True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor [Paperback]

I first became acquainted with David Mamet when I worked on the Los Angeles production of American Buffalo in 1978. I must admit I didn't like the play very much but, hey, a gig is a gig.

A couple of years later I saw the PBS production of The Water Engine and I was engaged by the performance of William H. Macy - and I liked the premise of the piece. But I still thought the play was lacking.

Then I saw A Life In The Theatre and I became a fan. To me, it was the first play about acting that really got to the heart of the actor's life and problems. It was obviously written by someone who had a great love of acting and actors. It was a revelation.

I have watched Mamet's writing and directing career ever since. His book, Writing in Restaurants was one of my own touchstones as I pursued my own love of writing. It has become obvious over the intervening years that David Mamet is a force to be reckoned with in the American theatre. In the fullness of time I have no doubt that his influence will be considered crucial to the development of modern acting and story-telling.

When he made the move into motion pictures, first as a writer and then as writer/director, he delivered some of the most startling and amazing stories and performances of the late twentieth century - right up through today. Not that every time at bat was a home run - but every effort was unique and entrancing. Anyone who wants a glance "behind the scenes" of a movie production is advised to see State and Main which I believe is the truest and funniest portrayal of what goes on in the making of a movie.

His latest book, True and False, is the finest book I've read about acting since I first started reading Stanislavsky's trilogy (a must for every actor). Mamet cuts right to the chase in this amazing book. It is not a tome, but rather a short, blunt treatise on the craft of acting that I cannot recommend too highly.

Before you run out and get a copy though, I have a caveat: This book is not for the beginning actor. Until you have spent some time on the boards, plying your craft, much of what Mamet says might be confusing and perhaps even misleading. The reason is simple - this book was written for the employed actor who is looking for a useable method to build and sustain a performance in a professional setting.

That is not to say that every actor will not gain insight and inspiration from his words, it's just that those at the start of their career will not have the experience to draw from that Mamet's credo demands.

Spencer Tracy, arguably one of the finest film actors ever, is famously quoted as saying, about acting, "Just say the gags and don't bump into the furniture." This is a bon mot that has been repeated around green rooms and holding areas since Pluto was a pup, but few actors understand the import of it. Mamet sets out to explain exactly what Tracy was talking about (although he never mentions this quote) in a well thought out, brilliantly written argument.

Laurence Olivier once said it took him twenty years to learn how to be simple. Again, this is an important bit of information for the actor who strives for believability and "realness." And again, Mamet's book goes a long way toward educating us about the exact meaning of Olivier's comment.

This is a book that can be read in one sitting but it might take quite awhile for the information to "settle in." I found myself going back and re-reading, underlining and even writing down the many gems Mamet presents. His take on how to deal with producers, casting directors, other actors and critics is worth the price of the book alone.

Not only does he cover the basics of believable acting, the correct position of the actor in the story telling process and several methods of working - he also underscores the importance of the actor's psychology to the entire process of doing well in the acting profession. I found myself nodding in agreement on practically every page. If you can absorb and put to use the skills Mamet espouses, it is inconceivable that you will not become a more employable actor.

We see many actors at the top levels of the business today who can be classified as being of the "Chicago school." Most of these stars and well known character actors are utilizing the methods that Mamet explains. In fact, I don't think it is too much to say that modern acting owes much to David Mamet and those who follow his dictums.

If you have been acting for awhile and you are ready to take the next step in developing your craft, you will be doing yourself a favor by getting, reading and using David Mamet's True and False.

It's a modern classic.

What Simon Callow, one critic of Mamet's acting critique, says is that people come to the theatre to see character, on stage, not the author's lines, and it is creating character that actors are paid for. With a view to both Mamet's novel and movies, it must be said that he has a point. Now, Callow, in a book of his own, the biography of the actor Charles Laughton, distinguished actors into two schools - those of Olivier and Laughton. Olivier worked from the outside, putting together a character out of bits and bobs - a nose here, a mustache there, a pair of shoes - and "swimming between these things" he said, he eventually found a creature. This is acting by instinct, not really technique, though Olivier was much regarded as artificial, and Mamet, by his theory, would not approve. The other school, Laughton's, finds the character within their own voluminous parade of sins and pulls, from within their capacious trove of maladies, a timbre or attitude akin to that they find before them in the role. That too, Mamet would not approve. Mamet sometimes presents actors with a type, with an intention and a list of objectives which - by his theory - should be enough to play with bravery - but the bravery is not a personality, it is not alive. It is not finally an expression of the individual, just a stare of fear.

Mamet cites, as the rewards of his career in theatre and film, a series of personal high-points: meeting Jose Ferrer ("the greatest every Cyrano"), walking across a room to chat up a gorgeous slim readhead with her back to him to find it was Lillian Gish, who talked to him for half an hour about "Mr. Griffiths", getting advice about his first screenplay through Bob Rafaelson, the director, from Sam Rafaelson, the director's uncle and author of the first talky screenplay. These people that he mentions, that he worships, and whose respect is what he claims to work for, are personalities finally, not an attitude to fear. They are collections of tics, prevailing in the face of a general inclination to downward slide. Likewise in Wag the Dog, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro won great acclaim for playing, respectively, an overblown Hollywood producer and a political advisor. Hoffman's performance, and in part Mamet's very witty characterisation in the script, are widely thought to be based on the personality of the scandal sized producer Robert Evans. De Niro's performance in the larger and in many ways less colourful role of the low-key political advisor is all in the slouch of a particularly rumpled hat on a crumpled face, it's all in the way he disappears in a deckchair. This is not action, as Mamet would call it, this is nuance, personal charm.

What Mamet in life and his best work recognizes is the immediacy of the individual - there is no American writer more accutely alert to the half beats and consonants of a casual word - but what he fails in his philosophy, this novel and SOME work to acknowledge is that no system and no attitude will actually survive more than the subtle spark, the twist of personal quirk hard not to recall, the personal grace. And that is all that will survive and all they will remember, however you hash the fear up and however you face the day. At the end only your self, not your good face will matter, what sparked care. All that survives of us is love.

Anyone who loves the magic of the theatre knows that a production is composed of two elements: the actor and the play-- not the playwright and his play. It is the actors job to create truth within himself with the part he is given. Plays written by authors like Shaw and Shaffer are crippling to actors, because they write in the lines all that is felt. This is not reality. This is not art. Acting (now, after reading this book, I feel the need to use the words "Method Acting") is the only art that uses real emotions and the human body as it's medium. This book is suggesting that actors need only be an extention of the literature, which my friends, is insane. Stanislavsky knew there was something wrong in the theatre, and composed a path for actors to follow in order to reach that "awareness". Strasburg found it. Chekov found it. Hagen found it. Meisner couldn't think abstractly, so he made revisions, but still believed strongly in the honest actor.

This book is a good example on what NOT TO BELIEVE.

Trying to say that this is a better method of acting is like trying to say that Humphrey Bogart was more believable than Marlon Brando.

If this book is taken seriously by too many, the entire world of our our theatre could be ruined.