by David Mamet
Business should be conducted in an unemotional environment. Anyone who presents herself in a business situation as a “friend,” and therefore exempt from the usual rigors and niceties of businesslike accountability, is taking and will continue to take advantage of you. The honest diner goes to the restaurant to have good food in pleasant circumstances. She does not require the waiter’s friendship, and the question “Is everything okay?” rather than being a service, is both an intrusion and the extortion of a compliment. “Yes,” we say in effect, “I will smile back at you to get you to go away.”
The addition of “emotion” to a situation which does not organically create it is a lie. First of all, it is not emotion. It is a counterfeit of emotion, and it is cheap. The respectful waiter will not demean his clients or himself by smarmy smiles and false narrations of his pleasure. And neither should the self-respecting actor.
Can we not imagine that the waiter or waitress, after fifty or so renditions of the question “Is everything all right?” might find the necessity of asking it onerous, might find his or her smile a little fixed, and might, finally, feel put-upon? If the waitress truly cares about whether or not the diners are enjoying themselves, she has ample room for operation—she might observe them and might both heed and anticipate their needs and take it upon herself to improve their enjoyment of the experience.
The addition of supposed “emotion” to a performance is an attempt to buy off the audience. In so doing, in playing the “happy” line “happy,” and the “sad” line “sad,” the actor strives, unconsciously, to put himself above criticism—to fulfill absolutely the requirements of the line, to “have done well.” It is another example of the academic-serfdom model of the theatre. The audience couldn’t care less. They came to see the play. If the play is good, all of that mugging going on under the name of “emotional memory” will lessen their enjoyment, and they’ll probably go along with the gag because the play works, and they will attribute much of their enjoyment of the play to the brilliant performances. Why? Because you extorted it out of them. Through your “hard work,” through your “emotions.”
The greatest performances are seldom noticed. Why? Because they do not draw attention to themselves, and do not seek to—like any real heroism, they are simple and unassuming, and seem to be a natural and inevitable outgrowth of the actor. They so fuse with the actor that we accept them as other-than-art.
It was said of African-American sports figures and entertainers that they had “natural ability.” This was a code of WASP America—a sop and an insult to greatness, which meant “They are shiftless and lazy and have succeeded through a fluke.” Similarly, the industrial-serfdom model of art wants to both endorse and define “hard work” as if and because such an endorsement permits the speaker to believe that, given the time, she could have made a similar accomplishment.
Emotion memory and sense memory are paint-by-numbers. They perpetuate the academic fallacy that, yes, yes, inspiration, bravery, and invention are very well, but they are not quantifiable for the purposes of the university, and so, cannot be art. What nonsense. Acting, like any art, can be learned, finally, only in the arena.
One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water—at which point the only “theory” which is going to be useful is that which keeps one’s head up. Just so with acting. The job of the actor is to communicate the play to the audience, not to bother it with his or her good intentions and insights and epiphanies about the ways this or that character might use a handkerchief—these are the concerns of second-class minds. And the lessons of the audience disabuse all but the most fatuous of the desire to “help.”
Acting is a physical art. It is close to the study of dance or of singing. It is not like the study of mechanical drawing or literature to which the academics would reduce it.
Let the politicians have their fixed smiles and their crocodile tears, let them be the unabashed promoters of their own capacity to feel. Let us be circumspect and say the words as simply as possible, in an attempt to accomplish a goal like that delineated by the author—and then both our successes and our failures can have dignity.
ACTION
When you tell a joke, your choice of what to include and what to exclude relates solely to the punchline of the joke. Those things which tend toward the punchline are included; those things which are purely ornamental are excluded. One does this naturally, as one knows the punchline is the essential element. A joke holds our attention because we assume, as audience, that all elements presented to us are essential.
In a well-written play, and in a correctly performed play, everything tends also toward a punchline. That punchline, for the actor, is the objective, which means “What do I want?” If we learn to think solely in terms of the objective, all concerns of belief, feeling, emotion, characterization, substitution, become irrelevant. It is not that we “forget” them, but that something else becomes more important than they.
Take the joke: “A man goes into a whorehouse. A run-down, weatherbeaten building nonetheless possessing a certain charm. Once, when the street was a residential block, the building, no doubt, housed a middle-class family—a family with aspirations, trouble, and desires not unlike our own.…” We see that all this, beautiful though it may be, is irrelevant to the joke. Not irrelevant in general, not unbeautiful, but irrelevant to the joke. What we are being presented with may be a magnificent essay, but we know it cannot be a joke, and that the teller is misguided.
She wanted to “help.”
How do we free ourselves from the misguided wish to “help”? To free ourselves from having to decide whether something is effective, beautiful, or germane, we ask the question “Is it essential to the action?” and all else follows. In so doing, we choose not to manipulate the audience, though we might, we choose not to manipulate the script, though we might; and we choose not to manipulate ourselves, though we might; and we find, by so doing, that the audience, the script, and ourselves function better. What we are doing is eschewing narration. If we devote ourselves to the punchline, all else becomes clear.
