Mamet on Acting – Part 2
Well, it was Mamet’s birthday on 30th November (St.Andrew’s Day) so to celebrate, here’s Part 2 of our blog series of Mamet on Acting:
From an interview in 1994 with John Lahr:
LAHR: Character is?
MAMET “It’s action, as Aristotle said. That’s all that it is. Exactly what a person does. It’s not what they ‘think’, because we don’t know what they think. It’s not what they say, it’s what they do. Which is exactly the same we that understand a person in life, not by what they say, but by what they do.”
Here Mamet is expressing his Aristotelian belief that character is action, character is the sum of their characteristics, the things that they do, their actions. Character is Action.
Mamet on the basic task of the actor.
“What they should do is they should learn their lines, understand very, very simply what the character in the script is doing, and try to find a congruent action for themselves, which is physically capable of being done.”
Many people have taken this quote and tried to undo Mamet’s logic – oh is THIS all acting is, oh come on, Dave, surely that’s not true. He’s trying to simplify. It’s the opposite of what the other approaches do, which is to complicate the actor’s craft to a level of voodoo so convoluted that no one can actually do it, so they experience various shades of failure.
“Most of the Stanislavski system is a Practical Aesthetic for the actor, based on the Aristotelian idea of unity’.
Mamet believes that the Stanislavski created a practicable (capable of being put to use) aesthetic (a theory of art) which based on the principles that Aristotle expressed that drama featured unity of time, place and action. Mamet would of course, favour the idea of unity of action. One action, one scene.
(1986 – First time I could find in print Mamet mentioning the term ‘Practical Aesthetic’ – if anyone out there in Tinterwebland can correct me on this, I’d be very happy)
“What is necessary is intention, clarity and intention. And the rest is just… as I used to say to my students, the words are just gibberish. They really are. Not to the audience, but to the actor”. Mamet offers us his definition of what’s really necessary, a clarity of work, a focused specificity, not generality and understanding intention. To him, even as a playwright, to him the actor should consider the words as gibberish, first and foremost, it’s intention, and how we attempt to get what we want.