by David Mamet
Sitting in the auditorium, the audience learns not only—and perhaps not even primarily—from the stage but from one another. We all have had the experience of rehearsing a comedy, of seeing a joke fail there, only to see it later bring down a full house. The members of the audience are informed by and gain enthusiasms from one another—they come to be delighted, and to share that delight with one another.
The talent agent, the casting agent, the producer, sits in a room not to be entertained but to be judgmental. He or she sees the supplicant actor not as a friend bringing potential delight, but as a robber whose lack of skill, looks, or credits is going to deplete the precious coffers of the listener’s time. It is a terrible process, and we learn to subscribe to it in school.
The worst result of this oppression, of this false vision of our role as actors, is that we internalize it. How often have we heard, and how often have we said, on leaving a performance, rehearsal, or audition, “I was terrible.… Oh, Lord, I was awful.…”
What is wrong with this? One might think it is a legitimate expression of the wish to improve. But it is not. It is an expression of the wish to have pleased authority. And in these cases where the authority is absent (or, in fact, congratulatory), we elect ourselves the stern taskmaster, and beat ourselves.
Why? Because we are taught, in fraudulent schools, by exploitative “agents” and directors, that we can please only by being abject and subservient to their authority. “There are ten thousand more where you came from, and if you are not correct in your attitude, not only will you not get the part [the place in the class] but you will not even be granted an audition to get the part.”
Does this attitude seem familiar?
If we believe these schools, agents, and directors, we, over time, internalize and become that “bad parent,” and curse ourselves.
As a member of the audience, I will tell you, it is an insult to come backstage and say to the performer, “You were great tonight,” only to be told, “No, I was terrible. You should have seen me last week.…” Any of us who have been so corrected know that it feels like a slap in the face. Reflection would inform the actor that the correct response is “Thank you very much.” The audience didn’t come to watch a lesson but to see a play. If they enjoyed it, you, the actor, have done your job.
But suppose you learned something onstage, and that something will instruct or impel you to do something differently at your next performance. Well, one would hope that you learned something onstage. If you are a dedicated actor, dedicated to self-improvement, you will learn something. Sometimes that lesson will be simple and easy (I should not eat a meal so close to a performance), sometimes it will be momentous (My voice is a disgrace and I should retire from the stage till I’ve fixed it), sometimes it will be life-changing (I am in the wrong company, perhaps the wrong profession). Any of these (and the gradients in between) can be acted upon. None will be acted upon that find their expression in self-castigating or self-loathing.
Such remarks as “I am a fraud, I am no good, I was terrible tonight” are the opposite of effective self-improvement. They are obeisance to an outside or internalized authority—they are a plea to that authority for pity for your helpless state.
But you are not helpless. You are entitled to learn and to improve and to vary. (Is it rational that each of, say, one hundred performances of a play should be, in all respects, equal?)
You will not please either yourself or others in every aspect of every outing. I have watched long runs over the years, and have heard actors say “Tonight was fine” or “Tonight was atrocious” of performances in which I could find no difference. And I’m speaking of plays which I wrote and directed, and in which I had a great stake—plays and performances I would have improved if I could have. Generally the “I’m garbage” and the “I’m brilliant” performances were the same.
Does this mean the actor is psychotic for feeling a difference? No. Some nights we feel better than others. But the actor is wrong to invest such feeling with magical significance.
The purpose of the performance is to communicate the play to the audience. If we bear this in mind, we will be less likely to go around berating ourselves. This is a habit caused not by aesthetic, but by economic, conditions.
There are many people trying to get into the theatre. Stage and screen cannot contain all of them, so some become teachers, agents, casting people, and most of these (just as most actors) seek the real or imagined security of a hierarchical system: “I’m just trying to do my job and to please my employers.”
But the actor does not have employers. The agent and the casting person are not employers, they are, frankly, impediments standing between the actor and the audience. Does that mean they should be ignored? Well, many times they cannot be. There they are. But they, and their job, should be kept in perspective.
One does not have to “like” them, and no amount of toadying will induce them to like us. Again, the Stoics say: “Do you want the respect of these people? Are they not the same folk you told me yesterday were idiots and fools? Do you then want the good opinion of idiots and fools?”
Remember it.
Don’t “confess” when you come offstage. If you have gained an insight, use it. They say “silence builds a fence for wisdom.” To keep one’s own counsel is difficult. “Oh, how terrible I was.…” How difficult to keep those words in—how comforting they are. In saying them one creates an imaginary group interested in one’s progress. But give up the comfort of an imaginary group. This “group” that is judging you is not real; you invented it to make yourself feel less alone.
