, and the industrialists who must destroy him to preserve their income and power. Set around Chigago's World's Fair in the 1930s, the play is framed as a radio play, with onstage sound effects, announcers, and so forth, giving it a dreamlike and nostalgic quality, even as acts of deep brutality take place.

[Ayoub]

The Water Engine: An American Fable and Mr. Happiness : Two Plays The Water Engine: An American Fable and Mr. Happiness : Two Plays (Hardcover) by David Mamet

[Harry Egerton · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Water Engine - 3/5

Mr Happiness - 2/5