David Mamet

David Mamet forms an interesting theory about theatre in his book True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. Mamet covers a myriad of important topics, in which he considers his approach to acting different than his predecessors. He covers a lot of ground in his book, but never really dives deep into one specific aspect of acting. Instead, he chooses to discuss many broad topics to bust through actor's previous actor training. Mamet refers to Delsarte, Stanislavsky, and the Method as he discredits their theories of acting. However, through the process of examining Mamet's theories closer, it becomes apparent that Mamet is actually borrowing many of his predecessor's ideas and theories. Mamet changes some of the ideas to become his own with a hint of the previous idea, but some he leaves as is. Even though Mamet thinks he is creating a new theory about acting, he is essentially taking bits and pieces of established theories and formulating his own “unique” theory.

David Mamet is an American playwright, director, screenwriter, novelist, and theorist. He was born in Chicago in 1947. He began writing plays while attending Goddard College in Vermont and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre in New York. After college he returned to Chicago and worked many factory jobs, a real-estate agency job and as a taxi-driver. The jobs and experiences serve as background for his later plays (“David Mamet”). Mamet's first plays to be commercially produced were Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Duck Variations. In 1975 he became a nationally acclaimed playwright with American Buffalo. It received a Tony nomination; however, Speed-the-Plow won the Tony for best play.

After all his success on stage, he was given the first opportunity to write a screenplay in 1979. He worked on the screenplay for the 1981 film version of James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. He then wrote The Verdict in 1982. After acclaim from these two screenplays, he returned again to the stage with his play Glengarry Glen Ross. He won a Pulitzer Prize. Mamet decided to embark on writing a novel. His first published novel was The Village and was followed by other novels, books for children, and collections of essays (Contemporary Authors Online).

Mamet delved into many different fields throughout his career. He has won many awards and has become an American icon in theatre and film. He has taught at Goddard College, the Yale Drama School, and New York University. He lectures at the Atlantic Theatre Company, of which he is a founding member. He was the first artistic director of Chicago's St. Nicholas Theatre Company. He also directed the films House of Games, Things Change, Oleanna, and The Spanish Prisoner. He has become the most famous playwright to switch to screenwriting and actually become successful at both. The entertainment industry and theatre think very highly on David Mamet because he has changed the way for writing; he has brought in colloquial and contemporary dialogue to theatre and film.

In his first chapter of his book True and False, Mamet admits that he once wanted to be an actor. His closest friends, his wife, and his extended family are all actors that he has grown up with and worked with. He writes, “I wanted to be an actor, but it seemed that my affections did not that way tend. I learned to write and direct so that I could stay in the theatre, and be with that company of people” (Mamet 3). He studied acting at various schools, which he will later discourage others to do. He first noted that the students noticed that the purpose of the instruction was to bring an immediacy to the performance, but he felt that the school did not accomplish that goal. Therefore, he made it a goal for himself as a teacher, director, and dramatist to effectively communicate his views to the actor.

It is very important to consider that although Mamet had some experience in acting during his earlier career, he is a playwright. He encourages the actors to always stick to what the author has written, which is valid because the author did write it with his/her own intention. However, Mamet believes so strongly in the author's work that he states that the actor should only read the lines that the author has provided. He believes that no other work is necessary because the author has provided all that is needed. It is evident that Mamet has a strong bias towards writers and their work. It is as though he does not trust the actors, or perhaps it is simply because he did not have enough ample training as an actor. Regardless of the reasons why, Mamet's book is lined with the ideas that the playwright is the most important person in the theatre, which skews his opinions on acting and how one should approach the art of acting.

Mamet's main theory about acting is that acting is doing the play for the audience. He states that the only job of the actor is to communicate the play to the audience. The actor needs a “strong voice, superb diction, a supple, well-proportioned body, and a rudimentary understanding of the play” (Mamet 9). He puts an emphasis on the physical characteristics of the actor in order to be able to fully and clearly speak the lines the author has provided. Mamet does not think that the actor must do anything else other than read the lines on the page. He believes that the actors should do everything they can to create an experience to please the audience.

The actor does not “become” the character according to Mamet. He believes that there is no character because there are only the lines upon a page. The actor says the lines and that is acting and putting a play together. The actor should deliver the lines simply to achieve something that the author more or less suggested. The audience then sees the illusion of a character upon the stage. He elaborates by saying that the actor does not have to do anything or feel anything in order to create the illusion of a character. He compares actors with magicians by stating that the magician creates an illusion in the mind of the audience and the actor should do the same. Later in his book, he elaborates on his idea of the actor not creating a character. He states that the character is really the actor. There is no character and there cannot be because it is always the actor that is playing the part.

