I’ve been cast in a local play here in Charleston, with my favorite theatre company, the Pure Theatre. Rehearsals are going well, the show opens the first weekend in September. At first I was a bit overwhelmed; this role is easily the largest one I’ve ever taken on, and certainly the longest in a good long while. The play is called ‘36 Views’ and is about an art dealer and an art historian who discover what they think is a Japanese pillow book, and try to find out whether it is authentic. “Their search becomes a game of greed, love, and mental hide-and-seek as they play explores the relationships between feelings and words, objects and photos of objects, antiques and perfect copies, and a woman’s heritage and her physical features”. I’m not sure about that last bit, but it’s very well written and should entertain.

At first I felt a bit out of my league there at the Pure, but I feel pretty good about performing. I may not have “technique” or really know what method acting is, but I’ve been reading a book that has made me feel a lot more confident about my lack of academic experience: ‘True or False’, by play and screenwriter David Mamet. It’s a feisty little easy to read series of essays on what Mamet feels about the acting industry, and acting schools, and actors themselves. He writes a lot of sense to me. He’s very against the very popular and widely taught “the System”, which is the basis for the method acting school of thought, that was created by Konstantin Stanislavski in the late ninteenth century, and then promoted primarily by the early teachers at the Actors Studio in NYC. Mamet doesn’t believe that acting can truly be taught in schools; he says that the only way to learn is to actually perform in front of an audience, and your only “affective memory” is the experience you have on the stage, by reading lines written by a competant playwright and with the help of a few well-planned directions from a director. I may not have had much experience with being directed or learning lines, but I don’t that I could have squeezed in any more performance time in my 30ish years.
It’s probably not a very widely accepted argument. I wouldn’t know, because I don’t really know much about “the System”, either. But not all of the book is inflammatory… it also has a lot of great words of wisdom for any artist, in any profession. Mamet believes that if you have “something to fall back on” you definitely will. He thinks that if you want to make money, and be secure, and make art in your spare time, you should. But if you are truly driven to create, to act, you will find a way to survive, and doing anything else is a huge waste of time.

I’ve lived my life with that in mind for years and years. And I can vouch that it works. Although I feel blessed that I currently might just have the best day job in the entire world, I still know that I can’t keep it forever. It’s the principle of the matter, and I have to agree with Mr. Mamet. If you have something else to do, you’ll do it. I can see both sides, for sure, but I know that currently I miss the days of being able to focus on my artistic pursuits without any other distractions. But I’ve already posted on that topic.
He also gives really sage advice on how to handle the more miserable elements of the theatre/music/dance/etc. business… the “Business” of being an artist. It all rings with a fantastic element of simple truth to me, and even though I consider David Mamet to be an international success, I can tell by his turn of phrase that he’s been where I have been, and made it through the worst parts of it, and moved on. It’s inspiring.

I don’t know whether I’ll ever want to call myself an Actor. There is a lot about the craft of acting that I enjoy, and there is a good bit that I don’t. To me, for now, it’s all a means to an end; it’s just the End that I’m not quite sure of, yet. But I think that trying on all these hats will push me in the right direction.

By the way, those of you that want to come and see some “old fashioned” non-film acting, in a legitimate “black box” theatre, like, live, and everything, we’re running the show for four weekends in September. Just go to puretheatre.org for more details!