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Reprinted from London's Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000933649949939&rtmo=Vqs88JqK&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/98/5/9/btmamt09.html .
As one of America's greatest playwrights and a director for the stage and cinema, David Mamet holds strong views about acting - and the damage it can do. His new book, previewed here, addresses actors directly, leaving none of their tenets unturned...
MY closest friends, my intimate companions, have always been actors. My beloved wife [Rebecca Pidgeon] is an actor. I have been, for many years, part of various theatre companies, any one of which in its healthy state more nearly resembles a perfect community than any other group that I have encountered.
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.
As a teacher, director and dramatist, I've worked - as did my teachers - to communicate my views to the actor. I have been fortunate in that I've had a lot of time to do it - almost 30 years - and that my views have been informed by and directed toward performance on the stage in front of a paying audience.
That is what acting is. Doing the play for the audience. The rest is just practice. And I see that the life of the academy, the graduate school, the studio, while charming and comfortable, are as removed from the life (and the job) of the actor as aerobics are from boxing.
The Stanislavsky "Method", and the technique of the schools derived from it, is nonsense. It is not a technique out of the practice of which one develops a skill - it is a cult.
A DIRECTOR calls and asks: "You have a character in the script say, 'I've been in Germany for some years.' Exactly how many years would that be?" It seems a legitimate question, and, indeed, it is. It is a legitimate desire to know how to play the scene. But the legitimate answer is: "I can't help you."
First, the playwright does not know "how many years". The play is a fantasy, it is not a history. The playwright is not withholding information, he is supplying all the information he knows, which is to say all the information that is germane. "The character" did not spend any time at all in Germany. He never was in Germany. There is no character, there are just black marks on a white page - it is a line of dialogue.
An actual person who said he had been in Germany would be able to answer the question "For how long?" You are an actual person, but the character is just a sketch, a few lines on the page; and to wonder of the character "How many years might he have spent in Germany?" is as pointless as to say of the subject of a portrait, "I wonder what underwear he has on?"
And no answer the questioner might receive could, finally, be acted upon. "I spent some years in Germany" cannot be acted differently than "I spent 20 years in Germany." It can only be delivered differently.
There is a school of theatrical thought which asks the player to, in effect, interpret each line and statement for the audience, as if the line were a word in a dictionary, and the actor's job was to perform the drawing which appeared next to it - to say the word "love" caressingly, the word "cold" as if shivering. This is not acting. It is Doing Funny Voices.
Consider our friends the politicians. The politician who trots out the "reverent" parts of the speech "reverently", the "aggressive" parts "staunchly", the "emotional" parts "feelingly" - that person is a fraud. How do we know we cannot trust them? We know because they are lying to you. Their very delivery is a lie. They have lied about what they feel in order to manipulate you.
We do not embellish those things we care deeply about.
THE rehearsal process is a demonstration of waste, and by extension, of the gentlemanly nature of acting. For if it is waste, it is not work, and if it is not work, then we are not workers, and, perhaps, that's what "art" means.
We spend our three weeks gabbing about "the character" and spend the last week screaming and hoping for divine intercession, and none of it is in the least useful, and none of it is work.
What should happen in the rehearsal process? Two things: 1) The play should be blocked [positioning worked out]. 2) The actors should become acquainted with the actions they are going to perform.
What is an action? An action is an attempt to achieve a goal. Let me say it even more simply: an action is the attempt to accomplish something. Obviously then, the chosen goal must be accomplishable. Here is a simple test: anything less capable of being accomplished than "open the window" is not and can't be an action.
You've heard directors and teachers by the gross tell you, "Come to grips with yourself", "Regain your self-esteem", "Use the space", and myriad other pretty phrases which they and you were surprised to find difficult to accomplish. They are not difficult. They are impossible. They don't mean anything. They are nonsense syllables, and they mean, "Damned if I know, and damned if I can admit it."
One is up there onstage solely to act out the play for the audience. The audience only wants to know what happens next. And what happens next is what you - the actor - do.
That action has always got to be simple. If it's not simple, it can't be accomplished. One was capable of freeing the 101st Airborne at the Battle of the Bulge; but we could not Win the Hearts and Minds of the Vietnamese, as the direction was meaningless. Of course we lost the war. We didn't have an objective.
We all know what it means to truly have an objective. To get him or her into bed, to get the job, to get out of mowing the lawn, to borrow the family car. We know what we want, and, therefore, we know whether we're getting closer to it or not, and we alter our plans accordingly. This is what makes a person with an objective alive: they have to take their attention off themselves and put it on the person they want something from.
Each character in the play wants something. It is the actor's job to reduce that something to its lowest common denominator and then act upon it. Hamlet wants to find out what is rotten in the state of Denmark. An actor might perhaps reason: "Oh, I get it - Hamlet is trying to restore order." Scene by scene, the tools necessary to restore order might be: to interrogate, to confront, to negotiate, to review... you get the idea.
All of the above are simple physical actable objectives. They do not require preparation, they require commitment and it is this commitment which the rehearsal process is supposed to rehearse.
If the actor whiles away the rehearsal process looking for some magic "character" or "emotion", he will take onstage that same unfortunate capacity for self-delusion and beg the audience to share it with him.
The "work" you do "on the script" will make no difference. That work has already been done by a person with a different job title than yours. That person is the author. The lines written for you should be said clearly so that the audience can hear and understand them.
IN my earlier days, actors would begin a line by adding their own words, saying, "I mean". Some thought that had personalised 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 on stage. They would in effect have witnessed the true lost art of the actor.
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.
Past vocal and physical training, and 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 - 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 skill of acting is like the skill of sport, which is a physical event. And, like that endeavour, its difficulty consists to a large extent in being much simpler than it seems.
© Copyright Telegraph Group Limited 1998. Terms & Conditions of reading.