True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor

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Authors: David Mamet

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BOOK: True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor
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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
TO THE ACTOR

M
y 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

A
s 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 less
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

S
tanislavsky 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.

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