The punchline is the action.
Think of it as a suitcase. How do you know what to put in the suitcase? The answer is, you pack for where you want to go.
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Anyone can turn on a TV program fifteen minutes into it and know exactly what is going on, and who did what to whom. But television executives insist on including fifteen minutes of narration in the script. Anyone can look at a couple across the lobby of a hotel and tell more or less what they are talking about and how they feel about each other. You don’t need narration in the writing of a play, you need action. Just so, in the acting, you don’t need portrayal, you need action.
Again, what is this action? The commitment to achieving a single goal. You don’t have to become more interesting, more sensitive, more talented, more observant—to act better. You do have to become more active. Choose a good objective which is fun, and it will be easy. Choose something that you want to do. The impulse to play, to imagine, got you interested in theatre in the first place. You knew, as children, that the game had to be fun. You played “War” or “Marriage” or “Lost in the Woods”—you did not play “Root Canal.” Choose a fun action. You remember how.
Actions rehearsed and performed grow stronger. Because they are fun. You can rehearse that goodbye speech to your girlfriend or boyfriend fifty times and it is still fun. That’s all the mystery there is to the “objective”—it is an action which is fun to do and is something like that which the author intended.
While you are intent on an objective, you do not have to compare your progress to that of your peers, you do not have to worry about a career, you do not have to wonder if you are doing your job, you do not have to be reverent to the script—you are at work. Not only is it the simple solution to a seemingly complex problem, it is the right solution. Not only is it
the right solution, it is the only solution.
GUILT
Any system built on belief functions through the operations of guilt and hypocrisy. Such a system, whether of acting training, meditation, self-improvement, etc., functions as a pseudo-religion, and is predicated on the individual’s knowledge of his or her own worthlessness. The system holds itself out as the alleviator, cleanser, and redeemer of the guilty individual.
Now, none of us is free of self-doubt, and none of us is free of guilt. We all have thoughts, feelings, episodes, and tendencies which we would rather did not exist.
A guilt-based educational system, which is to say, most acting training, survives through the support of adherents who were guilty before they signed up, who came to classes and failed (how could they do otherwise, as the training was nonsense), and were then informed that their feelings of shame—which they brought in with them—were due to their failure in class, and could be alleviated if and only if the student worked harder and “believed” more.
Faced with nonsensical, impossible directions (“Feel the music with your arms and legs”; “Put yourself into the state you were in when your puppy died”; “Create a Fourth Wall between yourself and the audience”), the victim can choose one or both of the following choices: to strive guiltily to fulfill the demands, or to claim, falsely, that she has succeeded in doing so.
Both voices keep the student tied to the institution, the first out of guilt, and the second out of a (correct) apprehension: “I have succeeded here, but I fear my merit, like the soft currency of a bankrupt country, is dispensable only in these limited surroundings, and will not transfer to the outside world” (the stage).
Curiously, the state these systems profess to cure—anxiety, guilt, nervousness, self-consciousness, ambivalence—is the human condition (at least in the postindustrial age) and, coincidentally, the stuff of art. Nobody with a happy childhood ever went into show business. The states enumerated are what impelled you to go into the theatre in the first place. Psychoanalysis hasn’t been able to cure them in a hundred years, and an acting school isn’t going to cure them in two easy terms. They are part of life and they are part of our age and, again, they are at the center of not only your, but the universal, longing for drama.
You went into the theatre to get an explanation. That is why everyone goes into the theatre. The audience, just like you, came to have its anomie, anxiety, guilt, uncertainty, and disconnectedness dealt with. Your responsibility to them is this: deal with your own.
Your fear, your self-doubt, your vast confusion (you are facing an ancient mystery—drama—of course you’re confused) do not mar you. At the risk of nicety, they are you. Sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich or an academician won’t do the trick, if the trick is to bring the play to the audience.
What will do the trick? Well, as in any situation where one is lost, it is helpful to acknowledge one’s state. We can say, “I’d be able to orient myself if I just knew where I was”; or “I’ll go on a diet as soon as I’ve lost some weight”; or “I’ll begin to seriously attempt to understand the art of the actor, and the requirements that art makes on me, as soon as I know what I’m doing.”
When you accept that you don’t know what you are doing, you put yourself in the same state as the protagonist in the play. Just like him, you are faced with a task whose solution is hidden from you. Just like the protagonist, you are confused, frightened, anxious. Just like him, your certainties will prove false, and humble you; you will be led down long paths and have to turn back; your rewards will come from unexpected quarters. This is the course of a play, a career, a performance, a life in the theatre.
Stanislavsky said that the job of the actor was to bring the life of the human soul to the stage. That life is your life. It is not neat and packaged. It is not predictable; it is often terrifying, disgusting, humiliating. It is all the things which make up your life. You don’t have to wish it away. You can’t wish it away, you can only repress it. But you needn’t do so.
