True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor was published by Pantheon Books in 1997. The book is a frontal assault on the Method acting tradition — the Stanislavski-derived approach, dominant in American theater and film since the 1950s, that requires actors to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances” by accessing their own emotional memories and psychologically merging with their characters.
Mamet’s position is that this entire enterprise is nonsense. The actor’s job, he argues, is not to feel the character’s emotions but to say the words and perform the actions. The script provides everything the actor needs; the attempt to add an emotional subtext — the Method actor’s “inner life” — is not only unnecessary but actively destructive, because it pulls the actor’s attention away from the text and the audience and toward his own psychological processes.
The argument is deliberately provocative, and Mamet supports it with characteristic pugnacity: acting schools are scams, emotional memory is self-indulgence, and the greatest actors in history (he cites the Elizabethans, the Commedia dell’Arte, and the vaudeville tradition) worked without any such theory. The book is short, funny, and certain to offend anyone who has spent money on acting lessons.
Collecting True and False
First edition (Pantheon Books, New York, 1997): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12