True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor

by David Mamet

  Finally, a concern with the “arc of the play” or the “unity of the character” is only a concern with performance. It is the desire to act perfectly, and so escape censure. But such escape is not to be found onstage. You are as apt to be censured for brilliance as for incompetence. And the notion that more emotional and sensory preparation is going to win over those in authority is as bootless as the idea that if you get better grades Daddy will stop drinking.

  If you decide to be an actor, stick to your decision. The folks you meet in supposed positions of authority—critics, teachers, casting directors—will, in the main, be your intellectual and moral inferiors. They will lack your imagination, which is why they became bureaucrats rather than artists; and they will lack your fortitude, having elected institutional support over a life of self-reliance. They spend their lives learning lessons very different from the ones you learn, and many or most of them will envy you and this envy will express itself as contempt. It’s a cheap trick of unhappy people, and if you understand it for what it is, you need not adopt or be overly saddened by their view of you. It is the view of the folks on the verandah talking about the lazy slaves.

  There is nothing contemptible in the effort to learn and to practice the art of the actor—irrespective of the success of such efforts—and anyone who suggests there is, who tries to control through scorn, contempt, condescension, and supposed (though undemonstrated) superior knowledge is a shameful exploiter.

  A preoccupation with emotion memory, sense memory, the character, is only an attempt to placate this generic person, to identify with her, accept her prejudices as one’s own.

  The academic-bureaucratic model of the theatre—that put forward by the school and by the critics—presents itself as intellectual, but it has nothing to do with intelligence or culture; it is antiart; and in rejecting the innovative, the personal, the simple, and the unresearched, it rejects all but mob-acceptable pablum.

  It has been written that it is easy to get the mob to agree with you—all you have to do is agree with the mob. An apprenticeship spent looking inward for supposed “emotion,” while perhaps spent with honest motives, trains one only to be a gull. An actor should never be looking inward. He or she must keep the eyes open to see what the other actor is doing moment to moment, and to call it by its name and act accordingly. If one cannot do that onstage, it is unlikely one will be able to do it in the school, casting office, and so on.

  To face the world is brave. To turn outward rather than inward and face the world which you would have to face in any case—such may not always win the day, but it will always allow you to live the day as an adult. A word about teachers. Most of them are charlatans. Few of the exercises I have seen, in what were advertised as acting schools, teach anything other than gullibility. Don’t leave your common sense at the door of an acting school. If you don’t understand the teacher, make the teacher explain. If they are incapable of either explaining or demonstrating to your satisfaction the worth of their insights, they do not know what they’re doing.

  You can’t live your life believing every ten-penny self-proclaimed teacher, critic, agent, etc., and then walk out onstage and be that model of probity and wisdom and strength you admire and wish to be. If you want that strength, you’re going to have to work for it, and your first and most important tool is common sense.

  THE VILLAIN AND THE HERO

  All of us have had the experience of watching television and hearing the announcer say: “The assailant, twice convicted of aggravated assault, was serving a life sentence for manslaughter at the time of his escape. When the police engaged him in the gun battle, he turned his weapon on his hostages and opened fire.” And as the announcer speaks, we see on the screen a photo of an intense, bearded man, and we say to ourselves, “Well of course that man is a criminal. How could anyone fail to notice it! Every line in his face proclaims him a depraved villain.”

  And, as we so muse, the announcer continues: “The photo you see depicts the heroic clergyman who dashed from the crowd, subdued the gunman, and saved the lives of all the hostages.” And then: “Oh,” you say to yourself. “Oh. I see it now. Of course. Look at that determination. Look at that simple, steady resolve—obviously the face of a hero. Anyone could see it.”

  You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it. It is not that we are stupid but that we are suggestible. Let’s learn the lesson: it is not the actor’s job to portray.

  The audience will accept anything they are not given a reason to disbelieve. Here is what I mean: a young woman across the room at a party is pointed out to us as being worth $500 million. We now begin to look at her a little differently. “Oh,” we think, “this is how the Rich act. This is how they drink their tea or light their cigarettes. Aha. How odd. In many ways, just like you and me.…”

  Just like the villain/clergyman in the news report, the young woman has done nothing. A characteristic was ascribed to her, and we accepted it. Why should we not?

  We will continue to accept it until we are given a reason to disbelieve. What would be such a reason? If she, for example, produced a vast roll of bills and began distributing them.

  But yet, such pointless clownishness is exactly that in which we indulge when we add “characterizations” to our performance.

  The work of characterization has or has not been done by the author. It’s not your job, and it’s not your look-out.

  You don’t have to portray the hero or the villain. That’s been done for you by the script.

  ACTING “AS IF”

  Here’s a phrase which appears in several languages, the French say L’esprit de l’escalier, in Yiddish it’s Trepverter, both of which mean “What I should have said.” We leave the room, and only then does the beautiful, effective, moving speech occur to us. And the speech always has an object: to bring the tyrant-employer low; to correct the vicious stepparent; to instruct the deficient; to eulogize the personal hero.

