Mamet on Acting – Part 1

It would be hard for anyone to read my blog and not read my obvious admiration for the contribution to drama, theatre, film, and acting that David Mamet has made. His ideas certainly have inspired me greatly over the years as a director, acting coach and writer and they still do. I don’t always agree with him, or some of his highly provocative statements (“Repetition is BULLSHIT” – to a recent Atlantic Theater Company Acting School class*) but there’s a lot that can be gleaned from him. His word is not law, but many times it inspires and agitates, and it makes us question, that’s the important bit. Coming up with the answer can take a life time, and that’s okay.

Here are some of my favourite moments of David Mamet talking about the topic of acting, and these I do agree with.

“The theatre is a profession of mountebanks and misfits, much like myself, who’ve come in through the backdoor because no one else would have them and learned to find a place in society by getting up on the stage and doing plays that people need to hear, doing them well in an interesting, provocative and unusual manner. Who haven’t had the life bred out of them.”

I think any of us that work in the arts know this feeling. A feeling of being an outsider, and many still are outsiders to the outsiders, those who live on the fringe of the misfits. Perhaps these days, the gate keepers are employed to keep people from coming in the backdoor quite so readily.

Mamet talks about organic acting and relates it to objectives. This is important for Practical Aesthetics practitioners. This is great for scene analysis, As-Iffing or playing the scene:

“A child who doesn’t want to go to bed. A lover who wants a second chance. A man or woman who wants a job. Someone who wants to get laid. There’s nothing that these people won’t do. And that’s called having an objective. Having an objective is just a fancy word for wanting something real, real bad. When all of us, or any of us, are in these situations, there’s nothing we won’t do. All our attention is on the other person.   And we’ll change horses in the middle of the stream to do anything to get them to give us what we want. Now when you see that in an actor on the stage it’s awfully damned compelling. Because what the great actor is doing on stage is changing his or her tactics to get what they need from the other person on stage, rather than performing what they dreamed up at home.”

*And let’s face it, whilst it was Meisner that created the exercise, it’s Mamet that taught it to his original NYU Practical Aesthetics Workshop class, and part of Practical Aesthetics it has become, perhaps these days, he doesn’t think it works. I’ll do some investigating and see what I can find out!