Dammit, Mamet

I just read David Mamet's Theatre, a collection of short essays about the subject you'd think he knows most about.  I enjoyed the book, but it's extremely repetitive.  Every essay keeps coming back to the same few points he has to make.  Points, in fact, he's made in previous essays (though this time around he incorporates some of his newly-found conservative politics, which add nothing).

What's best is his no-nonsense approach.  Theatre isn't about ideas.  It isn't even about characters.  It's about making the audience wonder what will happen next.  That's it.  There's comedy, tragedy, drama, etc., but all successful theatre must do this or fail.  And the only proper way to tell if you succeed is to see the reaction of a paying audience. (There are institutions that insulate people from this, but they aren't doing good theatre.)

Stanislavsky may have been a talented director, but his advice, particularly as filtered down into our age, is nonsense, and won't help you.  That's because games and sense memory and the like won't help you find a character, because there is no character.  All there is are lines that have been written for you to say.  Once you're offstage, you no longer exist.

So what should actors and directors do?  Avoid "good ideas" to improve the play and just do it.  There are techniques to learn, but not of the dull academic type, or psychotherapy.  No, what an actor should do is speak clearly and quickly with few pauses, slant so that the audience can see and hear her, not swallow words at the end of the line, not move during a laugh or when someone else is speaking, gesture as little as possible and when you do, make sure the gesture is done with your upstage arm.

The whole point of theatre is to tell that story that gets the audience interested. It's not an intellectual interest--in fact, it's pre-verbal.  It's about something primal, it's not a lecture, it's not a chance to learn a lesson.  It's a chance to experience basic emotions that we rarely get in our everyday lives. A chance to feel more alive.

Which is why the writer learns, if he cares about becoming a good playwright, that everything falls away except the essence--the plot, the incidents that lead from one to the next, that have the audience gripped.  So what should the director do?  As little as possible.   Don't overwork the actors, keep them positive, and never give them directions they can't do (what can they do?--"turn downstage"--what can't they do?--often things regarding complex inner states).

Mamet believes most shows would be better without a director around to improve things.  Same for the costume designer and the set designer.  Costumes and sets should exist to make the play better than one performed on a bare stage with street clothes, or on the radio. According to Mamet, they usually fail to meet this standard.

I'd guess most theatre people don't want to hear this.  And I'd say Mamet goes way too far.  Still, it's nice to have someone tugging in his direction.

PS  Years ago Mamet and his favorite actor, William H. Macy, taught a class and later started a workshop. Out of this workshop came a very popular book written by some of those in it: A Practical Handbook For The Actor.  Maybe I should check it out to see how it comports with what Mamet is saying.