  We act out these dramas not only in regard to actual personal events but also in regard to fantastical ones—that is, to those events we can participate in only through fantasy: we make the summation in the O. J. Simpson trial; we convince FDR to bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz; we defend Dreyfus or the Scottsboro boys, we personally congratulate Charles Lindbergh, or Neil Armstrong, or Nelson Mandela.

  We perform these personal dramas for our audience of one all day long. They take no preparation; they need only description—you see the difference? As soon as we have named these dramas, we can play them. These lovely dreams do not require “preparation”—we do not “believe” we are meeting Mandela; we only act “as if” we were. It’s like playing lacrosse. In order to play lacrosse you have to know the rules. The purpose of the rules is to make the game more enjoyable—you don’t have to prepare or put yourself into a lacrosse state of mind.

  These games, these fantasies, are highly dramatic and idiosyncratic. We enjoy them because in them we act—which means we perform them in order to achieve an objective—as above, to reveal the abuser to himself, to instruct the tyrant in simple humanity, to win the obstinate to common sense.

  In none of these do we have to “remember” how we are supposed to feel. We simply remind ourselves what we are about to do, and we are suffused with the desire to do it: we jump immediately and happily into the midst of the game, we begin our harangue, our explanation, our apology, protest, summation. We can make our speech to the tyrant time after time, and indeed we do, sometimes improving it, sometimes simply repeating it for the joy it affords us.

  Any method of acting—any interchange in life, for that matter—which is based upon the presence or absence of emotion sooner or later goes bad. We have all seen the perfectly good marriage discarded because one of the partners “fell out of love.” The religious who has a crisis of faith is undergoing the inevitable and will do so periodically.

  The actor does not need faith; and like the religious in the crisis, the actor is both called upon and pai
d, not to do the thing for which she is perfectly prepared, but to do that for which she is unprepared, unfitted, and which she would much rather avoid. This is called heroism.

  Joan chooses to honor her voices over saving her life; Hamlet chooses to get to the bottom of a vile and sordid entanglement when everyone around him calls him mad to do so; Henry V, on the eve of a battle which will likely bring his death, chooses to make a speech to his comrades, not of extortion but of thanks—he pays a debt; Sonia chooses to devote herself to Uncle Vanya rather than wallow in her loss. This is drama. Human beings contending bravely with their fate, their circumstances, and their nature.

  What do we say of the actor who would wish it all away—the immediacy, the ungainly bravery of people in extremes—who would wish it all away and substitute some shoddy counterfeit of emotion? We say that such a one is great, that he is a Great Actor, and that we have never seen such technique.

  What does this talk of technique mean? It means we were so starved of anything enjoyable that we were reduced to enjoying our own ability to appreciate. What would the word “technique” mean if applied to a chef? Or a lover? It would mean that their works and actions were cold and empty and that, finally, we’re disappointed by them. This is precisely what it means when applied to a performance onstage.

  Most actors are terrified of their jobs. Not some, most. They don’t know what to do, and it makes them crazed. They feel like frauds.

  Failure offers, at the least, support for their world-view, but success, to them, is agony. That which makes the actor uncomfortable—and I speak from observation as actor, director, teacher, and writer—that which makes the actor uncomfortable is always the scene. He and she, when unschooled, will attribute it to deficiencies in their preparation, in the preparation or attitude of their colleagues, to deficiencies in the script, and say or portray “I just could not be comfortable doing that,” and, in so saying, they are right.

  But when, in our fantasies of saving France, defeating Hitler, pleading for Dreyfus or for woman’s suffrage, are we ever comfortable? We may be happy, or enjoy, as we only can in fantasies, dolor and misery, but we are in a state of excitement-upset which has nothing to do with being comfortable.

  The actor cannot distinguish the cause of his perturbation—nor should he. It’s not his job. His job is to get out onstage and act in spite of it. In spite of whatever he’s feeling. Henry V would rather be alone with his fears, and his reflections, but in spite of it he chooses to pay a debt, in the St. Crispin’s Day Speech. Clarence Darrow would rather have leapt to his feet and cried, “My opponent is a fool, and his arguments a fool’s prattle,” but in spite of it he reasoned the judge through the Scopes Monkey trial, the Leopold and Loeb case, and so on. Jackie Robinson held his peace, and showed the world true heroism by not expressing himself.

  And you can show the audience some heroism. That’s why they came to the theatre. They didn’t come to see “technique,” whatever that may be.

  You are going to bring your unpreparedness, your insecurities, your insufficiency to the stage whatever you do. When you step onstage, they come with you. Go onstage and act in spite of them. Nothing you do can conceal them. Nor should they be concealed. There is nothing ignoble about honest sweat, you don’t have to drench it in cheap scent.

  And when you go onstage determined to act, that is, to get what you came for, and not to be denied, you can come offstage at peace.

  There is nothing more pointless or more common than the spectacle of the actor coming off, going home head hung, saying to herself and her colleagues, “I was not good tonight. I failed.”

  Leave it onstage. If your objective is only to do a good performance, the feeling of failure can only cast you into an anxious fugue state of self-consciousness. If, on the other hand, you come onstage to get something concrete from the other person, a feeling in any one moment of failure can and should and will only energize you to try harder.

