True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (11 page)

These games, these fantasies, are highly dramatic and idiosyncratic. We enjoy them because in them we
act
—which means we perform them in order to achieve an objective—as above, to reveal the abuser to himself, to instruct the tyrant in simple humanity, to win the obstinate to common sense.

In none of these do we have to “remember” how we are supposed to feel. We simply remind ourselves what we are about to do, and we are suffused with the desire to
do
it: we jump immediately and happily into the midst of the game, we begin our harangue, our explanation, our apology, protest, summation. We can make our speech to the tyrant time after time, and indeed we do, sometimes improving it, sometimes simply repeating it for the joy it affords us.

Any method of acting—any interchange in life, for that matter—which is based upon the presence or absence of emotion sooner or later goes bad. We have all
seen the perfectly good marriage discarded because one of the partners “fell out of love.” The religious who has a crisis of faith is undergoing the inevitable and will do so periodically.

The actor does not need faith; and like the religious in the crisis, the actor is both called upon and
paid
, not to do the thing for which she is perfectly prepared, but to do that for which she is unprepared, unfitted, and which she would much rather avoid. This is called heroism.

Joan chooses to honor her voices over saving her life; Hamlet chooses to get to the bottom of a vile and sordid entanglement when everyone around him calls him mad to do so; Henry V, on the eve of a battle which will likely bring his death, chooses to make a speech to his comrades, not of extortion but of thanks—he pays a debt; Sonia chooses to devote herself to Uncle Vanya rather than wallow in her loss. This is drama. Human beings contending bravely with their fate, their circumstances, and their nature.

What do we say of the actor who would wish it all away—the immediacy, the ungainly bravery of people in extremes—who would wish it all away and substitute some shoddy counterfeit of emotion? We say that such a one is great, that he is a Great Actor, and that we have never seen such technique.

What does this talk of technique mean? It means we were so starved of anything enjoyable that we were reduced to enjoying our own ability to appreciate. What
would the word “technique” mean if applied to a chef? Or a lover? It would mean that their works and actions were cold and empty and that, finally, we’re disappointed by them. This is precisely what it means when applied to a performance onstage.

Most actors are terrified of their jobs. Not some, most. They don’t know what to do, and it makes them crazed. They feel like frauds.

Failure offers, at the least, support for their world-view, but success, to them, is agony. That which makes the actor uncomfortable—and I speak from observation as actor, director, teacher, and writer—that which makes the actor uncomfortable is
always
the scene. He and she, when unschooled, will attribute it to deficiencies in their preparation, in the preparation or attitude of their colleagues, to deficiencies in the script, and say or portray “I just could not be comfortable doing that,” and, in so saying, they are right.

But when, in our fantasies of saving France, defeating Hitler, pleading for Dreyfus or for woman’s suffrage, are we ever comfortable? We may be
happy
, or enjoy, as we only can in fantasies, dolor and misery, but we are in a state of excitement-upset which has
nothing
to do with being comfortable.

The actor cannot distinguish the cause of his perturbation—nor should he. It’s not his job. His job is to get out onstage and
act in spite of it
. In spite of
whatever
he’s feeling. Henry V would rather be alone with his fears, and his reflections, but in spite of it he chooses to
pay a debt, in the St. Crispin’s Day Speech. Clarence Darrow would rather have leapt to his feet and cried, “My opponent is a fool, and his arguments a fool’s prattle,” but in spite of it he reasoned the judge through the Scopes Monkey trial, the Leopold and Loeb case, and so on. Jackie Robinson held his peace, and showed the world true heroism by
not
expressing himself.

And
you
can show the audience some heroism. That’s why they came to the theatre. They didn’t come to see “technique,” whatever
that
may be.

You are going to bring your unpreparedness, your insecurities, your insufficiency to the stage whatever you do. When you step onstage, they come with you. Go onstage and act in spite of them. Nothing you do can conceal them. Nor
should
they be concealed. There is nothing ignoble about honest sweat, you don’t have to drench it in cheap scent.

And when you go onstage determined
to act
, that is, to get what you came for, and not to be denied, you can come offstage at peace.

There is nothing more pointless or more common than the spectacle of the actor coming off, going home head hung, saying to herself and her colleagues, “I was not good tonight. I failed.”

Leave it onstage. If your objective is only to do a good performance, the feeling of failure can only cast you into an anxious fugue state of self-consciousness. If, on the other hand, you come onstage to get something concrete from the other person, a feeling in any one
moment of failure can and should and will only energize you to try harder.

“Technique” is the occupation of a second-rate mind. Act as you would in your fantasy. Give yourself a simple goal onstage, and go on to accomplish it bravely.

That dedication is up to you. Everything else is with the gods.

T
he prestige of most acting teachers rests upon the idea of apostolic succession.

They advertise that they studied with the students who studied with the students, who, at the beginning of the chain, studied with one of the great. Now, the great are safely dead and cannot be quizzed, but we might assume that they brought something of passion and courage to their work—that they were assured of nothing other than their own dissatisfaction with the status quo. It was the force, logic, or romance of their vision that emboldened students to reject conventionally approved approaches and throw in their lot with the newcomer.

These originals had no dogma, no imprimatur to fall back on. And if their vision and instruction did not please or divert or instruct, if it was not practical, the students left.