The beginning of wisdom is the phrase “I don’t understand.” Fine. You are faced with a part, a play, a scene. Begin with the useful phrase “I don’t understand.” “I don’t understand how I am to proceed.” Perhaps you feel better already.
Let’s revert to some very simple first principles: Your job is to communicate the play to the audience, by doing something like that which the playwright has shown the character to be doing. So, logically, a first step must be to observe what the character is doing.
At the beginning of Hamlet, Horatio comes onto the battlements to find out what all the hoopla is about this supposed ghost. That’s what he’s doing. There is no belief required, no emotion, only action. He, Horatio, wants to find out what the fuss is about.
All right. That’s the character. The character is not you, it is not anybody, it exists only in the lines of dialogue on the page. What, then, are you to do? You don’t want to do anything which involves a ghost, that would entail a certain measure of belief on your part. (What if you don’t believe in ghosts, or don’t believe in ghosts on the night of performance?)
Well, then, the next step of your task is to discard anything in the operations of the character which would require you to “feel” or to “believe”—to reduce the operations of the character to the lowest common denominator, so as not to burden yourself, so as to be able to act truthfully.
Now, you might or might not be able to act truthfully in a scene where you had to find out about a ghost; but nothing could stop you from acting truthfully in a situation where you had to clean up a mess.
One could say that that is the irreducible essence of that scene. (Please note that there may be other correct answers, but there is no perfect answer. It is the purpose of this simple analysis to get you out onstage playing a scene something like that which the playwright delineated. The search for the perfect analysis will keep you off the stage and in the classroom.) So, you say that, in the scene, your job is to clean up a mess. (Horatio’s job was to clear up the hoopla about the ghost; your job is to clean up a mess.) Please note that we have, at this point, left Shakespeare’s scene behind. We need never again refer to the ghost, or to fear, or to belief. The purpose of our simple analysis is to understand not the appearance but the mechanics of the scene. We want to lift up the hood, as it were, and look at the wiring.
All right. Now, when we go to a party, we are introduced to many people. Some we have met before, but we remember them vaguely It is helpful, in these cases, to ask a friend, “Who is that woman again?” And the friend might respond, “Oh, she’s the wildlife veterinarian,” and we nod, and, our recollection jogged, we say, “Oh, yes. Thank you.”
Similarly, when we have determined our action (in this case, to clean up a mess), we might require or enjoy a jog to our memory: “What does that mean again?” This is where the application of the phrase “as if” becomes most helpful. What does it mean to clean up a mess?
Well, it’s as if you went shopping with your little sister and she was caught shoplifting. And you go to the store manager and clean up her mess. It’s as if the credit card company charged you three thousand dollars for items you never bought. You don’t have to believe these things have happened. First, it’s impossible, as they didn’t happen. They are fantasy; and, second, even if you did “believe” them, it wouldn’t aid you in playing the scene. They, these “as ifs,” are just reminders, should you need them, to help you clarify to yourself the action in the scene.
The action in this scene, remember, is to clean up a mess. That is the action, or the objective, you have elected in this scene. You no more have to feel like, or even think about, “My little sister has been caught shoplifting” than you have to feel like a sick horse when you meet the veterinarian.
You have, in this simple analysis, used your powers of reason and of application to discover a simple, actable goal for yourself, which is something like that which the playwright devised for the character. The work you
have done to arrive at such a goal has given you not only understanding but confidence, as you have applied yourself to things you can control.
Because you have increased both your understanding and your confidence, you are less likely to be confounded or humiliated by an ignorant or arrogant director, or casting agent, should you encounter same. You have made a choice and, in so doing, have put yourself in the same situation as the protagonist.
Horatio does not exist. But, if he existed, he, on the battlements, might feel fear of the ghost, might feel himself unprepared to quell the fears of Marcellus and Bernardo, might curse the fate which had elected him their military superior and, so, responsible for the situation.
You do exist. When you are up—in an exposed position—not upon the battlements, but upon the stage—you might also feel unprepared, might feel you have made the wrong choice of an objective or of a career, might feel unequal to the task, might feel loathing for your fellow players.
Everything you ever feel onstage will be engendered by the scene. In rejecting a situation based on guilt (I can do more, do better, find a perfect solution, and, so, avoid uncertainty), in beginning with a frank avowal (I am confused, uncertain, and full of self-doubt), and proceeding honestly from one step to the next, you put yourself in the same position as the written character and can begin to bring to the stage the truth of the moment: your fear, uncertainty, self-doubt, courage, confidence, hardiness; yourself, in short, and your art.
CONCENTRATION
There is a fashionable pediatric diagnosis going around these days called attention deficit disorder. A friend remarked, “What a thing—in my day it used to be called daydreaming.”