  “Technique” is the occupation of a second-rate mind. Act as you would in your fantasy. Give yourself a simple goal onstage, and go on to accomplish it bravely.

  That dedication is up to you. Everything else is with the gods.

  “THEY ONCE WALKED

  AMONG US”

  The prestige of most acting teachers rests upon the idea of apostolic succession.

  They advertise that they studied with the students who studied with the students, who, at the beginning of the chain, studied with one of the great. Now, the great are safely dead and cannot be quizzed, but we might assume that they brought something of passion and courage to their work—that they were assured of nothing other than their own dissatisfaction with the status quo. It was the force, logic, or romance of their vision that emboldened students to reject conventionally approved approaches and throw in their lot with the newcomer.

  These originals had no dogma, no imprimatur to fall back on. And if their vision and instruction did not please or divert or instruct, if it was not practical, the students left.

  As we progress further down the chain, both the students and the teachers are attracted not to the new but to the approved.

  It is not the iconoclast who enters the equation at this point but the academic or hobbyist—that person looking for stability. Certainly, most of us have learned something from a teacher. But I doubt if anyone ever learned anything from an Educator. I suggest that the piety we find in these Schools of the Annointed is institutionalized ancestor worship, in which the absent ancestor stands in for our infinite perfectability, i.e., if we strive and strive and strive, we might be able to attain to the clean perfection of Those Who Once Walked Among Us. Yet those ancestors were no more perfect than we—they were unsure and brash and arrogant and wrong and right as the rest of us.

  That they managed, in spite of their human frailty, to assert their view sufficiently to found a school and attract followers might inspire us—but instead of inspiring us to worship their shades, it might inspire us to found our own schools.

  ELEVEN O’CLOCK

  ALWAYS COMES

  One discovers one’s old friend, the jeune premier playing the kindly old doctor. Well, that went quickly.

  Here is an exchange from Chekhov:

  ASTROV: We find that this, that we are living, is our life.

  VANYA: … it is?

  ASTROV: Quite.

  It goes so quickly. You can pass your life waiting for a break—and it will pass in the blink of an eye.

  The old joke has the fellow haranguing God, “Let me win the Lottery.” The fellow goes on, days and months on end. “Just let me win the Lottery.” And finally the heavens part, and a weary voice says, “Buy a ticket.”

  Your life in the theatre, like mine, will pass before you are aware of it. And you will realize why the old folks reminisce—it is not that they are nostalgic; they are stunned. It went so quickly.

  We all would like to be part of, to create, that theatre which we could participate in with pride. On which we could reflect with pride. To do so, one has to buy a ticket. The price of admission is choice—the choice to participate in the low, the uncertain, the unproved, the unheralded, to bring the truth of yourself to the stage. Not the groomed, sure, “talented,” approved person you are portraying; not the researched, corseted, paint-by-numbers presentation-without-flaws, not the Great Actor, but yourself—as uncertain, as unprepared, as confused as any of us are.

  Art does not flourish in subsidy, and it does not flourish in the studio—it is more frightening, more sordid, funnier, and truer than the certainties of the instructor. It is the stuff of the soul. It is the counterbalance to the reasonable view of the world; and, so, it is likely to be despised.

  To cherish, rather than despise it—that’s the job of the artist.

  MERITOCRACY

  I prize my life as a member of a reviled profession.

  I’ve been privileged to witness in a rehearsal room greatness of a magnitude and with a frequency seldom seen onstage. I’ve heard a
nd seen things funnier and dearer at the crafts service table in the middle of a night-shoot than anything heard by anyone in any majority culture.

  I’ve played cards with Roland Winters, who played Charlie Chan; I’ve shot pool with Neil Hamilton, who was in The Informer. I once walked across a room to introduce myself to what was obviously a very beautiful and slim young woman with astonishingly long red hair (I’d only seen her from the back), and when she turned, found myself speaking with Lillian Gish, and she talked to me, for a half hour, about Mr. Griffith.

  I worked with Don Ameche, and he told me stories about growing up in his father’s salon in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I did a play with José Ferrer—who was the world’s greatest Cyrano—and another with Denholm Elliot, who took a bite of a plum and told me it reminded him of Sonja Henie’s derrière.

  I wrote my first film script for Bob Rafelson. His uncle, Samson Raphaelson, wrote The Jazz Singer, the first talkie, and gave me notes, through Bob, on my first screenplay.

  Someone said, of the flight training of a U.S. Naval Aviator, that there was not enough money in the world to purchase it, it could be won only through merit. Similarly, advancement, subsistence, friendship, regard, in the theatre, is priceless to me and has been, after the love of my family, frankly, the guiding desire of my life: to win and keep a place in our culturally despised profession through merit.

  I was fortunate to come up in the years when every performer entered show business through the stage. There was, when I was young, no writer, or actor, or director who began in television or in film. This meant that my friends and I learned—or were given the chance to learn—the use of the age-old barometer of theatrical merit: the audience. Did we think it funny? Well, did the audience laugh? Did we think it moving—did they sigh? Was the second-act curtain surprising—did they gasp? (A standing ovation can be extorted from the audience. A gasp cannot.)