ABSTRACT

To the men who work on David Mamet’s Lakeboat,1 their ability to construct a fictional world that results in a mutually understood dreamlife is as essential as breathing to their daily survival. Without such a safety net, their lives would be intolerable, and so they collectively invest in an elaborate network of fantasies through which they try to bolster their flagging egos and carve a shared moment of mutually “lived” experience-even though that experience has almost certainly never actually taken place.