by David Mamet
Well, then, how did the Method “greats” rise to prominence, if not through their studies?
Through the gifts which God gave them, through experience, and in spite of their studies—to quote Fielding, “Education being proved useless save in those cases where it is almost superfluous.”
Actors almost without exception pursue a course of study. As all have passed through some “training,” and as a small but predictable percentage of them will have been graced with a predisposition for the stage, therefore a small percentage will reflect glory on some institution. I suggest, though, that there is no cause-and-effect relationship—it is as if Corsica, claiming Napoleon, recommended herself as a training ground for emperors.
And, of course, the Actors’ Studio, in the fifties, arrogated to itself some fine talents. The Studio, however, chose them; it did not make them. The best actors, passing through a rigorous and extensive auditioning process, were admitted to the Studio—an admittance deemed a great honor. Why would the Studio, and why should the actor, demean the operations of instruction? Administrative self-interest and filial piety would insure that they would not; but I suggest that they, the accomplished actors, young, vital, talented, and hearty, succeeded and succeed, at the Studio and elsewhere, in spite of their training.
Stanislavsky was certainly a master administrator, may have been a brilliant director and/or actor, and was widely heralded as a theoretician. But I say that his contribution as a theoretician was that of a dilettante, and has, since his day, been a lodestone for the theoretical, I will say the antipractical, soul. For amateurs. For his theories cannot be put into practice.
Like their coeval harness-mate, psychoanalysis, they can demand fealty and long-term devotion, but they rarely, if ever, show demonstrable results. Again like psychoanalysis, they command the time and attention of many who would otherwise be hard put to fill an idle hour; and, to complete the conceit, they, neither of them, tend toward closure, i.e., a completion of a course of action/study—for such closure would deprive the devotee of an enjoyable occupation.
The professional performs for pay. Her job is to play the piece such that the audience may understand it—the self-respecting person keeps her thoughts and emotions to herself.
The paint-by-numbers dissection of the play into emotional oases is the hobbyhorse of those whom chance or mischance has freed of the necessity to make their living on the stage.
A GENERATION THAT WOULD
LIKE TO STAY IN SCHOOL
You readers are of a generation that would like to stay in school. The world is, as usual, a frightening place to enter for all save the precious few impaired by inherited security There was perhaps for a time in this country a fairly secure promise of a career for a small segment of the bourgeoisie, and now even that is gone and good grades and a little family money can no longer assure one of the sinecure in law or medicine. And further, for the player—that is, for the man or woman who is interested in a career on the stage—there never was such a security.
You will encounter in your travels folks of your own age who chose the institutional path, who became the arts administrators rather than the actors, the casting agents rather than the writers. These folks chose to serve an institutional authority in exchange for a paycheck, and these folks are going to be with you for the rest of your life, and you actors and writers and people who come up off the street, who live without certainty day to day and year to year are going to have to bear with being called children by these institutional types; you will, as Shakespeare tells us, endure “the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.”
It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to a craft rather than a career, to an idea rather than an institution. It’s courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you.
Part of the requirement of a life in the theatre is to stay out of school. The old joke has the young woman in her bedroom as a visitor at a castle in Transylvania when a vampire appears in the middle of the night. The young lady grabs two spoons off the night table, forms them into a cross and thrusts them at the vampire, who responds, “Vil gurnisht Helfin,” which is Yiddish for “It ain’t gonna help.” And the same is true of school.
Past vocal and physical training, and the most rudimentary instruction in script analysis—all of which, by the way, can be acquired piecemeal through observation and practice, through personal tutoring, or through a mixture of the above—such acting training will not help you. Formal education for the player is not only useless, but harmful. It stresses the academic model and denies the primacy of the interchange with the audience.
The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.
Like the belief of the terminally ill in medicine, the belief of the legitimately frightened in the educational process is a comforting lie.
Young people ask if they should go to graduate school in the theatre, as they ask if it is a good idea to go to law school to improve their minds. (A question testing the limits of irony.) Alice, when in Wonderland, asked the caterpillar which road she should take, and the caterpillar responded by asking her where she wanted to end up. That’s a question you might ask yourself.
If you want to be in the theatre, go into the theatre. If you want to have made a valiant effort to go into the theatre before you go into real estate or law school or marry wealth, then perhaps you should stay in school.
The skill of acting is finally a physical skill; it is not a mental exercise, and has nothing whatever to do with the ability to pass a test.
The skill of acting is not the paint-by-numbers ability to amalgamate emotional oases—to string them like pearls into a performance (the Method). Nor is it the mastery of syntax (the academic public speaking model). The skill of acting is like the skill of sport, which is a physical event. And like that endeavor, its difficulty consists to a large extent in being much simpler than it seems. Like sports, the study of acting consists in the main of getting out of one’s own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.
