by David Mamet
All of the above and every other “I can’t” excuse is engendered by the play because our suggestibility knows no limits. Our minds work with unbelievable speed assembling and ordering information. That is our protective device as animals, and it has enabled us both to defeat the woolly mammoth and to vote for supply-side economics—we are infinitely suggestible.
As much as we theatre folk like to think of ourselves as intellectuals, we are not. Ours is not an intellectual profession. All the book learning in the world, all the “ideas,” will not enable one to play Hedda Gabler, and all the gab about the “arc of the character” and “I based my performance on …” is gibberish. There is no arc of the character; and one can no more base a performance on an idea than one can base a love affair on an idea. These phrases are nothing but talismans of the actor to enable him or her to ward off evil, and the evil they attempt to ward off is the terrifying unforeseen.
The magic phrases and procedures are incantations to lessen the terror of going out there naked. But that’s how the actor goes out there, like it or not.
And all the emotions and sense memory and emotional checkpoints will not create certainty. On the contrary, they will only dull the actor to the one certainty onstage, which is that the moment is going to unfold as it will and in spite of the actor’s desires. The actor cannot control it; he or she can only ignore it.
To return to suggestibility. The script is going to live in its own unforeseeable ways. The other people onstage will be acting in this rehearsal, in this performance, in this moment, in this take, in their own unforeseeable ways. Therefore you the actor, as you will be dealing with both the script and the others, as you are seeing something you did not expect, will likely be feeling something you did not expect. You will be brought to feel, as I said, “I cannot play that scene in Hamlet because I am unsure; I thought I understood it and now I just don’t know. Also, the other actors seem to want something from me I am not in the position to deliver”—which is, of course, the same situation in which the audience discovers Hamlet—what a coincidence.
How can the actor know that that which he or she is feeling in the moment is not only acceptable but an eloquent and beautiful part of the play? The actor cannot. When onstage it’s not only unnecessary but impossible to attribute one’s feelings, to say, “I feel A because I am overtired, and I feel B because the ‘character’ should feel it, and I feel C because the fellow playing the king opposite me is a ham,” and so on.
Actors like to attribute their feelings, as this gives them the illusion of control over them. Everything they try to wish away is the unexpected; which is to say again, the play.
The question is, how can an actor know or remember that? And the answer is, the actor can’t. Time onstage moves too quickly; and the moment, if one has time to consider it, is long gone by the time the consideration begins.
So wisdom consists in this: do not attribute feelings, act on them before attributing them, before negotiating with them, before saying, “This is engendered by the play, this is not engendered by the play.” Act on them. First, although you won’t believe it, they’re all engendered by the play; and second, even if they were not, by the time you feel something, the audience has already seen it. It happened and you might as well have acted on it. (If you didn’t, the audience saw not “nothing,” but you, the actor, denying something.)
The above is true and it’s difficult to do. It calls on the actor not to do more, not to believe more, not to work harder as part of an industrial effort, but to act, to speak out bravely although unprepared and frightened.
The middle-class work ethic: “But I did my preparation. It is not my fault if the truth of the moment does not conform.” That ethic is not going to avail. Nobody cares how hard you worked. Nor should they.
Acting, which takes place for an audience, is not as the academic model would have us believe. It is not a test. It is an art, and it requires not tidiness, not paint-by-numbers intellectuality, but immediacy and courage.
We are of course trained in our culture to hold our tongue and control our emotions and to behave in a reasonable manner. So, to act one has to unlearn these habits, to train oneself to speak out, to respond quickly, to act forcefully, irrespective of what one feels and in so doing to create the habit, not of “understanding,” not of “attributing,” the moment, but of giving up control and, in so doing, giving oneself up to the play.
Acting in my lifetime has grown steadily away from performance and toward what for want of a better term can only be called oral interpretation, which is to say a pageantlike presentation in which actors present to the audience a prepared monologue complete with all the Funny Voices. And they call the Funny Voices emotional preparation.
In life there is no emotional preparation for loss, grief, surprise, betrayal, discovery; and there is none onstage either.
Forget the Funny Voices, pick up your cue, and speak out even though frightened.
I’M ON THE CORNER
The best advice one can give an aspiring artist is “Have something to fall back on.” The merit of the instruction is this: those who adopt it spare themselves the rigor of the artistic life.
I was once at a marriage ceremony where the parties swore “to try to be faithful, to try to be considerate …” That marriage was, of course, doomed. Any worthwhile goal is difficult to accomplish. To say of it “I’ll try” is to excuse oneself in advance. Those who respond to our requests with “I’ll try” intend to deny us, and call on us to join in the hypocrisy—as if there were some merit in intending anything other than accomplishment.
