Read Online True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor by David Mamet - Free Book Online

than being a service, is both an intrusion and the extortion of a compliment. “Yes,” we say in effect, “I will smile back at you to get you to go away.”
    The addition of “emotion” to a situation which does not organically create it is a lie. First of all, it is not emotion. It is a counterfeit of emotion, and it is cheap. The respectful waiter will not demean his clients or himself by smarmy smiles and false narrations of his pleasure. And neither should the self-respecting actor.
    Can we not imagine that the waiter or waitress, after fifty or so renditions of the question “Is everything all right?” might find the necessity of asking it onerous, might find his or her smile a little fixed, and might, finally, feel put-upon? If the waitress truly cares about whether or not the diners are enjoying themselves, she has ample room for operation—she might observe them and might both heed and anticipate their needs and take it upon herself to improve their enjoyment of the experience.
    The addition of supposed “emotion” to a performance is an attempt to buy off the audience. In so doing, in playing the “happy” line “happy,” and the “sad” line “sad,” the actor strives, unconsciously, to put himself above criticism—to fulfill
absolutely
the requirements of the line, to “have done well.” It is another example of the academic-serfdom model of the theatre. The audience couldn’t care less. They came to see the play. If the play is good, all of that mugging going on under the name of “emotional memory” will lessen their enjoyment, and they’ll probably go along with the gag because the play works, and they will attribute much of their enjoyment of the play to the brilliant performances. Why? Because
you extorted it out of them
. Through your “hard work,” through your “emotions.”
    The greatest performances are seldom noticed. Why? Because they do not draw attention to themselves, and do not seek to—like any real heroism, they are simple and unassuming, and seem to be a natural and inevitable outgrowth of the actor. They so fuse with the actor that we accept them as other-than-art.
    It was said of African-American sports figures and entertainers that they had “natural ability.” This was a code of WASP America—a sop and an insult to greatness, which meant “They are shiftless and lazy and have succeeded through a fluke.” Similarly, the industrial-serfdom model of art wants to both endorse and define “hard work” as if and because such an endorsementpermits the speaker to believe that, given the time, she could have made a similar accomplishment.
    Emotion memory and sense memory are paint-by-numbers. They perpetuate the academic fallacy that, yes, yes, inspiration, bravery, and invention are very well, but they are not quantifiable for the purposes of the university, and so, cannot be art. What nonsense. Acting, like any art, can be learned, finally, only in the arena.
    One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water—at which point the only “theory” which is going to be useful is that which keeps one’s head up. Just so with acting. The job of the actor is to communicate the play to the audience,
not
to bother it with his or her good intentions and insights and epiphanies about the ways this or that character might use a handkerchief—these are the concerns of second-class minds. And the lessons of the audience disabuse all but the most fatuous of the desire to “help.”
    Acting is a physical art. It is close to the study of dance or of singing. It is not like the study of mechanical drawing or literature to which the academics would reduce it.
    Let the politicians have their fixed smiles and their crocodile tears, let them be the unabashed promoters of their own capacity to feel. Let us be circumspect andsay the words as simply as possible, in an attempt to