True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor

  Acclaim for DAVID MAMET’s

  TRUE AND FALSE

  “Terrific … simply, beautifully expressed … really clears the air.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Entertaining and enlightening.… Mamet’s new book on the actor’s life makes me proud to be a participant in that life.”

  —Joe Mantegna

  “This is a very important book. No one has defined the actor’s job better than Mamet.”

  —William H. Macy

  “I agree with almost nothing Mr. Mamet says in this book and encourage you to devour every word. Mamet is a genius.”

  —Alec Baldwin

  DAVID MAMET

  TRUE AND FALSE

  David Mamet was born in Chicago in 1947 and studied at Goddard College in Vermont and at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater in New York. He has taught at Goddard College, the Yale Drama School, and New York University, and lectures at the Atlantic Theater Company, of which he is a founding member. He was the first artistic director of Chicago’s St. Nicholas Theater Company, and has directed the films House of Games, Things Change, Homicide, Oleanna, and The Spanish Prisoner. Mamet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross. His acclaimed plays and screenplays include Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and The Verdict, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.

  ALSO BY DAVID MAMET

  PLAYS

  The Cryptogram

  Oleanna

  Speed-the-Plow

  Bobby Gould in Hell

  The Old Neighborhood

  The Woods

  The Shawl and Prairie du Chien

  Reunion and Dark Pony

  and The Sanctity of Marriage

  The Poet and the Rent

  Lakeboat

  Goldberg Street

  Glengarry Glen Ross

  The Frog Prince

  The Water Engine and Mr. Happiness

  Edmond

  American Buffalo

  A Life in the Theater

  Sexual Perversity in Chicago

  and The Duck Variations

  FICTION

  The Village

  The Old Religion

  NONFICTION

  The Cabin

  On Directing

  Some Freaks

  Make Believe Town

  Writing in Restaurants

  Three Uses of the Knife

  SCREENPLAYS

  Oleanna

  Glengarry Glen Ross

  We’re No Angels

  Things Change

  (with Shel Silverstein)

  Hoffa

  The Untouchables

  The Postman Always Rings Twice

  The Verdict

  House of Games

  Homicide

  Wag the Dog

  The Edge

  The Spanish Prisoner

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 1999

  Copyright © 1997 by David Mamet

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1997.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged

  the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Mamet, David.

  True and false : heresy and common sense

  for the actor / David Mamet.

  p. cm.

  1. Acting. I. Title.

  PN2061.M2265 1997

  792′.028—dc21 97-19336

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80649-9

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  The scientific approach to the phenomenon

  of human nature enables us to be ignorant without

  being frightened, and without, therefore, having to

  invent all sorts of weird theories to explain away

  our gaps in knowledge.

  —D. W. WINNICOTT

  Towards an Objective Study of Human Nature

  A magician is an actor

  impersonating a magician.

  —JEAN EUGÈNE ROBERT-HOUDIN

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  To the Actor

  Some Thoughts

  Ancestor Worship

  A Generation That Would Like to Stay in School

  Scholarship

  Find Your Mark

  I’m on the Corner

  Business is Business

  Auditions

  Paint by Numbers

  “Work”

  Oral Interpretation

  Helping the Play

  Acceptance

  The Rehearsal Process

  The Play and the Scene

  Emotions

  Action

  Guilt

  Concentration

  Talent

  Habit

  The Designated Hitter

  Performance and Character

  The Villain and the Hero

  Acting “As If”

  “They Once Walked Among Us”

  Eleven O’Clock Always Comes

  Meritocracy

  TO THE ACTOR

  My closest friends, my intimate companions, have always been actors. My beloved wife is an actor. My extended family consists of the actors I have grown up, worked, lived, and aged with. I have been, for many years, part of various theatre companies, any one of which in its healthy state more nearly resembles a perfect community than any other group that I have encountered.

  I wanted to be an actor, but it seemed that my affections did not that way tend. I learned to write and direct so that I could stay in the theatre, and be with that company of people.

  I studied acting in various schools, and could understand little of what was being said. I, and the other students, saw, I know, that the goal of the instruction was clear—to bring an immediacy to the performance—but none of us, I think, understood, nor did practice reveal, how the school’s exercises were to bring that goal about.

  As a teacher, director, and dramatist, I’ve worked—as did my teachers—to communicate my views to the actor. I have been fortunate in that I’ve had a lot of time to do it—almost thirty years—and that my views have been informed by and directed toward performance on the stage in front of a paying audience.