As we progress further down the chain, both the students and the teachers are attracted not to the
new
but to the
approved
.

It is not the iconoclast who enters the equation at this point but the academic or hobbyist—that person looking for stability. Certainly, most of us have learned something from a teacher. But I doubt if anyone ever learned anything from an Educator. I suggest that the piety we find in these Schools of the Annointed is institutionalized ancestor worship, in which the absent ancestor stands in for our infinite perfectability, i.e., if we strive and strive and strive, we might be able to attain to the clean perfection of Those Who Once Walked Among Us. Yet those ancestors were no more perfect than we—they were unsure and brash and arrogant and wrong and right as the rest of us.

That they managed, in spite of their human frailty, to assert their view sufficiently to found a school and attract followers might inspire us—but instead of inspiring us to worship their shades, it might inspire us to found our own schools.

O
ne discovers one’s old friend, the jeune premier playing the kindly old doctor. Well,
that
went quickly.

Here is an exchange from Chekhov:

It goes so quickly. You can pass your life waiting for a break—and it will pass in the blink of an eye.

The old joke has the fellow haranguing God, “Let me win the Lottery.” The fellow goes on, days and months on end. “Just let me win the Lottery.” And finally the heavens part, and a weary voice says, “Buy a ticket.”

Your life in the theatre, like mine, will pass before you are aware of it. And you will realize why the old
folks reminisce—it is not that they are nostalgic; they are stunned. It went so quickly.

We all would like to be part of, to create, that theatre which we could participate in with pride. On which we could reflect with pride. To do so, one has to buy a ticket. The price of admission is
choice
—the choice to participate in the low, the uncertain, the unproved, the unheralded, to bring the truth
of yourself
to the stage. Not the groomed, sure, “talented,” approved person you are portraying; not the researched, corseted, paint-by-numbers presentation-without-flaws, not the Great Actor, but yourself—as uncertain, as unprepared, as confused as any of us are.

Art does not flourish in subsidy, and it does not flourish in the studio—it is more frightening, more sordid, funnier, and truer than the certainties of the instructor. It is the stuff of the soul. It is the counterbalance to the reasonable view of the world; and, so, it is likely to be despised.

To cherish, rather than despise it—that’s the job of the artist.

I
prize my life as a member of a reviled profession.

I’ve been privileged to witness in a rehearsal room greatness of a magnitude and with a frequency seldom seen onstage. I’ve heard and seen things funnier and dearer at the crafts service table in the middle of a night-shoot than anything heard by anyone in any majority culture.

I’ve played cards with Roland Winters, who played Charlie Chan; I’ve shot pool with Neil Hamilton, who was in
The Informer
. I once walked across a room to introduce myself to what was obviously a very beautiful and slim young woman with astonishingly long red hair (I’d only seen her from the back), and when she turned, found myself speaking with Lillian Gish, and she talked to me, for a half hour, about Mr. Griffith.

I worked with Don Ameche, and he told me stories about growing up in his father’s salon in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
I did a play with José Ferrer—who was the world’s greatest Cyrano—and another with Denholm Elliot, who took a bite of a plum and told me it reminded him of Sonja Henie’s derrière.

I wrote my first film script for Bob Rafelson. His uncle, Samson Raphaelson, wrote
The Jazz Singer
, the first talkie, and gave me notes, through Bob, on
my
first screenplay.

Someone said, of the flight training of a U.S. Naval Aviator, that there was not enough money in the world to purchase it, it could be won only through merit. Similarly, advancement, subsistence, friendship, regard, in the theatre, is priceless to me and has been, after the love of my family, frankly, the guiding desire of my life: to win and keep a place in our culturally despised profession through merit.

I was fortunate to come up in the years when every performer entered show business through the stage. There was, when I was young, no writer, or actor, or director who began in television or in film. This meant that my friends and I learned—or were given the chance to learn—the use of the age-old barometer of theatrical merit: the audience. Did we think it funny? Well, did the audience laugh? Did we think it moving—did they sigh? Was the second-act curtain surprising—did they gasp? (A standing ovation can be extorted from the audience. A gasp cannot.)

I was fortunate to grow up in an environment that
made it easy to prefer the well-made to the shoddy. The well-made paid the rent.

The well-made play, scene, design, direction, the good performance, must be
true
. The simple truth may stem from a natural disposition, or come from years of arduous study—it’s nobody’s business but your own.

The blandishments of fame, money, and security are great. Sometimes they have to be quieted, sometimes they have to be compromised with—just as in any other sphere of life.

What is true, what is false, what is, finally, important?

It is not a sign of ignorance not to know the answers. But there is great merit in facing the questions.

THE CABIN
Reminiscence and Diversions

The pieces in
The Cabin
are about places and things, from the suburbs of Chicago to New York City. They are about guns, campaign buttons, and a cabin in the Vermont woods that stinks of wood smoke and kerosene—and about their associations of pleasure, menace, and regret.

Memoir/Essays/0-679-74720-6

THE CRYPTOGRAM

The Cryptogram
is a journey back into childhood and the moment of its vanishing—the moment when the sheltering world is suddenly revealed as a place full of dangers. Set in 1959 and involving an insomniac boy, his anxious mother, and a family friend with a tendency toward deception, David Mamet’s play uses events as stepping stones toward a series of devastating revelations.