by David Mamet
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. It is the old Delsarte technique of the nineteenth century, come again to comfort us with its schematicism.
The Delsarte books of that bygone day showed photographs of the correct pose to adopt for each emotion and degree thereof: grief, mild grief, severe grief; diversion, amusement, hilarity, and so on. The responsible actor needed only to determine which emotion was required for each scene, and turn to the page indicated and Bob’s your uncle.
The notion—art without the untidiness of uncertainty—survives, as this book suggests, in many forms, and one of them is oral interpretation. This is a high school event in which the competitor mounts the podium to embellish snippets of speech with age-old clichés of delivery.
It survives also in the “intellectual” school of script interpretation. “I want to know everything there is to know about this character and the times in which he lived,” the actor says. “And if the author wrote, ‘… did smite the Sledded Polack on the Ice,’ I want to know the crux of the dispute between Poland and Denmark which gave rise to that line, and I want to know the depth of the ice.’ ”
Sounds like a good idea. But it ain’t going to help. It will not help you in the boxing ring to know the history of boxing, and it will not help you onstage to know the history of Denmark. It’s just lines on a page, people. All the knowledge in the world of the Elizabethan era will not help you play Mary Stuart.
You have to learn the lines, look at the script simply to find a simple action for each scene, and then go out there and do your best to accomplish that action, and while you do, simply open your mouth and let the words come out however they will—as if they were gibberish, if you will.
For to you, to the actor, it is not the words which carry the meaning—it is the actions. Moment to moment and night to night the play will change, as you and your adversaries onstage change, as your conflicting actions butt up against each other. That play, that interchange, is drama. But the words are set and unchanging. Any worth in them was put there by the author. His or her job is done, and the best service you can do them is to accept the words as is, and speak them simply and clearly in an attempt to get what you want from the other actor. If you learn the words by rote, as if they were a phone book, and let them come out of your mouth without your interpretation, the audience will be well served.
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, and nothing of what he or she would have you believe is true. 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.
Just as with the politician, the actor who puts on Funny Voices is a fraud. She may, granted, have a “good idea” about the script; but the audience isn’t looking for a person with a “good idea” about the script. They are looking for a person who can act—who can bring to the script something they couldn’t have learned or imagined from reading it in a library. The audience is looking for spontaneity, for individuality, for strength. They aren’t going to get it from your tired old interpretive powers.
Here is what I have learned in a lifetime of play-writing: It doesn’t matter how you say the lines. What matters is what you mean. What comes from the heart goes to the heart. The rest is Funny Voices.
HELPING THE PLAY
If it is necessary for us to devote the energy to believe that we are a Great Actor, or a character actor, or an ugly actor, or a charming actor, that energy will not be put into the task of observation and action on the things we have learned … let us accept ourselves and set about our task. If it is necessary for us to believe we live in turn-of-the-century Russia or that that woman who last week played our sister Anya is this week Arkadina our mother, that energy will not be devoted to getting our play done. All of acting, all parts, all seemingly emotion-laden scenes are capable of and must be reduced to simple physical actions calling neither for belief nor for “emotional preparation.”
Most plays are better read than performed. Why? Because the feelings the play awakens as we read it are called forth by the truth of the uninflected interactions of the characters. Why are these interactions so less moving when staged by actors? Because they are no longer true. The words are the same, but the truth of the moment is cloyed by the preconceptions of the actors, “by feelings” derived in solitude and persisted in, in spite of the reality of the other actor.
An “intellectual” company of actors becomes a cabal of hypocrisy. “I will agree not to notice what you are truly doing, because to do so would interfere with my ability to trot out my well-prepared emotion at the appropriate instant. In return, you must agree not to notice what I am doing.” So the investment in “emotion” makes the play not a moment-to-moment flow of the real life of the actor, but, instead, an arid desert of silly falsehoods enlivened periodically by a signpost of “fake” emotions.
