True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor by David Mamet

Author:David Mamet [Mamet, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Writing
ISBN: 9780307806499
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1997-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

HELPING THE PLAY

If 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 interactions of 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 in your 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.

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