Mamet states that an actor on stage involved in his or her own emotions is the most uninteresting thing in the world. He believes that emotions should not be created or manufactured; they come from the actor saying the lines of the script. He does not state that all emotion is bad for the actor, but that the emotion that is created without the script is unhealthy for the actor. Instead, he feels that if the actor says the lines on the page, the emotion might follow from the lines, if at all. He elaborates on his idea by even going as far as to say that the “very act of striving to create and emotional state in oneself takes one out of the play. It is the ultimate self-consciousness” (Mamet 11). The actor's emotions should be a by-product of the performance of the action.

He constantly refers to “The Method,” although wrongly naming Stanislavsky as its creator, as unhealthy and excessive. He believes that technique such as “The Method” creates an introversion that is not necessary to the script. It creates personal stories that Mamet argues are not in the script and are about nothing but ourselves. He also thinks that the purpose of the Method is to string emotions like pearls into a performance, which he thinks does nothing for the actor or the performance. He believe that when the students of the Method are asked to substitute their emotions or moments in the scene that they are planning the events of the play without paying attention to the play or what is happening in the play.

According to Mamet actors should not pursue formal theatre training; he believes an actor can learn more on stage than he can by studying. He believes that past vocal and physical training and script analysis will not help actors because it stresses the academic model and does not allow for interchange with the audience. Mamet states, “The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct” (Mamet 19). He goes on further to say that the classroom only teaches obedience, which in the theatre will get the actor nowhere. The skill of acting is a physical skill that is not the paint-by-numbers ability that some acting teachers are teaching. Instead, Mamet compares the skill of acting to the skill of sports because both are physical and the study of acting consists in “the main of getting out of one's own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and bring comfortable being uncomfortable” (Mamet 20).

Mamet strongly believes that actors are scared of the unexpected. He thinks that actors reveal themselves on stage when the unexpected occurs, and that formal academic education and sense memory are ways that conceal the truth of the moment on stage. Therefore, he views the Method and formal education as crutches to the development of truth because they artifically create circumstances to hide the unexpected. In a way Mamet wants the truth of the moment to be what is happening between two people on stage in a scene with no interference of emotions or planned events. He wants the actor to say the line on cue even if the actor is uncertain because the audience would have been watching the truth of the moment instead of a planned way of saying the line.

Mamet quotes Stanislavsky throughout his book, whether or not he is correct in the quotations. An important quotation that Mamet uses is that Stanislavsky said that the person one is is a thousand times more interesting than the best actor one could become. Mamet agrees with this statement to further his idea of not planning lines. He thinks that when the actor says the line the audience will see the interesting person. The audience sees true courage from the actor because the actor is called upon to speak and all he/she has is self-respect. He elaborates further by saying that when the actual courage of the actor is coupled with the lines of the playwright, the illusion of character is created.

Mamet rephrases the Method's question of “what would I do in that situation” to be “what must must I do to do what I would do in that situation” (Mamet 27). He misquotes Stanislavsky by saying he said the actor should ask “what would I do in that situation?” Mamet said the actor should disregard the idea of the situation altogether because he does not understand how we can know what we would do in those situations. Instead, the actor should take his/her feelings of the moment, such as nervousness, and apply it to the character's situation in the present moment. He asks how can the actor know what they are feeling is not what the character would feel as well. He encourages the actor to use his/her current state and apply it to the character on the stage.

Mamet has an interesting view of the rehearsal process because he states that “the only reason to rehearse is to learn to perform the play” (Mamet 52). He does not think that the actors should explore the meaning of the play because the play has no meaning other than the performance. He does not think the actors should investigate the life of the character because he thinks there is not character. In his opinion, a play can be rehearsed quickly by actors who know the lines and are prepared to find simple actions. The actors need a director to help arrange the actions into appropriate stage pictures. In the rehearsal process he thinks that only two things need to happen: the play should be blocked and the actors should become acquainted with the actions they are going to perform.

