True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor

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True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor Details

Review "Mamet manages to demolish the myths...that pass for theory with regard o acting and directing. . . True and False is a revealing book of the highest order and a pleasure to read"—Anthony Hopkins   "Hard-edged, pragmatic and idealistic. . . . Every actor or would-be actor should read this book."—Chicago Tribune    "Trenchant...Meet’s pared-down, occasionally cryptic prose can make powerful sense."—The New York Times   "This book should be read and considered by everyone who acts."—Steve Martin  Read more About the Author David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, as well as a director, novelist, poet, and essayist. He has written the screenplays for more than twenty films, including Heist, Spartan, House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, The Winslow Boy, Wag the Dog, and the Oscar-nominated The Verdict. His more than twenty plays include Oleanna, The Cryptogram, Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and the Pulitzer Prizewinning Glengarry Glen Ross. Born in Chicago in 1947, Mamet has taught at the Yale School of Drama, New York University, and Goddard College, and is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company. Read more

Reviews

I enjoy Mamet's writing and respect his work, and there are a lot of positives about this book. But let me start with the negatives.Ironically, Mamet's "simple" approach to acting is exactly what I was taught in the first university acting class I ever took. This class was taught by a professor who had great respect for academics. His Acting I students were taught from the very beginning to avoid focusing on trying to show or feel emotions, and to focus instead on the objective of the character in the scene. Of course, we went on to study voice, movement, Shakespeare, dramaturgy, makeup, stagecraft, representative plays, directing--all subjects that I daresay are of importance to one hoping to work as an actor. I went to a small public university. We were exposed (of course) to Stanislavski's theories, and to "method" acting, and such, because these subjects are undoubtedly part of the world of theatre, and actors should know about them. But we did not have any cult beliefs forced upon us. In fact, everything we did was backed up by an ambitious schedule of mainstage and second-stage (student-directed) plays every semester, and it was generally all quite practical, all with the aim of training students to be ready to work as actors.Mamet's basic thesis here seems to be that all acting schools want to fill students with theories that are useless in the actor's working world, for the purpose of serving some ivory-tower god that has no relevance to life in the real world. He even condescendingly tells readers that our generation (does he expect only one generation to read his book?) are afraid of life and would like to stay in school.There is, in fact, a lot of insight in this book, if you read it not as statements of truth and falsehood, but as something of a mild tirade--a playwright expressing his frustration against what actors seem to want to add to his plays, which he obviously feels should stand on their own. It's probably the case that he has come up against a lot of B.S. in his esteemed career, and he would like to take this opportunity to debunk some of it. But he goes too far.Based on some of his other books, Mamet is personally averse to liberal-arts education, to the very idea that a person needs any education beyond basic job training. The value of being educated for the sake of being educated eludes him. But he takes this view to the extreme: all education is a complete fraud; it's all worthless; nobody learns anything useful in any institution of higher learning. Clearly this view is out of touch with reality.And then there is his idea that in order to play a character (which he alternately treats as a nonentity and a useful abstraction), all that is required is that the actor should choose some simple action (objective) to play in each scene, and this action need not be the character's action in the scene; it need only be "like it." Then the actor should more or less blindly recite his or her lines while pursuing the chosen objective.Well, straightaway I tried this with a simple monologue, and of course I learned after a few readings that the character's objective is not simple. He is baring his soul to a stranger he has just met. Why? He hopes she will affirm his worth? He is trying to work out his problems for himself by discussing them with her? He is attracted to her and wants to make a personal connection? ALL of these are elements in this character's motivation, and this is a very simple one-act play, not King Lear.As an example, Mamet considers Horatio on the battlements, come to investigate the reported ghost sightings. He ventures that since the actor himself does not believe in ghosts, he should choose some action that he himself can relate to, that is "like" what Horatio is doing here, and he comes up with "to clean up a mess." So the actor playing Horatio should spew Shakespeare's lines while "cleaning up a mess" in this scene. It's hard to see how this advice is going to help anyone play Horatio. Mamet is dead against using memories of similar experiences to summon the proper mood, but he seems to be suggesting that the actor in this scene do just that--summon the mood with memories of situations in which a mess must be cleaned up.What is the poor actor to do when confronted with the ghost of the king? After all, he doesn't believe in ghosts. He knows this ghost is not real. Therefore he isn't scared of it. Does Mamet suggest that therefore Horatio cannot be afraid of the ghost, even though Shakespeare's lines indicate that he should be? The actor is not allowed to pretend to be afraid, because that would be a lie? He's not allowed to call upon his resources of life experience, remembering what it was like to be afraid in his own past?Even the most rudimentary pretending relies on emotional and sense memory. If I pretend to be seeing an actual ghost, of course I'm going to have to use my imagination to come up with an idea of what that would be like, and of course my imagination is stocked with images and feelings from my own life experiences.All that said, I think this is a very interesting and insightful book. If you read between the lines of the bombastic style, there are general truths here. You just have to translate them from the form they're expressed in, which is typically oversimplified, black-and-white assertions, such as that no actor ever had a happy childhood. (!)It's ironic that a man so full of disdain for academia uses words that most of his readers would have to look up in a dictionary to know what they mean. There are plain, straightforward ways of saying what he wants to say that don't involve these words. If the actor's job is to please the audience, surely the author's job is to please the reader, not confuse him or her. And if those learned professors in ivory towers are to be accused of trying to make us feel that we are beneath them because we haven't bowed to the gods of higher education and received their blessing, what does this esoteric vocabulary say of Mamet's motives as a writer? He says "stay out of school," while writing prose that only those with a solid liberal-arts education are going to understand, and even then with some difficulty.But I forgive him these quirks, because I think he really is a brilliant thinker, and I find his thoughts interesting. At the end of the day, it probably is true that actors tend to overcomplicate the process, and that a lot of the systems and methods are more likely to hinder than help.

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