Those with “something to fall back on” invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternative see the world differently. The old story has the mother say to the sea captain, “Take special care of my son, he cannot swim,” to which the captain responds, “Well, then, he’d better stay in the boat.”
——
The most charming of theories holds that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays—that he was of too low a state, and of insufficient education. But where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?
It is not folly to ascribe the oeuvre to the unlettered, but it certainly is so to ascribe it to the nobility, whose entire lives were, to torture the conceit, “something to fall back on.” It is both comfortable and prudent to have a fall-back position; and those possessing the happy same cannot help but have their work colored by it—such work must be more rational, considered, and possessed of the communitarian virtues than that of an outsider. Such prudent work would tend to shun conflict … well, you get my drift.
The other side of the coin is pride. One could say, “I am a fool, for I have not provided myself with an alternative”; one could also say, “I see nothing else worth my time,” which is, I think, a rather strengthening attitude.
The cops say, “I’m on the corner.” Young folks in the theatre might have it, “Molly can go home and John can go home, I am never going home.” Bravo. And good luck.
Those of you with nothing to fall back on, you will find, are home.
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
The prospectors of the Old West were in the mining business whether they knew it or not because they enjoyed the life of the outdoors. None of us is going to take it with us when we go, and all of us are going to go; and the prospectors, had you put them in a room which had billions of dollars of gold in it, and told them the gold was theirs, would they have been happy or sad? Or had they been given everything that that billion dollars could buy, would they have been content, or would they have longed to be back in the wilds with their burro, so to speak?
It’s the same with the quest for fame and recognition. Certainly the drive for them is real. But let us exercise a bit of philosophy.
We’d all like to be thought well of, to do noble things, to do great things, and
to be respected. But is it worthy of respect to act in a manner we ourselves feel trivial, exploitative, demeaning, or sordid? How can that command the respect of others; and would we value the approval of someone who is taken in by behavior which we know to be shoddy, grasping, and mercantile?
And yet our truly noble desire to do good work, to contribute to the community, becomes warped into an empty quest for something which we call success—that quest where many of you and many of your peers will squander your youth, your simplicity, and whatever you may have of talent—that quest in which you might be sitting for literally years in the outside offices of some casting agent begging for a role in a trivial manipulative piece of what is finally advertising and may not even be entertaining advertising at that.
An actor friend of mine moved to L.A. and did not work for three or four years. One day I asked how he was, and he told me he was angry, as he had just spent the day waiting to audition for a walk-on in a car-crash movie.
“Why don’t you come back east,” I said, “and work in the theatre.”
“Hey,” he said, “this is where the work is.” He was a fine, respected, working actor. He situated himself in the midst of those he despised and chose to suffer their displeasure.
Do you desire the good opinion of these people? Are not these the same people you told me yesterday were fools and charlatans? Do you then desire the good opinion of fools and charlatans? That is the question asked by Epictetus.
And so we might ask ourselves, you and I, what is character? Someone says character is the external life of the person onstage, the way that that person moves or stands or holds a handkerchief, or their mannerisms. But that person onstage is you. It is not a construct you are free to amend or mold. It’s you. It is your character which you take onstage.
The word “character” in the theatre has no other meaning. The ability to act, to resist, to assent, to assert, to proclaim, to support, to deny, to bear. These are the components of character onstage or off.
Your character, onstage or off, is molded by the decisions you make: which play you do, whether or not to pursue employment in commercials, in sex films or pseudo-sex films, in violent or demeaning films, in second-rate movies or plays; whether or not to treat yourself with sufficient respect to perfect your voice and body, whether or not to prepare for your scene, for your play, for your film, for your audition. Whether or not to conduct your business affairs circumspectly. The ideas, organizations, actions, and people you support and dedicate yourself to, mold and finally are your character. Any other definition is the jabbering of the uncommitted.
Certainly the weak would like you to believe that character is a costume which can be put on or taken off at will. And from time to time we’d all like to believe it. But that doesn’t make it true.
——
You can pursue fame, but that doesn’t mean that you will achieve fame, or that if you get it you’ll find it is what you thought it was. Similarly, you can pursue money, or the phantom called mobility, which is to say, “I just want to get far enough ahead so that I can do whatever I want.” Well, you can attempt whatever you want today, and if you can’t today you aren’t going to be able to tomorrow.
An actor who had moved to Los Angeles was once offered the lead in a play we were doing in Chicago, a lovely actor who was perfect for the role, and he said, “I’d love to be able to come and play the part, and I wish my career were far enough along to allow me to do so.” That actor, like many of his brothers and sisters, sat alone home by the phone in L.A. for the eight weeks he could have been playing a part in Chicago. A part he professed that he’d love to play.
“If not now, when?” That’s the question Hillel asked.
And if you like the theatre and the life of the theatre, participate in it like the prospector out there with his or her burro. Participate in it.
