True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor Read online

  I was fortunate to grow up in an environment that made it easy to prefer the well-made to the shoddy. The well-made paid the rent.

  The well-made play, scene, design, direction, the good performance, must be true. The simple truth may stem from a natural disposition, or come from years of arduous study—it’s nobody’s business but your own.

  The blandishments of fame, money, and security are great. Sometimes they have to be quieted, sometimes they have to be compromised with—just as in any other sphere of life.

  What is true, what is false, what is, finally, important?

  It is not a sign of ignorance not to know the answers. But there is great merit in facing the questions.

  ALSO BY DAVID MAMET

  THE CABIN

  Reminiscence and Diversions

  The pieces in The Cabin are about places and things, from the suburbs of Chicago to New York City. They are about guns, campaign buttons, and a cabin in the Vermont woods that stinks of wood smoke and kerosene—and about their associations of pleasure, menace, and regret.

  Memoir/Essays/0-679-74720-6

  THE CRYPTOGRAM

  The Cryptogram is a journey back into childhood and the moment of its vanishing—the moment when the sheltering world is suddenly revealed as a place full of dangers. Set in 1959 and involving an insomniac boy, his anxious mother, and a family friend with a tendency toward deception, David Mamet’s play uses events as stepping stones toward a series of devastating revelations.

  Drama/0-679-74653-6

  THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD

  In these three short plays, a middle-aged Bobby Gould returns to the old neighborhood in a series of encounters with his past that open windows on his present. Mamet proves himself a writer who can turn the most innocuous phrase into a lit fuse and a family reunion into a perfectly orchestrated firestorm of sympathy, yearning, and rage.

  Drama/0-679-74652-8

  OLEANNA

  A male college instructor and his female student sit down to discuss her grades and in a terrifyingly short time become participants in a modern reprise of the Inquisition. The relationship between the somewhat fatuous teacher and his seemingly hapless pupil turns into a fiendishly accurate X-ray of the mechanisms of power, censorship, and abuse.

  Drama/0-679-74536-X

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