Mamet on Acting: Part 3 – The Final Part

So, this is it, the final part of the 3-part Mamet on Acting. In our glasgow acting classes, we often talk about Mamet and I try to inspire the students with some of his more useful suggestions and maxims. His new play RACE looks like it might ignite Broadway when it opens officially. Thanks again to JAG for the PlayBill :o)

When asked about what he meant by ‘stick to the action’ by Matthew Roudane in a wonderful interview in 1984 Mamet said:

“The action is what the character is doing. That’s what the actor must do. Acting has absolutely nothing to do with emotion or feeling emotional. It has as little to do with emotion as playing a violin does.’

Mamet’s pet hate is emotional performance. I guess, many people then believe he thinks acting should be emotionless. This isn’t true. It’s just that he believes that it’s the audience that should be feeling something. The pursuit of emotions or emotional truth ends in self-indulgence, self-consciousness and self-pleasuring – yes, it’s a kind of masturbation. Anyone who has ever ‘stuck to the action’ long enough to try to get it from someone in a scene will realise, when their defenses are down, that they will feel, that emotion will appear, but it shouldn’t be chased. Of course, a lover spurned and trying to get a second chance will be emotional, but their foremost concern will be to get the second chance, and they will be looking hard at the other person, desperate for signs of success or failure, and they will often do ANYTHING, and I mean ANYTHING to get what they want. When emotion comes, they won’t be in control of it, but they won’t give up the fight for that second chance either.

On the same subject, in True and False – Mamet says: “If we learn to think solely in terms of the objective, all concerns of belief, feeling, emotion, characterisation, substitution, become irrelevant. It is not that we “forget” them, but that something else nbecomes more important than they.”

I like this next passage very much (and remember, I’m an acting teacher): “A word about teachers. Most of them are charlatans. Few of the exercises I have seen, in what were advertised as acting schools, teach anything other than gullability. Don’t leave your common sense at the door…” Provocative words, but let’s face it, we all know it to be true. For my own students, the next time you enter the Acting Studio, look above the door and see what it says.

Finally, an our last word from Mamet for a while and I encourage any of my students to do this with me, because if I truly believe in what I teach and if for a second I thought I was turning into one of the charlatans that Mamet despises, I would pack up my business and go run a book shop or something: “If you don’t understand the teacher, make the teacher explain. If they are incapable of either explaining or demonstrating to your satisfaction the worth of their insights, they do not what what they are doing.”

I have to say that I’m sitting here at 01:10am in the morning, re-reading Mamet’s incredible book on acting True and False, and marveling again just how right he got it. Extreme? Yeah, maybe. But that doesn’t stop it from being true. If you don’t have a copy of it, get a copy, it won’t hurt you to read what this guy has to say on your craft. He’ll probably make you spitting mad, but if like me, you read it again and again, it starts to make sense, common sense.