[In the following review, Price outlines Mamet's main messages about acting in True and False.]

In David Mamet's True and False, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter reveals the unique perspective of how a playwright views the rehearsal and performance aspects of a text. In this book, Mamet offers an alternative to the standard “Method” acting approach.

Without specifically addressing his own plays, Mamet's scalding criticism of Stanislavski and the American “Method” can easily be read as a prescription for how this playwright intends his plays to be analyzed and performed—and how not to.

True and False consists of one hundred and twenty-seven pages divided into twenty-nine chapters; and, like his dialogue, Mamet's chapters are brief, hard-hitting, and poignant. Mamet assaults and insults the commonplace institution(s) of American acting, while delivering an (albeit limited) alternative for discovering artistic Truth in the “depraved carnival” of show business (50). The chapters, the longest being only eight pages, read as vignettes on acting, philosophy, and life, with titles such as: “The Rehearsal Process,” “A Generation That Would Like to Stay in School,” and “Eleven O'Clock Always Comes.” Although seemingly diverse topics, Mamet links philosophy and acting through the pursuit of Truth—on stage and in life. According to Mamet, one should live “To deny nothing, invent nothing—accept everything, and get on with it” (71).

In American popular culture and theatre, Mamet stands at the forefront of the contemporary canon of American dramatic literature. It is through this status that one must view his unabashed and overt “slaughter of the sacred cow” of American acting: The Method. Mamet criticizes conventional acting methodology in every chapter save four, referring to Stanislavski's theories as “hogwash” (12). The mainstays of The Method, “emotional memory” and “sense memory,” represent for Mamet the same futility as “teaching pilots to flap their arms while in the cockpit in order to increase the lift of the plane” (12). Throughout this text, I found the strongest quality to be the simple and direct style in which Mamet presents an alternative approach to acting. Mamet believes that if a play is designed well, the writing itself contains all that is needed. Say the words clearly and with intention, for layering emotion on the words dilutes the strength and clarity, and creates “funny voices” or false emotions. Mamet's advice to the actor is as direct as his dialogue. His tearing down of mainstream acting theory constitutes, for many, the subtitle's “heresy”; however, “common sense for the actor implies that a mother does not concern herself with her emotions when trying to save her child, she reacts.” He emphasizes instinct and action, not preparation and emotion. Mamet, in general, reduces a complex art form to simple directives, perhaps too general and overly simple.

Ironically, the strength and confidence that exudes from his attack on The Method may also be the weakest and most contradictory sections of this text. While denouncing Stanislavski, he encourages the use of imagination, action (pursuing an objective), and “acting ‘as if’”—all of which are pure Stanislavskian elements of acting. Moreover, Mamet's theories also resemble Sanford Meisner's acting techniques, yet Meisner's name is notably absent from Mamet's text.

Mamet's approach holds immense promise for the playwrights of popular culture, like himself, Pinter, and Shepard. True and False stands as a guide, allowing us “to lift up the hood, as it were, and look at the wiring” (90) of the dramatic mechanisms of David Mamet. But what of Shakespeare? The Greeks? Molière? How can an actor who isn't familiar with verse concern herself with objectives when she doesn't understand the language?

Mamet's approach is specific to his plays and those of similar style and language, the way in which he wrote his plays to be performed. To this end, True and False represents a significant contribution to acting theory and popular culture.