I knew a man who went to Hollywood and languished jobless for a period of years. A talented actor. And he got no work. He came back at the end of the period and lamented, “I would have been all right if they’d just sat me down on day one and explained the rules.”
Well, so would we all. But who are “they”? And what are the rules? There is no “they,” and there are no rules. He posited the existence of a rational hierarchical group acting in a reasonable manner.
But show business is and has always been a depraved carnival. Just as it attracts the dedicated, it attracts the rapacious and exploitative, and these parasites can never be pleased, they can only be submitted to. But why would one want to submit to them?
The audience, on the other hand, can be pleased. They come to the show to be pleased, and they will be pleased by the honest, the straightforward, the unusual, the intuitive—all those things, in short, which dismay both the teacher and the casting agent.
Keep your wits about you. It is not necessary to barter your talent, your self-esteem, and your youth for the chance of pleasing your inferiors. It is more frightening but it is not less productive to go your own way, to form your own theatre company, to write and stage your own plays, to make your own films. You have an enormously greater chance of eventually presenting yourself to, and eventually appealing to, an audience by striking out on your own, by making your own plays and films, than by submitting to the industrial model of the school and studio.
But how will you act when you, whether occasionally or frequently, come up against the gatekeepers?
Why not do the best you can, see them as, if you will, an inevitable and preexisting condition, like ants at a picnic, and shrug and enjoy yourself in spite of them.
Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad of interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you’ve got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you’re learning to say it better.
PAINT BY NUMBERS
The only reason to rehearse is to learn to perform the play.
It is not to “explore the meaning of the play”—the play, for the actor, has no meaning beyond its performance. It is not to “investigate the life of the character.” There is no character. There are just lines on the page.
A play can be rehearsed quickly, by a group of competent actors who know the lines, and are pr
epared, with the help of the director, to find the simple actions associated with them and to be arranged into an appropriate stage picture. If this is so, why squander months in rehearsal and years in school? The reason is economic.
Acting has become a profession of amateurs, a profession of the genteel class, and, by approbation, infinitely expansible. If one need not be employed to call oneself an actor, any number can play; and so “acting” becomes a refuge for the energy and time of the privileged class, like tatting or good works.
Since there is little chance of the vast hordes of amateurs being tested in performance, their “skills” need not be demonstrably useful. They are never to be used. So these “skills,” capable of demanding the maximum of devotion, are the amateur’s friend, since, in their endless study, one can stay and play and never be tested.
I remember a billboard on a Nevada road advertising some new slot machines at a casino. The sign read BIGGER PAY MEANS LONGER PLAY and was the most truthful piece of advertising I’ve ever seen. “We admit,” the sign meant, “you do not gamble to win. We announce, in fact, that, as you know, you will not win. But we offer you more of that for which you gamble: gambling time.”
The use to which the gambler puts his or her money is “time at the tables.” And the use to which the acting student puts his or her time, money, and faith is “time at the school.” It is an end in itself.
This hobby caste creates not only acolytes but their inevitable companions, priests. The priest caste—the teachers, coaches, managers, etc.—minister to those involved in this “work.” But life in the studio, in “auditioning” classes, in casting offices, is not the work of acting. Acting is bringing the play to the audience.
How can it be learned? Perhaps it cannot. Perhaps one can but perfect a disposition. Perhaps it must be studied but cannot be taught. It has no point beyond bringing the play to the audience.
The paint-by-numbers mechanical actor judges himself and his performance constantly, and by a preordained checklist, as if acting were like rallye driving and the actor rated by how accurately he hit each checkpoint. And so the audience is robbed of any immediacy, and intimacy, of the unforeseen, of those few things, in short, those sole things capable of rendering a performance of a play superior to a reading of the text.
American schools of acting grew, in the main, from a tradition of acting as a hobby. These schools teach and reward those habits of thought and behavior which fit the student for the leisurely life of the studio, and unfit them for any chance encounter they might have with the real life of the stage—which is to say, with the audience.
The paint-by-numbers analysis of emotion memory, sense memory, character dissection, and so on, is designed for the hobbyist who can take the piece apart at her leisure with never a thought of performance. Its merit is in its potentially endless consumption of time.
Actors must be trained to speak well, easily, and distinctively, to move well and decisively, to stand relaxedly, to observe and act upon the simple, mechanical actions called for by the text. Any play can then be rehearsed in a few weeks at most.
