Directions

Compared to some of its New England neighbors, Vermont has seemed to long-time resident David Mamet a place of intrinsic energy and progressiveness. It lived up to the old saw that settlers came up the Connecticut River and turned right to get to New Hampshire and left to get to Vermont. Is this bi-partisan tradition of live and let live an accident of geography, the happy byproduct of 200 years of national neglect, an emanation of its Scots-Irish regional character? In exploring the ways in which his decades in Vermont have shaped his character and his work, Mamet examines how these contributory strands inform each other. He asks how does the free-thrinking tradition survive in a climate of increasing conglomeration? As the farmland, the open spaces, the wildlife environment, and thus the hunting ethos contract, what remains?