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

page; and to wonder of thecharacter “How many years might he have spent in Germany?” is as pointless as to say of the subject of a portrait, “I wonder what underwear he has on?”
    And no answer the questioner might receive could, finally, be acted upon. “I spent some years in Germany” cannot be acted differently than “I spent twenty years in Germany.” It can only be
delivered
differently.
    There is a school of theatrical thought which asks the player to, in effect,
interpret
each line and statement for the audience, as if the line were a word in a dictionary, and the actor’s job was to perform the drawing which appeared next to it—to say the word “love” caressingly, the word “cold” as if shivering. This is not acting. It is Doing Funny Voices. It is the old Delsarte technique of the nineteenth century, come again to comfort us with its schematicism.
    The Delsarte books of that bygone day showed photographs of the correct pose to adopt for each emotion and degree thereof: grief, mild grief, severe grief; diversion, amusement, hilarity, and so on. The responsible actor needed only to determine which emotion was required for each scene, and turn to the page indicated and Bob’s your uncle.
    The notion—art without the untidiness of uncertainty—survives, as this book suggests, in many forms, and one of them is oral interpretation. This is a high school event in which the competitor mounts the podium to embellish snippets of speech with age-old clichés of delivery.
    It survives also in the “intellectual” school of script interpretation. “I want to know everything there is to know about this character and the times in which he lived,” the actor says. “And if the author wrote, ‘… did smite the Sledded Polack on the Ice,’ I want to know the crux of the dispute between Poland and Denmark which gave rise to that line, and I want to know the depth of the ice.’ ”
    Sounds like a good idea. But it ain’t going to help. It will not help you in the boxing ring to know the history of boxing, and it will not help you onstage to know the history of Denmark. It’s just lines on a page, people. All the knowledge in the world of the Elizabethan era will not help you play Mary Stuart.
    You have to learn the lines, look at the script
simply
to find a simple action for each scene, and then go out there and do your best to accomplish that action, and while you do, simply open your mouth and let the words come out however they will—as if they were gibberish, if you will.
    For to you, to the actor, it is not the words which carry the meaning—it is the actions. Moment to moment and night to night the play will change, as you and your adversaries onstage change, as your conflicting actions butt up against each other.
That
play,
that
interchange, is drama. But the words are set and unchanging. Any worth in them was put there by the author. His or her job is done, and the best service you can do them is to
accept
the words
as is
, and speak them simply andclearly in an attempt to get what you want from the other actor. If you learn the words by rote, as if they were a phone book, and let them come out of your mouth without your interpretation, the audience will be well served.
    Consider our friends the politicians. The politician who trots out the “reverent” parts of the speech “reverently,” the “aggressive” parts “staunchly,” the “emotional” parts “feelingly”—that person is a fraud, and nothing of what he or she would have you believe is true. How do we know we cannot trust them? We know because they are lying to you. Their very delivery is a lie. They have lied about what they feel in order to manipulate you.
    We do not embellish those things we care deeply about.
    Just as with the politician, the actor who puts on Funny Voices is a fraud. She may, granted, have a “good idea” about the script; but the audience isn’t looking for a person with a “good idea” about