“WORK”
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. Any meaning past that supplied by the author will come from your intention toward the person to whom they are said.
“Good day,” on- or offstage, can be an invitation, a dismissal, an apology, a rebuke; it can mean anything, in short. Its meaning will come from the intention of the speaker toward the spoken-to. Similarly, onstage, a line’s “meaning” to the audience is conveyed immeasurably quicker than, with more finality and force than, and, finally, supplants, any intention at explanation or embellishment on the part of the actor—it is conveyed by the actor’s intention.
The tradition of oral interpretation, text interpretation, etc., may be all well and good for those addicted to the pleasures of the English Department, but these jolly disciplines have nothing whatever to do with the interchange between actor and audience. The audience perceives only what the actor wants to do to the other actor. If the speaker wants to do nothing to or about the other actor but wants only to interpret the text, the audience loses interest in the play. Such a performance at the amateur end of the scale is called stupid and stodgy; at the critically acclaimed end of the food chain, it is called Great Acting, which differs from acting, in the main, by being polite and predictable.
All the “connections” an actor makes between parts of a text are made to fill the time and mind of one with a little too much leisure. If the actor learned the lines and went on that night without the “textual work,” the performance would only improve drastically. The work on the text, finally, shields the actor both from anxiety about his performance and from the necessity of paying attention to his colleagues while onstage.
The watchful, inventive, wary, cunning, brash individual nature intended for the stage is supplanted, in the text-analyzer, by the academic. Who wants to watch that person on the stage?
All of us have had the experience of the teacher who both bores and knows that he bores. “Yes,” he says, “this material may be boring, but I Have Done the Work, and I sentence you to hear it.” The actor who devotes herself to a fuller understanding of the textual significance of Madame Ranyevskaya’s references to “Paris” does similarly. Those connections have or have not been made by the author. The author’s contribution is the text. If it’s good, it doesn’t need your help. If it’s lacking, there’s nothing you can do to aid it. Recognize the fact and learn to live with it—the words and their meaning are not your responsibility. Wisdom lies in doing your job and getting on with it.
Here, again, is your job: learn the lines, find a simple objective like that indicated by the author, speak the lines clearly in an attempt to achieve that objective. Text analysis is simply another attempt by the amateur to gain admittance to our pubs.
Now let us be earnest and sincere and pretend for a moment that a great desire to perform good works is equal to artistic merit. This is the error of those who invest time endeavoring to “believe.” It is not necessary to believe anything in order to act. This delusion is attractive because and only because it allows the deluded to “work hard.”
Historically, the artist has been reviled and feared because his or her job has nothing to do with hard work. There’s nothing you or I could do to enable us to paint like Caravaggio, or to skate like Wayne Gretsky. We could work all day every day for millennia, and we would never achieve that goal. But students are given to believe that they will be able to act like Fill-in-the-Blank if and when they master the impossible. If, for example, they can just learn to “believe.”
But we cannot control what we believe.
Religions and political creeds which degenerate in that direction demand belief. They receive from their adherents not belief (which cannot be controlled) but a certain more-or-less well-meaning avowal of hypocrisy: “I proclaim that I have mastered that over which I know I have no control, that I am part of that brotherhood which proclaims similarly, and that I am opposed to all who do not so proclaim.”
The strength of these groups is directly proportional to the individual’s knowledge of his own failure to fulfill its goals—it is the individual’s attempt to conceal his shame which binds these groups together. This is the grand adhesive of the acting school. It is the reason for “the fourth wall.” The so-called Fourth Wall is a construction of someone afraid of the audience. Why should we strive to convince ourselves of the patently false?
There is not a wall between the actor and the audience. Such would defeat the very purpose of the theatre, which is communication and communion.
Respect for the audience is the foundation of all legitimate actor training—speak up, speak clearly, open yourself out, relax your body, find a simple objective;
practice in these goals is practice in respect for the audience, and, without respect for the audience, there is no respect for the theatre; there is only self-absorption.
The urge to “believe” grows from a feeling of individual worthlessness. The actor before the curtain, the soldier going into combat, the fighter into the arena, the athlete before the event, may have feelings of self-doubt, fear, or panic. These feelings will or will not appear, and no amount of “work on the self” can eradicate them.
The rational individual will, when the bell rings, go out there anyway to do the job she said she was going to do. This is called courage.
ORAL INTERPRETATION
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 twenty years in Germany.” It can only be delivered differently.