He also redefines, or thinks he redefines, what actions are; actions are an attempt to achieve a goal. It is the attempt to accomplish something so the goal must be accomplishable. He says that anything less capable of being accomplished that “'open the window'” (Mamet 73) is not an action. The action is always supposed to be simple according to Mamet. The person with an objective is alive because they are taking the attention off of themselves and putting it on the person they want to get something from. Mamet states that each character in the play wants something and it is the actor's job to “reduce that something to its lowest common denominator and then act upon it” (Mamet 74). Therefore, Mamet's definition of action should always require that actions be simple and to the point. He relates actions to punchlines in jokes because the choice of what to include in the joke always relates to the punchline. Everything the actor does should always relate to the action. He concludes his discussion of actions by telling the actors to find a fun action and to rehearse the actions to make them stronger.

The last major idea of Mamet's theory of acting is acting “as if” the actor were in certain situations. He does not think that the situations are actual personal events but that they are made up circumstances in which the actors have not been in before. The actors can act “as if” they were in the situations but not actually believing they are in the situations. He sees actors as reacting to certain situations as if they could be going through it, but the actors should not think that they are actually experiencing the situations on stage as they are happening.

Throughout his book Mamet offers many pieces of advice to actors. The most valuable piece of advice is “invent nothing, deny nothing” (Mamet 41). He repeats it and his ideas stem from the advice. Mamet's overall message of his theory of acting is that the actors should never invent or create emotions or situations that are not written in by the author. He also says that the actors should never deny how they are feeling on stage because they think their character would not be feeling the same. Instead, Mamet thinks the actors should always use how they are feeling to bring it to the character because the actor does not know how the character would really be feeling at that moment. The piece of advice serves as a summary for his theory of acting, which is why he reiterates it throughout the book.

David Mamet constantly tears apart the Method throughout his book, however, he confuses Stanislavsky with creating the Method. In actuality, Mamet's ideas of acting are actually quite similar to Stanislavsky's the System even though he would deny it. The problem with Mamet is that he did not fully care to research Stanislavsky's ideas and if he had, he would have seen how similar they are to each other. Mamet's discussion of actions is along the same lines as Stanislavsky's discussion of actions and Active Analysis. Mamet states that actions should be simple and should require a partner to get the action from. Stanislavsky's definition of action always requires that the action be directed towards the other person in the scene. Mamet agrees with the idea of Active Analysis because Mamet states that the scene comes from the bumping of two conflicting actions in the scene.

Mamet refers to Delsarte as he discusses physicality bringing on emotion. He says that Delsarte had photographs of the correct poses to portray emotions. Although Mamet does not agree with Delsarte, in theory he actually does. He claims that Delsarte was incorrectly stating how to portray emotions because Delsarte had specific poses to denote specific emotions. In contrast, Mamet wants the “poses” to be solid and emotion to follow. If one examines the purpose of Delsarte's poses, it was to easily identify the emotion to the pose for the audience's understanding. Although Mamet does not want emotions to be manufactured, he would agree in theory that poses should be solidified so emotion can come forth.

Mamet's idea of the actor not becoming a character is similar to Coquelin's first self and second self. Coquelin stated there is a first self which is the artist and the second self which is the material. The idea of first and second self seems to have deeply influenced Mamet's idea that the actor is a separate person than the character he or she plays. He does not believe that the actor becomes the character, but rather that the actor (artist) should read the lines on the page (the material) in order to create the illusion of character. Mamet never mentions Coquelin's name or the idea of first and second self, but it is evident that his idea stems from Coquelin's.

Mamet's overall message to the actor is to communicate to the audience. Diderot's paradox of the actor is almost exactly what Mamet is trying to articulate. Diderot figured out that it did not matter whether the actor felt during the performance or not; the only thing that mattered was whether the audience felt it. He came to the conclusion that the actor should not feel. Mamet seemed to have latched on to Diderot's idea because Mamet does not think the actor should necessarily feel every emotion on stage, but that the actor should at least communicate to the audience the situations, circumstances, and emotions of the play.

David Mamet creates a new theory to acting by mixing together previous theories. He adds something new in the aspect of combining bits of theories together and his theory of not needing theatre education, which is not found elsewhere previously. However, he does not really come up with “new” ideas since most are borrowed from his predecessors. Instead, he melds together what has worked for him in his past acting experience and what he thinks actors should focus on. Since he is a playwright, his bias towards playwrights is apparent as he states that the actor's job is to simply deliver the lines that the author has given to them. Mamet's theory of acting has resonated with the acting community because of his already legendary status of playwright and screenwriter but also because he combines parts of theories that “work” to create the first theory that has a little bit of everything. Therefore, most actors will read and listen to what Mamet has to say because he has picked the strongest ideas to create his theory.

Works Cited
Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2008. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2008. <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
Mamet, David. True and False : Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. New York: Pantheon, 1997. 3+.