  That is what acting is. Doing the play for the audience. The rest is just practice. And I see that the life of the academy, the graduate school, the studio, while charming and comfortable, are as removed from the life (and the job) of the actor as aerobics are from boxing.

  This is a book for the actor. It contains, I hope, a little common sense, and a few basic principles. I hope that they will aid you to appreciate, to understand, to practice, this most challenging, and most worthy of endeavors.

  SOME THOUGHTS

  As actors, we spend most of our time nauseated, confused, guilty. We are lost and ashamed of it; confused because we don’t know what to do and we have too much information, none of which can be acted upon; and guilty because we feel we are not doing our job. We feel we have not learned our job well enough; we feel others know their job but we have failed. The good we do seems to be through chance: if only that agent would notice me; if only that producer had come on Tuesday night when I was good rather than on Wednesday night when I was off; if only the script allowed me to do more this and le
ss that; if only the audience had been better; if only we had not gone up five minutes late—as a consequence of which I lost my concentration.

  So we become envious of those who have “luck,” of those who, seemingly, have “technique,” as, having no “technique” ourselves, we think that their accomplishments must be based on “luck.” So we invest more heavily in a “technique based on luck,” and it becomes, in effect, a superstition, an investment in self-consciousness, in introversion. We turn our attention inward because introversion spares us from the horrible necessity of living in a theatre world for which we are totally unprepared. So our “technique” becomes more and more devoted to the development of a kind of catatonia: Sense memory. Substitution. Emotional memory. The “Fourth Wall.” The creation of auxiliary “stories” which are just as difficult to “perform” as the script but lack the merit of being about anything other than ourselves.

  The Stanislavsky “Method,” and the technique of the schools derived from it, is nonsense. It is not a technique out of the practice of which one develops a skill—it is a cult. The organic demands made on the actor are much more compelling, and the potential accomplishments of the actor much more important—the life and work, if I may say so, much more heroic—than anything prescribed or foreseen by this or any other “method” of acting.

  Acting is not a genteel profession. Actors used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. Those people’s performances so troubled the onlookers that they feared their ghosts. An awesome compliment.

  Those players moved the audience not such that they were admitted to a graduate school, or received a complimentary review, but such that the audience feared for their soul. Now that seems to me something to aim for.

  Here are some thoughts on the subject.

  ANCESTOR WORSHIP

  Stanislavsky was essentially an amateur. He was a member of a very wealthy merchant family, and he came to the theatre as a rich man. I do not mean to denigrate either his fervor or his accomplishments—I merely note his antecedents.

  The busker, the gypsy, the mountebank, come to the theatre to support themselves. As their support depends directly upon the favor of the audience, they study to obtain that favor. Those who have, in the perhaps overused phrase, “come up from the streets,” have little interest in their own performance, save as it relates to their ability to please an audience. This is, I believe, as it should be.

  I do not assume that the doctor, or the musician or dancer or painter, strives first to bring himself to a “state,” and only then directs his efforts outward. I assume that practitioners of these crafts put their attention on the legitimate demands of their profession and of their clients; and I, as a client, patient, audience member, do not expect these professionals to burden me with their life story.

  The actor is onstage to communicate the play to the audience. That is the beginning and the end of his and her job. To do so the actor needs a strong voice, superb diction, a supple, well-proportioned body, and a rudimentary understanding of the play.

  The actor does not need to “become” the character. The phrase, in fact, has no meaning. There is no character. There are only lines upon a page. They are lines of dialogue meant to be said by the actor. When he or she says them simply, in an attempt to achieve an object more or less like that suggested by the author, the audience sees an illusion of a character upon the stage.

  To create this illusion the actor has to undergo nothing whatever. He or she is as free of the necessity of “feeling” as the magician is free of the necessity of actually summoning supernormal powers. The magician creates an illusion in the mind of the audience. So does the actor.

  Eisenstein wrote that the true power of film came from the synthesis in the mind of the viewer of shot A and shot B: e.g., shot A, a teakettle whistling; shot B, a young woman raises her head from a desk. The viewer is thus given the idea “rising to renewed labors.” If shot A is a black-robed judge being handed an envelope, he opens it, and clears his throat; and shot B is the same as before—a woman raising her head from a desk—the audience creates the idea “hearing the verdict.”

  The action of the woman is the same in each case, her snippet of film is the same. Nothing has changed except the juxtaposition of images, but that juxtaposition gives the audience a completely new idea.

  Eisenstein theorizes, and I believe his theory is borne out in example, that the idea so created is vastly stronger—i.e., more effective—than simply “following the protagonist around”—i.e., using the camera to tell the story rather than using the cut; that this method of storytelling is superior because it is the viewer who creates the idea—who, in effect, tells herself the story.