But we need not hobble after false emotions. We are not empty. We are alive, and emotion and feeling flow through us constantly. They are not susceptible to our conscious mind, but they are there.
There is nothing we feel nothing about—ice cream, Yugoslavia, coffee, religion—and we do not have to add these feelings to a play. The author has already done that through the truth of the writing, and if he has not, it is too late.
Be a man; be a woman. Look at the world around you: onstage and off. Do not forsake your reason. Do not paternalize yourself. Your true creative powers lie in your imagination, which is eternally fertile, but cannot be forced, and your will, i.e., your true character, which can be developed through exercise.
To bring to the stage a mature man or woman capable of decision based on will is to make of acting not only an art but a noble art.
In so doing, you present to the eyes of a demoralized public the spectacle of a human being acting as she thinks right irrespective of the consequences. What is required is not the intellect to “help the play,” but the wisdom to refrain.
ACCEPTANCE
Often, as students, we are struck with a sense of guilt because we cannot enter into that state of belief we think is required of us. We speak of “getting” the character. “Getting” the role. Of that magic time when we were onstage or in class and we somehow “forgot” that we were in a play or in a scene. And we feel that it is required of us to dwell always in this state, this magical state of psychosis: to dwell in a state where we “forget” that we are actors in a play and somehow “become” the characters. As if acting were not an art and a skill but only the ability to self-induce a delusional state.
But is this true of music? Does the musician devote his energies to forgetting that what is in front of him is a piano, and does the dancer strive to forget that she is dancing and endeavor to believe that what she is doing is walking?
This is why the ideas of substitution, sense memory, affective, or emotion, memory, are both harmful and useless: the idea is not to trick ourselves any more than it is to trick the audience; it is to perform something. What? The action of the play as set down by the author. Our job is the performance of that action as we discerned it in the text.
It is the choreography that we perform: the dancer does not endeavor to create either in himself or in the audience the feelings the choreography might evoke; he just performs the steps the most truthful way he knows how. Just so, our task is to execute the actions called for by the author. How, you ask, can we do so without belief If we do not believe them, how c
an we perform them? Well, let’s turn the attention outward.
Your belief is not the subject of the play. What could be less interesting? And if the task is uninteresting, your concentration will fall back on yourself. It has to. Why limit yourself? Choose something interesting to do.
Ever wonder what it would be like if your wife, husband, or lover died? Do you believe it has happened? No. You imagine for the moment that it has happened because it is enjoyable to do so. Not to wish their death but to imagine. To experiment with the dramatic.
Anyone ever play with the idea that you have a wasting disease, and you are writing your will? You toy with what you would say, with the wisdom you would impart from your position of one removed from life.…
What fun. Your imagination may, in fact, even be piqued by reading the above suggestion. Now: what happens to you when I ask you to believe you are dying?
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The mind will always rebel at a direct command: fall asleep: fall in love: stop mourning: be interested. Relax. The command to believe will never be accepted by the mind, and all the supposed techniques to induce the capacity to believe do nothing other than take the “believer” away from the play and away from the idea of the play, away from the fun of the play. All of his energy becomes taken up in the precious shepherding and guarding of the belief.
“Can I see the flat? Can I see the audience? Are my fellow workers completely costumed? Can I ‘see’ the Fourth Wall?” So the believer falls into a false relation to the audience: the audience becomes an enemy capable of robbing the actor of his belief. On the other hand, play or dress-up, or imaginative fantasy, cannot be harmed by the presence of the “real.” Why? Because they have a worth of their own. And what is that worth? We enjoy them.
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To act means to perform an action, to do something. To believe means to hold a belief.
What are our beliefs in life? What do you believe? Basic things. Things beyond your control. What would it take to change one of those beliefs? To inculcate a new one? Beliefs are unreasoning. In life, our beliefs are so primordial, so basic, most times we don’t even know what they are. Let us leave belief alone. Let us deal with something which is susceptible to reason.