Now what do I mean by that? The Method school would teach the actor to prepare a moment, a memory, an emotion for each interchange in the play and to stick to that preparation. This is an error on the order of the basketball coach instructing his team to stick to the plays which they practiced irrespective of what their opponents are doing.
We actors, being human, do not like the unexpected. If we encounter the unexpected onstage in front of people, we are apt to reveal ourselves. And formal academic education and sense memory and emotional memory and creative “interpretation” and all of these skills which are much more appropriate, finally, to the lectern than to the stage, are ways of concealing the truth of that revelation—of that moment.
The truth of the moment is another name for what is actually happening between the two people onstage. That interchange is always unplanned, is always taking place, is always fascinating, and it is to the end of concealing that interchange that most acting training is directed.
In my earlier days actors would begin a line by adding their own words, saying “I mean.” Some thought that had personalized the line and made it “more real.” Today we see actors doing the same thing in a different way. It is what I call Hollywood Huff acting. The actor is given a cue, and he shuffles his feet and blows out air in a huff, much like a whale, sometimes enunciating a sort of “phew,” and then continues to the assigned line. What does this mean? It means the actor was moved by an unforeseen sensation, emotion, or perception, and, in an effort to regain what he understood to be a necessary anchor of self-consciousness, he played for time. All of this happened, of course, in the merest fraction
of a second, but it did happen.
And it happens all the time, that huff, that “I mean.” That’s where the scene went. If the actor had simply opened his mouth on cue and spoken even though he felt uncertain, the audience would have been treated to the truth of the moment, to a lovely, unexpected, unforeseeable beautiful exchange between the two people onstage. They would in effect have witnessed the true lost art of the actor.
Stanislavsky said that the person one is is a thousand times more interesting than the best actor one could become. And when the actor picks up her cue, then speaks out though uncertain, the audience sees that interesting person. They see true courage, not a portrayal of courage, but true courage. The individual onstage speaks because she is called upon to speak—when she has nothing to support her except her self-respect.
When the actual courage of the actor is coupled with the lines of the playwright, the illusion of character is created. When the audience sees the steadfastness of the actress playing Joan coupled with the words of Shaw, they see majesty. When they see the courage of the actor playing Willy Loman coupled with the words of Arthur Miller, they see anguish. And it is the coupling of the truth of the actor struggling bravely with uncertainty, with the portrayal made by the dramatist, which, again, creates the illusion of character—the illusion of the character of the king, the murderer, or the saint.
The Method got it wrong. Yes, the actor is undergoing something onstage, but it is beside the point to have him or her “undergo” the supposed trials of the character upon the stage. The actor has his own trials to undergo, and they are right in front of him. They don’t have to be superadded; they exist. His challenge is not to recapitulate, to pretend to the difficulties of the written character; it is to open the mouth, stand straight, and say the words bravely—adding nothing, denying nothing, and without the intent to manipulate anyone: himself, his fellows, the audience.
To learn to do that is to learn to act.
The actor, in learning to be true and simple, in learning to speak to the point despite being frightened, and with no certainty of being understood, creates his own character; he forges character in himself. Onstage. And it is this character which he brings to the audience, and by which the audience is truly moved.
SCHOLARSHIP
Polite western society has long confounded scholarship with art. Scholarship is a reasoned endeavor; and the goal of scholarship, at least as it applies to the art of the actor, is to transform the scholar from a member of the audience into a being superior to it. “It is all very well,” the theatrical scholars might say, “to laugh, to cry, to gasp—it’s fine for the mob. But I will do something higher, and will participate only as a sort of cultural referee.”
That’s fine for a scholar, but for a working member of the theatre to reason thusly is to wish one’s life away. Here is the taint of scholarship in the theatre: a preoccupation with effect. That is the misjudgment of the Method: the notion that one can determine the effect one wants to have upon an audience, and then study and supply said effect.
Preoccupation with effect is preoccupation with the self, and not only is it joyless, it’s a waste of time. Can we imagine the Cockney street buskers studying what effect they wish to have on the audience at which portion of their turn? Can we imagine the African drummer doing so, the Gypsy guitarist, the klezmer? Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one’s virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit. Our effect is not for us to know. It is not in our control. Only our intention is under our control. As we strive to make our intentions pure, devoid of the desire to manipulate, and clear, directed to a concrete, easily stated end, our performances become pure and clear.
Eleven o’clock always comes. In the meantime, may you know the happiness of working to serve your own good opinion. Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.
FIND YOUR MARK
Find your mark, look the other fellow in the eye,
and tell the truth.
—JAMES CAGNEY
Why accept the second-rate in yourself or in others? Why laugh at the unfunny? Why sigh at the hackneyed? Why gasp at the predictable? Why do we do that? We do it because we need to laugh, to sigh, to gasp.
