Stanislavski and Mamet: The Core Difference

Often people who already have actor training or teach acting and have read Mamet’s True and False, are curious about how our approach differs to the more traditional Stanislavski approach.

Mamet’s ideas on acting are linked in lineage to the work of Stanislavski, particularly his later period on the Method of Physical Action. It is more closely linked with the theories of Sanford Meisner, but Stanislavski is a strong influence on those too.

In fact, in an interview William H Macy, who is essentially Mamet’s silent partner in the creation of Practical Aesthetics, has referred to PA as ‘the next generation of the Stanislavsky system.’

Sharon Marie Carnicke also believes that Mamet and Stanislavski are not so far apart. She points out that if Mamet does not believe in character, then Stanislavski rarely uses the Russian word for ‘character’, instead referring to it as ‘image’ or ‘role.

However, it’s not the use of the word CHARACTER that defines the split, but the creative responsibilities of the actor.

Mamet:

Mamet writes in True and False: “The work of characterisation has or has not been done by the author. It’s not your job, it’s not your look-out’” For Mamet, the characterisation process is something done (or not done) by the writer, it’s not something that the actor has to even consider, since it is not “your job”. The actor’s job does not involve the creation of anything at all, for Mamet, the actor is not a creative artist, but an interpretive artist, more akin to a dancer or a musician, than a choreographer or a composer.

Mamet’s most frequent comparison is actually the magician. He says “the magician creates an illusion in the mind of the audience’ so does the actor. Macy says ‘character is a trick that we do with the audience’s collusion’. The magician does not actually ‘make magic’, they create an illusion through their own actions, aided by the audience’s own complicity.

Mamet writes: “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 the illusion of character upon the stage”.

Audiences are complicit in the creation of character, they see what they want to see, they are “suggestible”, willingly so. Mamet says: “The audience will accept anything they are not given a reason to disbelieve.” In other words, they are willingly complicit, they will willingly collude, deluding themselves, suspending their disbelief and accepting characteristics that we ascribed to that person in front of them. The only problem comes when the actor does something to jar this happy self-delusion.

I bring my friend Allen to this room, I tell you this is Allen, a world expert on Practical Aesthetics, you accept it until something causes the illusion to shatter, but it was your illusion, not Allen’s.

Furthermore, Mamet is certain that the audience did not come for the actor’s brilliant interpretation of the role, in True and False he writes “They came to see a play, not your reasoned emotional schematic of what your idea of a character might feel like in circumstances outlined by the play.” This is a primary focus of Practical Aesthetics, the story of the play, it is Mamet’s belief that audiences only care ‘what happens next?’ and not about great character.

The Atlantic Theater Company:

In A Practical Handbook for the Actor, the only pragmatic guide to Practical Aesthetics – (True and False is after all manifesto) Mamet’s original students outline what they learned one summer with Mamet. There is one chapter devoted to characterisation, it’s called The Myth of Character, it is 2 pages in length and they spend roughly 460 words on the topic. That word count is a good indicator of how insignificant character is to one of the most successful theatre companies in New York City.

In the Handbook, they write “Remember that it is you onstage, not some mythical being called character. For your purposes, the character exists on the printed page for analysis only.” If you have done your analysis and memorised your lines, you have fulfilled your obligation to the script and the illusion of your character will emerge’.

Finally, they end by asking the actor to reflect on these words by Stanislavsky – “the person you are is a thousand times more interesting than the best actor you could ever hope to be.”

Practical Aesthetics

There are no character exercises in Practical Aesthetics, because there is no character to exercise. There is no Character History homework. Macy writes: “I used to carry around a wallet of fake IDs, one day the hypocrisy got the better of me, and I asked myself what would happen if I left the wallet and the fake IDs behind for one performance. The answer was nothing happened… no difference to my performance.”

To Practical Aesthetics, character and characterisation are a waste of energy, anything that does not affect your action on stage in the moment is excised from the actor’s craft. Learn the lines, analyse what’s really going on in a script, use rehearsal to habituate your objectives and when you step on stage or in front of the camera, try to get the other actor to do what you want them to do. Your actions, the words of the writer and the imagination of audiences – that’s the triadification that conjures character.

Stanislavsky

Several factors problematise even speaking about what Stanislavski’s position was on character. His ideas have been communised, capitalised (Donellan) and poorly translated. Sometimes it’s impossible to know which Stanislavski we are speaking about. More recently, Benedetti’s newest versions of An Actors Work and An Actors Work on the Role, provide the actor with a great new resource, but again, this is Benedetti’s Stanislavski, different from Merlin’s, Strasberg’s or Sonia Moore’s. For that reason, as Benedetti writes in his earlier work ‘Stanislavski and the Actor’, “Stanislavski is widely and consistently misunderstood.” But he would say that, because like all the others, he feels he’s in possession of unique knowledge about who the real Stanislavski is and what his intentions were:

Stanislavski believed that the script was not enough, the writer did not provide all that was required for the actor to breathe life into the character. A character is not just the 2-dimensional representation on the page, but as three-dimensional as a real person, with “thoughts, feelings, aspirations and actions” The writer has only provided source material and “all this has to be filled out and given depth by the actor.’ Stanislavski believed that “only then can the actor begin to live the inner life of the role.’

Stanislavski turned the actor’s job into one of the creative artist, like a painter or playwright, shaping the composition of character in performance as a new work of art, not a mere interpreter of the text, but a progenitor in their own right. And through this, the actor would enjoy parity of esteem with the other creative artists in the theatre. The writer sketches an outline, but the actor fills it in.

The many games and exercises that Stanislavski created are intended to help the actor to develop belief in the imaginary given circumstances created by the fictional world of the play. The actor trains their imagination with games that have them react to the given circumstances as stimulus. Perhaps first the location, a restaurant over looking a lake, and they improvise around this, accepting whatever their partner gives them, and adapting to whatever they do in the game. Then a time is added to the location, so it’s ‘Christmas Day in the cemetery’ and an improvisation begins. Then an objective is added to these, and then a score of psychophysical actions.

If the Stanislavski-trained actor is in a state of relaxation, has a solid objective and concrete inner actions, and use their imagination to accept through the actor’s faith, (belief in theatrical truth of the given circumstances), then they enter the state of ‘I am’, a state where, as Bella Merlin writes “the actor imperceptibly merges with the character’.

Stanislavski believed that in the state of ‘I am’ the actor acts as the character would, although there is no way of knowing if this is true of not, since the character is a fictional construct, and does not actually exist outside the world of the play.

Stanislavski insists that the actor must know all the minute details of the character’s life and history. Like the given circumstances, it is considered that this information will allow the actor to more truthfully act and react as the character, since they know more and more about the character. Where Practical Aesthetics would say, character is formed from your characteristics, in other words, you are what you do, for the Stanislavski-trained actor, you are what you know, and you react out of your belief in this inner knowledge.

I hope this outline helps those of you who are interested in learning the difference.