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Title: True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor by David Mamet ISBN: 0-679-77264-2 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 March, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.98 (43 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: I marvel at how ignorant he can be of playwrites
Comment: I recently read this book for my acting class in high school. When I began it I was told that Mr. Mamet felt that acting school was a waste of time, I could accept that. But he goes much further than that; he states, basically, that actors need do nothing more than say their lines. He goes so far as to say that the only person who matters in how the "characters" (which he claims do not exist) are portrayed is the playwrite. He says that you shouldn't have to do any more than say the lines because if the play isn't written well you can't save it. I am willing to bet half the country has seen a play or movie where an actor carried a poor script or where excellent writing was destroyed by poor acting. Actors were the ones who brought Mr. Mamet notarity as a writer, I am astounded he can write them off so easily and say they are only responsable for getting a play to it's ending. I do not feel that "the method" is the correct way to do things, acting should be done actor by actor, there is not a grand method. But to degrade the actors job to nothing but a fountain for words that someone else has given them is merely a childish way to tell actors he feels that he is more important than they are.
Rating: 5
Summary: True!
Comment: Engaging. Insightful. Funny. Deadly serious. Most of all, True.
My brother is a professional repetoiry actor in Ft. Worth, Texas. When we met for Christmas two years ago, he couldn't stop talking about this book. I honestly regret not rushing out and buying it then and there. This is useful, actual information about the process of good acting. If you act, buy this book and read it now.
I haven't done traditional theater in over a decade, but even as a slam poet and improvisational comedian, I found what Mamet shares in "True and False" invaluable in approaching my work as a live performer. If you do anything involving words, a stage and an audience, you'll find something useful here. Simply put, what he says works.
The writing is short, eloquent, and straight to the point. The topics he touches on by way of analogy and example make this a great read for actors and non-actors, alike. You can plough through this book in an afternoon, but you'll ponder it and reconsider it for the rest of your professional life. At least, you should, if you want to benefit from it.
He says it best... The audience will teach you to act. They will show you what works and what doesn't. If your job onstage becomes anything more or less than to communicate what the audience has come to see, you may be brilliant, but you're not acting anymore. Chasing emotions you don't feel about a situation you're not actually in is the job of the writer, not the performer.
You probably won't agree with 100% of what he has to say. Scratch that, you *won't* agree with everything here, but even then, he will force you to reconsider what you do believe. And, just what is the jist of what his supposedly "heretical" views on acting?
Speak clearly. Find a simple, realistic objective for the scene. Let the words have their meaning without adding your own spin to them. Your own effective performance in their service will add anything of value that the audience couldn't have gotten from reading them off the page.
Now, what's so false about that?
Rating: 2
Summary: Disappointing - not very useful
Comment: Much of this book is taken up with Mamet raving against the Stanislavski Method, of which he demonstrates a stunning ignorance. For example, he claims that the Method is not practical because you cannot "force" your emotions (those who, unlike Mamet, have actually READ any of Stanislavski's books will recognize that Stanislavski said this exact thing) and you cannot force yourself to believe things (I would suggest that Mamet read Stanislavski's sections on the "magic if," and he would find that Stanislavski also teaches this). When he quits ranting against the Stanislavski Method and what he thinks actors need to stop doing and gets down to what he thinks actors SHOULD do, many of his principals are (or, at least, should be) either painfully obvious (such as, our job as actors is to entertain the audience) or of little use to the professional actor. Unlike Stanislavski (whose approach was "these are the principals of what must happen "internally," this is how it looks externally, this is how it looks when you're creating a character for the stage), Mamet does not consider it important to spend much time explaining how his principals work or how they are to be applied on stage.
I will give Mamet credit for a few things, though. His writing is concise and to the point, and touches on a few of the basic principals of acting. He also points out some of the mistakes that some actors make. The one thing that this book does a very good job with is reminding us of the basic job of the actor, which actors tend to get away from sometimes, such as the fact that the audience is paying good money to see us perform and our first obligation is to them. He makes a few other interesting points (e.g., we learn to act on stage, not in the classroom).
Do not read this book instead of other acting books, but rather in addition to it. The book is pretty short and the writing concise - you should be able to get through it fairly quickly. This might be good to read along with Stanislavski or books on the Method, but do not read it as a the first or only acting book you read, or read it instead of others. I'm not sure that it is necessarily worth buying vs., for example, getting it from the public library - it's possibly worth reading once, prefrably after you've already been studying and acting for awhile, but probably not more than that.
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Title: Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama by David Mamet ISBN: 037570423X Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 13 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: A Practical Handbook for the Actor by Melissa Bruder ISBN: 0394744128 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 April, 1986 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Writing in Restaurants by David Mamet ISBN: 0140089810 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1987 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Sanford Meisner on Acting by Sanford Meisner, Dennis Longwell ISBN: 0394750594 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 June, 1987 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: On Directing Film by David Mamet ISBN: 0140127224 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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