Let us learn acceptance. This is one of the greatest tools an actor can have. The capacity to accept: to wish things to happen as they do. It is the root of all happiness in life, and it is the root of wisdom for an actor. Acceptance. Because the capacity to accept derives from the will and the will is the source of character. Applying our intention to use only one meaning for words, character is the same onstage and off. It is habitual action.
Onstage or off, one may or may not believe that one’s father has died when faced with the facts. One can strive to accept that fact: and that struggle is, of course, the struggle of Hamlet. One may not believe that one’s wife has been unfaithful, but one may strive to accept it, and so we have Othello; or that one’s protégé has been duplicitous and so we have American Buffalo.
The habit of cheerful acceptance is an aide in the greater life in the theatre, too, because it induces truthful consideration: “The world is as it is, what can I do about it?” But belief, on the other hand, induces self-deception—e.g., I believe my teachers are bright, producers are powerful/evil/good, my director hates me/loves me, the audience is good/bad/hot/cold.
Perhaps no one in a situation demanding courage (that is, in a situation that has frightened him) can believe it—when the ramp comes down on the landing craft on D-Day, when the baby is ready to be born, when the time comes to address the court, or to plead with the spouse for a second chance, or to ask the bank for an extension—when the time comes, in short, to act, it becomes apparent to these people, as it should to you, that no one cares what you believe, and if you’ve got a goal to accomplish you’d best set about it. To deny nothing, invent nothing—accept everything, and get on with it.
THE REHEARSAL PROCESS
The rehearsal process, as practiced in this country, 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.
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, strung together by ourselves and others, 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 82nd 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 goes to rehearsal with a mind and spirit dedicated to discover and perform the actions simply and truthfully, she will take this spirit onstage along with the discoveries. 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 PLAY AND THE SCENE
The correct unit of study is not the play; it is the scene. The action involved in the play, the through-line of the character, is always too general to admit of being healthily physical. You might say that Horatio’s through-line in the play was to help his mentor out of a vicious trap. That’s all very well, and not inaccurate, but it’s not going to be overly useful in the first scene with the players.
Any through-line must involve the character, and as the character exists only on the page and as we exist on the stage, his actions are not going to be helpful to us except as guideposts. The character wants to help his mentor out of a vicious trap. How does the character do it in this scene? By awaiting instructions. Good. Now, that is all you, the actor, have to do in the scene. And when you do that, you are fulfilling your responsibility to
the play. You do not have to await instructions in order to help your mentor out of a vicious trap. You simply have to await instructions. Carve the big tasks up into small tasks and perform these small tasks.
Your responsibility to the character is done when you’ve chosen a simple action for the scene. There is no arc of the play; there is no arc of the character. Those are terms invented by scholars. They do not exist. Choose a simple action for the scene, and play the scene. There will be others onstage for you to play it with, and they and your objective will take more than enough of your energy.
After you finish one scene, you will encounter another one, with its own task; the total of them is the play. If you play each scene, the play will be served. If you try to drag your knowledge of the play through each scene, you are ruining whatever the worth is of the playwright’s design, and you are destroying your chances to succeed scene by scene.
The boxer has to fight one round at a time; the fight will unfold as it is going to. The boxer takes a simple plan into the ring, and then has to deal with the moment. So do you. The correct unit of application is the scene.
EMOTIONS
The attempt to manipulate another’s feelings is blackmail. It is objectionable and creates hatred and hypocrisy. If one asked an honest worker or craftsperson, “What did you want your client to feel on receipt of your work,” he would most likely be dumbfounded. He had set out not to create an emotion in the recipient but to create an object—a chair, a table, a personal-injury defense, a meal.
For craftspeople in the theatre to set out to manipulate the emotions of others is misguided, abusive, and useless. In the theatre, as outside it, we resent those who smile too warmly, who act overly friendly, or overly sad, or overly happy, who, in effect, narrate their own supposed emotional state. Why do we resent it? Because we feel, rightly, that it is being done only to bring about or to extort something from us we would be reluctant to give in return for an uninflected presentation.