A DIRECTOR CALLS
By Wendy Lesser
University of California Press, 257 pages, $40, $14.95 paper
TRUE AND FALSE: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor
By David Mamet
Pantheon, 127 pages, $20
At first glance, the two latest “must owns” for theater lovers and disciples, David Mamet’s “True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor” and Wendy Lesser’s “A Director Calls,” couldn’t be more different. Mamet has written a guide for all professional performers that is hard-edged, pragmatic and, at the same time, idealistic, while Lesser’s offering plunges the reader into the deeply absorbing artistic world and career of one brilliant director, Stephen Daldry.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Mamet employs his famous spare, powerful prose style to empower actors, those creatures constantly dependent on the kindness and approval of strangers, with an argument that centers on self-respect and courage. Heresy abounds here, but it is presented so persuasively that it seems like common sense. Taking on the business end of show business–casting agents, directors, et al.–as well as the academy, Mamet asserts that the “industrial” models that produce good students or good team players prove death to actors.
Acting teachers and coaches receive Mamet’s most withering assessments. Deeming most of them “charlatans” who try to control their students through shame, with “supposed (though undemonstrated) superior knowledge,” he characterizes them as exploiters of a particularly vulnerable population. Mamet ruthlessly challenges the long-revered Stanislavsky Method, debunking each of its famed concepts: sense memory, substitution, emotional memory and the fourth wall. In a prime example of his heretical common sense, Mamet derides the goals of trying to “become” the character or to control emotions or beliefs. He connects his critique of the “acting is believing” credo (the Actor’s Studio catechism) to acting teachers; for him, any system that relies on belief, as do those spawned by the Method, operates “as a pseudo-religion” and preys on the actor’s sense of worthlessness.
Actors take center stage in Mamet’s vision of the theater. According to him, their job consists of showing up, using the playwright’s words and their own will and common sense to achieve a series of clear, specific goals, and doing so with intelligence and bravery. Mamet’s actor cannot hide behind self-focused “concentration,” bothering with the “arc of the play” or the “unity of the character.” Rather, at every performance, the actor should “open the mouth, stand straight, and say the words bravely–adding nothing, denying nothing, and without the intent to manipulate anyone.” “Her job,” declares Mamet, “is to play the piece such that the audience may understand it–the self-respecting person keeps her thoughts and emotions to herself.”
Every actor or would-be actor should read this book as an inspiration and a warning of the paradoxical nature of the “depraved carnival” of show business. In the face of a profession that denigrates them and treats them like children, actors must protect their characters, integrity and personal power, for therein lies the source of their art.
In contrast to Mamet’s actor-centered vision, Lesser, editor and publisher of The Threepenny Review and author of the provocative “His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art,” aims her critical spotlight on the directing process. (She quotes director Julian Webber, who described his profession by comparing it to sex: ” `You know other people do it, but you don’t know how they do it.’ “) Actors make only sporadic appearances here. In her skillful narration, Lesser enacts a theater lover’s fantasy: Entranced by director Stephen Daldry’s 1993 Royal National Theatre production of J.B. Priestley’s “An Inspector Calls,” she makes him and his work her project, following him from production to production, up the career ladder. As she pioneers a new form of theater criticism, she enjoys truly the best seat in the house as she sits in on rehearsals, meetings, post-performance sessions and press nights.
Always retaining Daldry as her main character, Lesser also offers valuable insight on almost every aspect of producing a play, from finances to sound effects. She seems to have talked to everyone. Lesser holds no brief for professional critique, regarding theater reviewing as an “inherently self-defeating task,” since months of nuanced work must “be grasped on the fly” in a single viewing. Instead, for an opinion of the subtle adjustments Daldry implemented during a play’s run, she turns to an expert who has seen the play more times than anyone–the London fireman assigned to guard the hall. She is not unrewarded in this or any of her other interviews.
Perhaps the most fascinating chapters deal with Daldry’s mounting of “Rat in the Skull,” a 1980s four-character play involving an IRA terrorist, his interrogator and other officials. In the chapter “Anatomy of a Rehearsal,” Lesser outlines an exhaustive process, one of fascinating detail and riveting interplay between Daldry and his actors. Where Mamet advises short rehearsal periods, with only enough time to learn the words and movements and set out goals, Lesser unveils an intense procedure wherein, though Daldry’s “strategies and obsessions” remain constant, the director “learn(s) a whole new language, physically and theatrically as well as verbally and tonally, in order to speak about a particular play to particular actors.” Daldry emerges from these pages as a brilliant director, a generous artistic collaborator, and possessed of “a pragmatic, flexible, theatrical imagination.”
Lesser’s rich prose style and encyclopedic interests seem a stark contrast to Mamet’s simplicity and narrow focus, but a careful read of Lesser’s multifaceted tale will uncover issues and ideas about performance that actually inspire both authors. Like Mamet, Lesser acknowledges the players and audience as free agents, asserts the fundamental importance of the unexpected and recognizes the primary goal of conveying meaning to the audience.
Indeed, the oddest moment in “A Director Calls,” which occurs comparatively early in Lesser’s tale, would no doubt gratify Mamet. In 1994, determined to explore all aspects of the production process, she charts the meticulous changes Daldry made in transplanting “An Inspector Calls” to New York (where it went on to win Tonys for best revival and best directing, among others). Upon seeing the production months later, she notes ruefully that many of the changes had been eliminated, yet the production remained pleasing and complete. Her conclusion–“One of the paradoxes of theatre is that, like a dream, it is both pointedly meaningful and open to various interpretations, at once all intention and all chance”–unwittingly echoes Mamet’s assertion that the only life worth living onstage combines focus and risk.
Though different in style and focus, both of these strikingly original books take seriously the importance of live theater, but not for the platitudinous reasons artists must mouth in, for example, defending the National Endowment for the Arts. Mamet reminds us that actors hold such power onstage that they “used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart” because their performances “so troubled the onlookers that they feared their ghosts.” Lesser would doubtless agree with Mamet that the profession she examines with such passion is not “genteel,” but rather one that makes audience members fear for their immortal souls. Inspiring that fear, Mamet concludes, “seems to me something to aim for.”