Yes, but sometimes of course we must decide to fill up the larder, or to make a less than perfect choice which might improve our chances to fill up the larder, you say. Granted. But which times are those, and on what basis do we choose? The Stoics would say, “Act first to desire your own good opinion.”
That is the meaning of character.
Here is the best acting advice I know. And when I am moved by a genius performance, this is what I see the actor doing: Invent nothing, deny nothing. This is the meaning of character.
I’ve heard young actors speak of “stepping out.” They felt constrained by the above suggestions, and they wanted, finally, a “part to tear a cat in,” in which they could strut their stuff. They wanted to invent, to mold, to elaborate, to influence, to be a “transformational actor”—to be, in effect, anything but themselves.
No doubt, for the grass is always greener. But the so-attractive actions listed above are the work of the writer. It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.
When the performance is made truthful, the work of the writer is made something more than words on the page, not by the inventiveness, but by the courage of the actor. Yes, it might seem like a good, and might seem an attractive idea to embellish—it’s your job to resist that attractive idea; for you cannot both “guide” the performance, and keep your attention and will on accomplishing your objective onstage. The impulse to “help it along,” to add a bit of “emotion” or “behavior” is a good signpost—it means you are being offered—in resisting it—the possibility of greatness. Invent nothing. Deny nothing. Develop that hard habit.
It takes great strength of character—which is formed only over time and in frightening times—to make difficult, and many times upsetting, decisions. Act first to desire your own good opinion of yourself.
——
Today’s vast amusement parks, “theme parks,” offer not amusement but the possibility of amusement. Like the lottery, which offers not money but the possibility of money Similar is the academic/serfdom/great-chain-of-being paradigm from which our current western system derives. We are trying to please the teacher, to get into the good undergraduate school, to get into the good graduate school, to get into the good postgraduate program, to get into the good job.
The actor strives to please the panel, to get into the good professional studio, to please the casting director, please the agent, please the critic, and so progress. “But progress to what?” I ask you.
These schematic, arithmetical models, while reassuring, are false. To serve in the real theatre, one needs to be able to please the audience and the audience only. This has nothing to do with the great chain of being, or the academic model. The opinion of teachers and peers is skewed, and too much time spent earning their good opinion unfits one for a life upon the stage. By the time one is twenty-eight years old and has spent twenty-three of those years in a school of some sort, one is basically unfit to work onstage as an actor. For one has spent most of one’s life learning to be obedient and polite. Let me be impolite: most teachers of acting are frauds, and their schools offer nothing other than the right to consider oneself part of the theatre.
Students, of course, do need a place to develop. That place is upon the stage. Such a model can and probably will be more painful than a life spent in the studios. But it will instruct.
And it is probably finally kinder to the audience to subject them to untutored exuberance than to lifeless and baseless confidence.
AUDITIONS
The audition process selects for the most blatant (and not even the most attractive) of the supplicants. As a hiring tool, it is geared to reject all but the hackneyed, the stock, the predictable—in short, the counterfeit.
The casting agent, and, to the largest extent, the talent agent are unacknowledged adjuncts of the production companies and studios. They reason, and in their place you or I might reason similarly, that the actors come and go but the producers go on forever.
The producers are not interested in discovering the new. Who in their right mind would bet twenty million dollars on a
n untried actor? They want the old—and if they cannot have it, they want its facsimile.
These gatekeepers understand their job to be this: to supply the appropriate, predictable actor for the part. They base their choice on the actor’s appearance, credits, and quote—as if they were hiring a plumber.
If this sounds tedious, reflect that the actor himself is habituated into the process and endorses it from his first experience of it. And his first experience is the school.
The acting school and its lessons are many times harsh, but their rigor and extent is comfortable and predictable. The lessons of the stage, on the other hand, are often devastating and almost beyond bearing.
The school, like the audition process, has a clear and simple structure of commands and rewards. If, and as long as, the student propitiates the teacher, she may be disappointed but she will rarely be humiliated. To the extent that she internalizes her subscription to the system (“It is harsh, but I know in my heart it is just, or, at the very least, unavoidable”) she can enjoy freedom from anomie. If she never ventures out of the confines of the system, she can live, whether employed or unemployed, free from terror.
Teachers of “audition technique” counsel actors to consider the audition itself the performance, and to gear all one’s hopes and aspirations not toward the actual practice of one’s craft (which takes place in front of an audience or a camera), but toward the possibility of appealing to some functionary. What could be more awful?
For much of the beauty of the theatre, and much of the happiness, is in a communion with the audience. The audience comes to the show prepared to respond as a communal unit. They come prepared (and expecting) to be surprised and delighted. They are not only willing, but disposed to endorse the unusual, the honest, the piquant. Everything the audition process discards.
