2007 marks the ten year anniversary of David Mamet's True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. When this book was first published I was still in my freshman year at USC, and little did I know that my young life was directly within the crosshairs of Mamet's manifesto. I wanted to revisit it because, among my close circle of friends, this book was incredibly influential. Some of us chose to stay in school, some chose to return to school, others chose to drop out of school entirely.
So now that it's been ten years, how have those choices worked out? I'll be blogging along as I re-read this book a little bit at a time. I have a heavy load of required reading this quarter, and while True and False doesn't represent a very challenging read, I still have to fit it in during my free time...
Alright, here we go. Page 3. Mamet begins by assuring us that he is on our side. That is, the side of the actor. He loves actors. At first, he wanted to be one, but through experience he found that he was a better writer than he was an actor. (Whether or not he's a better writer than he is a director is a topic for another blog.) Mamet wastes no time in famously rejecting the Stanislavsky Method, honed by Lee Strasberg at the Actors' Studio. He calls Stanislavsky an "amateur" and describes his Method as "nonsense" and "hogwash", and his adherents as belonging to "a cult". Oh, what I wouldn't give to see a conversation between Mamet and James Lipton.
As Mamet derides Stanislavsky and other forms of "ancestor worship", he celebrates the work of "the busker, the gypsy, and the mountebank", those who "come up from the streets" and depend on the quality of their performance for their daily sustenance. We'll set aside the fact that buskers, gypsies, and mountebanks were notoriously con artists and charlatans, and just focus on the fact that they must have been very good at courting favor from their audience in order to earn (or swindle) enough money to buy themselves food at the end of the day.
Although Mamet cites these examples to demonstrate that actors must outwardly engage the audience rather than inwardly delve into their emotional state, it's not hard to extrapolate his analogy into something a little bigger. And it's here we see the first hints that Mamet is about as American as they come: he believes artists should be subject to the same economic forces as any other profit-seeking business person in free-market capitalism. If you want to earn your keep as a professional actor, you better figure out how to attract a paying audience. "That is what acting is. Doing the play for the audience. The rest is just practice... The professional performs for pay."
I suspect that Mamet is railing against the safety and comfort of academic theatre, not the non-profit theatre. After all, actors in non-profits still earn a paycheck (albeit a small one). No, Mamet is trying to knock some sense into "a generation that would like to stay in school..." But I think I'll save that chapter for my next blog.
Click here for part 2 of this series.
Comments (1)
Hi
I'm glad someone is doing a 10th anniversary critique of True and False. However, you are suddenly mistaken on a number of topics:
I think that there are some key flaws in your assessment of Mamet's critique of Stanislavsky:
Stanislavsky WAS an amateur, it was only by being an amateur that he could 'afford' to experiment so much.
Ancestor Worship is dangerous in any form, since Mamet's technique of acting is based on Stanislavsky, one can presume he feels that its acceptable to also criticise the parts he believes do not work.
Whilst I TOTALLY agree the LIPTON vs. MAMET Prize Fight would be quite staggering to watch, I'm going to your 'Part-Two' to continue my critique of your critique :)
Posted by Mark | June 15, 2007 4:57 AM
Posted on June 15, 2007 04:57