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

the script. They are looking for a person who can
act
—who can bring to the script something they couldn’t have learned or imagined from reading it in a library. The audience is looking for spontaneity, for
individuality
, for strength. They aren’t going to get it from your tired old interpretive powers.
    Here is what I have learned in a lifetime of play-writing:
It doesn’t
matter
how you say the lines
. What matters is what you mean. What comes from the heart goes to the heart. The rest is Funny Voices.

HELPING THE PLAY
    I f it is necessary for us to devote the energy to believe that we are a Great Actor, or a character actor, or an ugly actor, or a charming actor, that energy will not be put into the task of observation and action on the things we have learned … let us accept ourselves and set about our task. If it is necessary for us to believe we live in turn-of-the-century Russia or that that woman who last week played our sister Anya is this week Arkadina our mother, that energy will not be devoted to getting our play done. All of acting, all parts, all seemingly emotion-laden scenes are capable of and must be reduced to simple physical actions calling neither for belief nor for “emotional preparation.”
    Most plays are better read than performed. Why? Because the feelings the play awakens as we read it are called forth by the truth of the uninflected interactionsof the characters. Why are these interactions so less moving when staged by actors? Because they are no longer true. The words are the same, but the truth of the moment is cloyed by the preconceptions of the actors, “by feelings” derived in solitude and persisted in, in spite of the reality of the other actor.
    An “intellectual” company of actors becomes a cabal of hypocrisy. “I will agree not to notice what you are truly doing, because to do so would interfere with my ability to trot out my well-prepared emotion at the appropriate instant. In return, you must agree not to notice what
I am
doing.” So the investment in “emotion” makes the play not a moment-to-moment flow of the real life of the actor, but, instead, an arid desert of silly falsehoods enlivened periodically by a signpost of “fake” emotions.
    But we need not hobble after false emotions. We are not empty. We are alive, and emotion and feeling flow through us constantly. They are not susceptible to our conscious mind, but they are there.
    There is nothing we feel nothing about—ice cream, Yugoslavia, coffee, religion—and we do not have to add these feelings to a play. The author has already done that through the truth of the writing, and if he has not, it is too late.
    Be a man; be a woman. Look at the world around you: onstage and off. Do not forsake your reason. Do not paternalize yourself. Your true creative powers lie inyour imagination, which is eternally fertile, but cannot be forced, and your
will
, i.e., your true character, which can be developed through exercise.
    To bring to the stage a mature man or woman capable of
decision based on will
is to make of acting not only an art but a
noble
art.
    In so doing, you present to the eyes of a demoralized public the spectacle of a human being acting as she thinks right irrespective of the consequences. What is required is not the intellect to “help the play,” but the wisdom to refrain.

ACCEPTANCE
    O ften, as students, we are struck with a sense of guilt because we cannot enter into that state of
belief
we think is required of us. We speak of “getting” the character. “Getting” the role. Of that magic time when we were onstage or in class and we somehow “forgot” that we were in a play or in a scene. And we feel that it is required of us to dwell always in this state, this magical state of psychosis: to dwell in a state where we “forget” that we are actors in a play and somehow “become” the characters. As if acting were not an art and a skill but only the ability to self-induce a