And in the absence of the real stimulus we are capable of being manipulated and of manipulating ourselves, to take the form for the substance. To take cheap, degraded thrills for fear of having no thrills at all. Because, remember, it is the audience that goes to the theatre to exercise its emotion—not the actor, the audience. And when they go, having paid to be moved, they exercise their right to their money’s worth.
What moves them?
When we read the newspaper, we are most moved by the ordinary man or woman forced by circumstances to act in an extraordinary way. We are moved by heroism. We are not moved by the self-proclaimed emotions of the manipulative, or of the famous. We discount to the greatest extent these reports, as we fear, correctly, that they are only advertising themselves. Similarly, at the theatre or at the film, we are truly and only moved by the ordinary men or women (actors) doing their best under extraordinary circumstances, forced to act in an extraordinary way in order to achieve their goal. Just as when we read in the newspaper of the postman who rescues the invalid from the burning building. We are moved by the heroism of the ordinary person acting in an extraordinary way.
We enjoy the foibles of the great, their follies, and their self-proclamations, as it titillates both our own grandiose folly and our feeling of self-importance—as we feel ourselves, rightly, superior to them. But this thrill is cheap and it is as nothing compared to our enjoyment of real heroism. Why? Because when we see real heroism, the heroism of the ordinary person forced by circumstances to act bravely, we identify with that man or woman and we say, “If they can do it, then perhaps I could, too.”
The actor who mugs, who hams it up, who lays claim to emotions which are false, or who uses these supposed emotions to make a demand upon the audience, can extort an unhappy admiration as he asks the audience in admiring him to admire itself. But the actor who tells the truth simply because the circumstances require it is like the postman who saves the invalid, the bicycle messenger who rides in the Olympics, an ordinary man or woman behaving with address and direction in extraordinary circumstances. And, at this, we, the audience, exercise a higher faculty than that of getting our money’s worth: the faculty of admiration, of love for true nobility in human character. Now, I have spoken of “the situation.” You say, “The postman was placed in a situation; Hamlet was placed in a situation. I might act truthfully perhaps, but cannot one act truthfully and be out of adjustment with the situation? How can I be true to the situation?”
Stanislavsky said the actor should ask, “What would I do in that situation?” His student Vakhtangov said the question was more aptly put, “What must I do to do what I would do in that situation?” But I say you should ask not “What would I do in that situation,” not “What must I do to do what I would do in that situation?” but you should discard the idea of “the situation” altogether.
None of us has any idea whatever what we would do in such a situation—Hamlet’s or the postman’s. How can we know? Only a fool or a liar would claim to know what they would do when called upon to act with courage.
Well, fine then, let’s disavow foreknowledge of our capacity for bravery, for grace under pressure; and rather than idolizing ourselves—which is what sense memory is all about, enthroning our power to feel and hoping that that includes the power to move—rather let us learn to submit, as it were, to stand the gaff, to face the audience, the casting director, the opponent on the stage, with, bravely, shoulders squared. And then, rather than pretending, we can discover whether or not we are courageous.
——
Most of us, in the course of a day or a week, treat ourselves to the fantasy of the Bad News at the Doctor’s Office in which we are invited to sit and hear our fate. And in that
fantasy we are stoical and simple, and that is of course what makes the fantasy so pleasing to indulge in—we wait to hear the verdict on our future bravely.
Similarly onstage. The actor is placed in that position somewhere between regularly and constantly. He or she needs something the other person onstage has (in the case of the Doctor’s Office fantasy it is information). The actor is given the opportunity to be brave and simple in difficult circumstances.
Here’s a hint. The opportunity for bravery is always there—it is always in the play itself.
Let me explain. The actor says to himself, “I can’t play this scene because I am unprepared; I can’t play it because I don’t like the other actor, who is a swine; I feel that the moment is wrong as the director has interpreted it; I feel this flies in the face of my preparation; the script isn’t as good as I thought it was,” and so on.
All of these feelings are engendered by the script and they are always and only engendered by the script. The fantasy that the play brings to life (the bad news from the doctor, begging for the child’s life, refusing the crown) supplies everything we need to act—and all our excuses, all those supposed “impediments” to acting are, if we listen closely, merely the play asserting itself. The actor creates excuses not to act and attributes her reluctance to everything in the world except the actual cause. The play itself has brought her to life in ways she has not foreseen, and she doesn’t like it one small bit. I realize this observation may seem simplistic and even Pollyannaish, and I wouldn’t credit it myself except that I have seen it to be true over too long a time spent in show business.
We say, “I can’t play the scene in Hamlet because I am unprepared, I can’t play the scene in Othello because I don’t quite trust those around me; I can’t play Desdemona because I don’t believe the fellow playing Othello would actually act that way. I can’t play Bigger Thomas because I am furious at everyone around me. I can’t play the Madame Ranyevskaya scene because I simply don’t care about this project anymore.”
