True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor by David Mamet
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.97 You Save: $6.03 (43%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $4.28 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor
Book Review: A Challenge to the Actor
Summary: 5 Stars
Mamet is an infuriating author. He calls Stanislavski a "hack," and yet his system is based upon a part of Stanislavski's system: the actor's objective.
Mamet derides acting schools, and yet the Atlantic Theater has an actor training program based upon the system that he devised. It's as if his system is the one "correct" one. (If Mamet were religious, he would make a great Baptist.)
Mamet's method is exclusive- it only provides for actor's working on a written text. What about actor's who are creating a piece of theatre? How are they to analyze their lines and find an objective? What if there are no lines? What if it is a piece based on sound and rhythm?
Mamet could pose very good answers to all of these questions. So could I. This is merely to demonstrate that Mamet seems to argue that everything he says is the truth with absoloute finality. Mamet is an infuriating author.
But the infuriation is well worth it. By forcing us to question our ideas about acting, school, etc. -- Mamet is doing a lot of good. Read this book. Be outraged. Be challenged. Question, think, and either you'll have been enlightened by Mamet or you'll come out having reinforced your own ideas.
It's a concise, lively read.
Cheers!
Book Review: Finally!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I have been in theater for years and am sick and tired of the emphasis on Stanislavski. His methods are only useful to hacks and actually impede the progress of those with any talent. If nothing else, this book is valuable just for the few words of wisdom it lends to those who have found acting under "the method" to be torture. It frees them from the shackles of established thought and allows them to view themselves and their abilities in a more positive and productive light. I don't agree with everything he says, and I'm actually not too fond of the man, but I think that this book is an important read for anyone who is frustrated with the "Stanislavski as God" culture of today's theater and theater schooling.Book Review: Speak the Speech with an Attitude
Summary: 3 Stars
An odd passage catches your eye in the first pages of True and False, which in a sense is not just Mamet's manifesto on acting and a proper way of life in the performing arts, but a manifesto as to the nature of narrative, and hence a view to most of his output. He writes: "Most of us, in the course of a day or a week, treat ourselves to the fantasy of the Bad News at the Doctor's Office in which we are invited to sit and hear our fate. And in that fantasy we are stoical and simple, and that is of course what makes the fantasy so pleasing to indulge in- we wait to hear the verdict on our future bravely."Now, I can't say this has ever crossed my mind daily, weekly or in the course of a year. When last given bad news by a doctor I was irritable, to say the least, and stoicism was not uppermost in my mind - my aching limbs more probably were - but to Mamet this position of a macho virtue is central.
Mamet's principal point in True and False is that there is no magic, no emotion: "The actor does not need to "become" the character. The phrase, in fact, has no meaning. There is no character. There are only lines upon a page. They are lines of dialogue meant to be said by the actor. When he or she says them simply, in an attempt to achieve an object more or less like that suggested by the author, the audience sees an illusion of a character upon the stage." And, later, it is back to the machismo virtue: "An apprenticeship spent looking inward for supposed "emotion", while perhaps spent with honest motives, trains one only to be a gull. An actor should never be looking inward. He or she must keep the eyes open to see what the other actor is doing... To face the world is brave. To turn outward rather than inward and face the world which you would have to face in any case - such may not win the day, but it will always allow you to live the day as an adult." So any of Mamet's characters, like the actor, and presumably Mamet, are all alike in their predicament - they may not be successful but they are trying to face outward, to keep their eyes open, and take it like a man.
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.
Book Review: the NEW actor's Bible!
Summary: 5 Stars
David Mamet's True and False is one of the best books that I have read on the subject in recent history. Many people were surprised or shocked to read some of what he has to say, and for good reason. Mamet doesn't "trash" Stanislavsky, Strasberg, or the Method, as much as he offers an alternative to it. The Method is simply the universal standard by which he bases his criticisms of current acting techniques. Even if you don't agree with everything he outlines in the book, some of it can be used, or at least adapted to better help the actor. True and False should be read, and read again. Once I finish I just start back at the beginning and always find something new. An excellent companion book written by students of Mamet is A Practical Handbook for the Actor. It applies some of the techniques outlined in True and False into real stage experience. I've grown to love the Mamethod!Book Review: Sense and Nonsense in the Theatre
Summary: 2 Stars
Mr Mamet makes a convincing case for the perfect actor being 'Joey' in 'Friends' - I had previously thought Brando was rather good myself, but now have discovered he was rubbish by reading this book. Entertaining silliness throughout - perfect for breaking the ice at play readings and provoking pretentious conversations among thespians and directors everywhere. I don't believe that Mamet's take on acting is nonsense... I accept it.