True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor by David Mamet Read Free Book Online

responsibility
. Wisdom lies in doing
your
job and getting on with it.
    Here, again, is your job: learn the lines, find a simple objective like that indicated by the author, speak the lines clearly in an attempt to achieve that objective. Text analysis is simply another attempt by the amateur to gain admittance to our pubs.
    Now let us be earnest and sincere and pretend for a moment that a great desire to perform good works is equal to artistic merit. This is the error of those who invest time endeavoring to “believe.” It is not necessary to believe anything in order to act. This delusion is attractive because and only because it allows the deluded to “work hard.”
    Historically, the artist has been reviled and feared because his or her job has nothing to do with hard work. There’s nothing you or I could do to enable us to paint like Caravaggio, or to skate like Wayne Gretsky. We could work all day every day for millennia, and we would never achieve that goal. But students are given tobelieve that they will be able to act like Fill-in-the-Blank if and when they master the impossible. If, for example, they can just learn to “believe.”
    But we cannot control what we believe.
    Religions and political creeds which degenerate in that direction demand belief. They receive from their adherents not belief (which cannot be controlled) but a certain more-or-less well-meaning avowal of hypocrisy: “I proclaim that I have mastered that over which I know I have no control, that I am part of that brotherhood which proclaims similarly, and that I am opposed to all who do not so proclaim.”
    The strength of these groups is directly proportional to the individual’s knowledge of his own failure to fulfill its goals—it is the individual’s attempt to conceal his shame which binds these groups together. This is the grand adhesive of the acting school. It is the reason for “the fourth wall.” The so-called Fourth Wall is a construction of someone afraid of the audience. Why should we strive to convince ourselves of the patently false?
    There is not a wall between the actor and the audience. Such would defeat the very purpose of the theatre, which is communication and communion.
    Respect for the audience is the foundation of all legitimate actor training—speak up, speak clearly, open yourself out, relax your body, find a simple objective; practice in these goals is practice in respect for the audience,and, without respect for the audience, there is no respect for the theatre; there is only self-absorption.
    The urge to “believe” grows from a feeling of individual worthlessness. The actor before the curtain, the soldier going into combat, the fighter into the arena, the athlete before the event, may have feelings of self-doubt, fear, or panic. These feelings will or will not appear, and no amount of “work on the self” can eradicate them.
    The rational individual will, when the bell rings, go out there anyway to do the job she said she was going to do. This is called courage.

ORAL INTERPRETATION
    A director calls and asks, “You have a character in the script say ‘I’ve been in Germany for some years.’ Exactly how many years would that be?” It seems a legitimate question, and, indeed, it is. It is a legitimate desire to know how to play the scene. But the legitimate answer is “I can’t help you.”
    First, the playwright does not know “how many years.” The play is a fantasy, it is not a history. The playwright is not
withholding
information, he is
supplying
all the information he knows, which is to say, all the information that is germane. “The character” did not spend any time
at all
in Germany. He never was
in
Germany. There
is
no character, there are just black marks on a white page—it is a line of dialogue.
    An actual person who said he had been in Germany would be able to answer the question “For how long?”
You
are an actual person, but the character is just a sketch, a few lines on the