  Similarly, it is the juxtaposition in the mind of the audience between the spoken word of the author and the simple directed-but-uninflected action of the actor which creates the ineluctable idea of character in the mind of the audience.

  ——

  Most acting training is directed at recapitulating the script. Actors are told to learn how to “be happy,” “be sad,” “be distracted,” at those points in the script or performance where it would seem the “character” would so be. Such behavior is not only unnecessary, it is harmful both to the actor and to the audience.

  My philosophical bent and thirty years’ experience inform me that nothing in the world is less interesting than an actor on the stage involved in his or her own emotions. The very act of striving to create an emotional state in oneself takes one out of the play. It is the ultimate self-consciousness, and though it may be self-consciousness in the service of an ideal, it is no less boring for that.

  The actor on the stage, looking for or striving to create a “state” in himself can think only one of two things: (a) I have not reached the required state yet; I am deficient and must try harder; or (b) I have reached the required state, how proficient I am! (at which point the mind, ever jealous of its prerogatives, will reduce the actor to (a).

  Both (a) and (b) take the actor right out of the play. For the mind cannot be forced. It can be suggested, but it cannot be forced. An actor onstage can no more act upon the order “Be happy” than she can upon the order “Do not think of a hippopotamus.”

  Our emotional-psychological makeup is such that our only response to an order to think or feel anything is rebellion. Think of the times someone suggested that you “cheer up,” of the perfect young person your friends wanted to fix you up with, of the director who suggested you “relax.” The response to an emotional demand is antagonism and rebellion. There is no exception. If one were truly able to command one’s conscious thoughts, to summon emotion at will, there would be no neurosis, no psychosis, no psychoanalysis, no sadness.

  We cannot control our thoughts, nor can we control our emotions. But perhaps “control of emotion” has a special case-specific meaning upon the stage. Indeed it does. It means “pretending.”

  I don’t care to see a musician concentrating on what he or she feels while performing. Nor do I care to see an actor do so. As a playwright and as a lover of good writing, I know that the good play does not need the support of the actor, in effect, narrating its psychological undertones, and that the bad play will not benefit from it.

  “Emotional memory,” “sense memory,” and the tenets of the Method back to and including Stanislavsky’s trilogy are a lot of hogwash. This “method” does not work; it cannot be practiced; it is, in theory, design, and supposed execution supererogatory—it is as useless as teaching pilots to flap their arms while in the cockpit in order to increase the lift of the plane.

  The plane is designed to fly; the pilot is trained to direct it. Likewise, the play is designed, if correctly designed, as a series of incidents in which and through which the protagonist struggles toward his or her goal. It is the job of the actor to show up, and use the lines and his or her will and common sense, to attempt to achieve a goal similar to that of the protagonist. And that is the end of the actor’s job.

&n
bsp; In “real life” the mother begging for her child’s life, the criminal begging for a pardon, the atoning lover pleading for one last chance—these people give no attention whatever to their own state, and all attention to the state of that person from whom they require their object. This outward-directedness brings the actor in “real life” to a state of magnificent responsiveness and makes his progress thrilling to watch.

  On the stage, similarly, it is the progress of the outward-directed actor, who behaves with no regard to his personal state, but with all regard for the responses of his antagonists, which thrills the viewers. Great drama, onstage or off, is not the performance of deeds with great emotion, but the performance of great deeds with no emotion whatever.

  Now, will the outward-directed actor not be, now and again, “moved”? Certainly, as will anyone in any circumstance, giving all of his or her attention to a task—but this emotion is a by-product, and a trivial by-product, of the performance of the action. It is not the point of the exercise. The bogus politician strives for verisimilitude. Roosevelt, on December 7, 1941, had more important things to do.

  ——

  The simple performance of the great deed, onstage or off, is called “heroism.” The person who will not be swayed, who perseveres no matter what—that hero has the capacity to inspire us, to suggest that we reexamine our self-imposed limitations and try again.

  In politics, in sport, at work, or in literature, that hero suggests through selflessness that we can be better than we are. The liar, the pretender, the self-promoter, the false performer full of crocodile tears, jingoism, cheap patriotism—that person may compel our admiration for a moment, but will subsequently leave us unsure, angry, and degraded.

  Similarly, onstage, the Great Actor, capable of bringing herself to tears, may extort our admiration for her “accomplishment,” but she will never leave us stronger; she has made us pay a price, and made us pretend we like it, but we leave the theatre moved only by our capacity to be moved.