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True and False

Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor

Author David Mamet
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Paperback
$17.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
5.1"W x 8"H x 0.4"D  
On sale Feb 22, 1999 | 144 Pages | 978-0-679-77264-4
| Grades 9-12 + AP/IB
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, director, and teacher gives us a blunt, irreverent, unsparingly honest guide to acting that overturns conventional truths and tells aspiring actors what they really need to know.

David Mamet leaves no acting tenet untouched: How to judge the role, approach the part, work with the playwright. How to concentrate and think about the scene. How to avoid becoming the Paint-by-Numbers Mechanical Actor, the "How'm I Doing?" Ham Actor, the over-the-top "Hollywood Huff " Actor. The right way to undertake auditions and rehearsals. The proper approach to agents, to individual jobs, and to the business in general. The question of talent.

Mamet is unmistakably clear about why he thinks actors should not be taken in by such highly touted notions as "the arc" of the character or the play, "substitution,"  "sense-memory,"  the Method itself--in fact, by most of what is being taught in acting schools and workshops across the country today.

True and False slaughters some of the profession's most sacred cows. It is bold, witty, and likely to be as controversial as the author himself.
DAVID MAMET is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, as well as a director, novelist, poet, and essayist. He has written the screenplays for more than twenty films, including Heist, Spartan, House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, The Winslow Boy, Wag the Dog, and the Oscar-nominated The Verdict. His more than twenty plays include Oleanna, The Cryptogram, Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and the Pulitzer Prizewinning Glengarry Glen Ross. Born in Chicago in 1947, Mamet has taught at the Yale School of Drama, New York University, and Goddard College, and is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company. View titles by David Mamet
"Mamet manages to demolish the myths...that pass for theory with regard o acting and directing. . . True and False is a revealing book of the highest order and a pleasure to read"—Anthony Hopkins
 
"Hard-edged, pragmatic and idealistic. . . . Every actor or would-be actor should read this book."—Chicago Tribune 
 
"Trenchant...Meet’s pared-down, occasionally cryptic prose can make powerful sense."—The New York Times
 
"This book should be read and considered by everyone who acts."—Steve Martin 

About

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, director, and teacher gives us a blunt, irreverent, unsparingly honest guide to acting that overturns conventional truths and tells aspiring actors what they really need to know.

David Mamet leaves no acting tenet untouched: How to judge the role, approach the part, work with the playwright. How to concentrate and think about the scene. How to avoid becoming the Paint-by-Numbers Mechanical Actor, the "How'm I Doing?" Ham Actor, the over-the-top "Hollywood Huff " Actor. The right way to undertake auditions and rehearsals. The proper approach to agents, to individual jobs, and to the business in general. The question of talent.

Mamet is unmistakably clear about why he thinks actors should not be taken in by such highly touted notions as "the arc" of the character or the play, "substitution,"  "sense-memory,"  the Method itself--in fact, by most of what is being taught in acting schools and workshops across the country today.

True and False slaughters some of the profession's most sacred cows. It is bold, witty, and likely to be as controversial as the author himself.

Author

DAVID MAMET is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, as well as a director, novelist, poet, and essayist. He has written the screenplays for more than twenty films, including Heist, Spartan, House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, The Winslow Boy, Wag the Dog, and the Oscar-nominated The Verdict. His more than twenty plays include Oleanna, The Cryptogram, Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and the Pulitzer Prizewinning Glengarry Glen Ross. Born in Chicago in 1947, Mamet has taught at the Yale School of Drama, New York University, and Goddard College, and is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company. View titles by David Mamet

Praise

"Mamet manages to demolish the myths...that pass for theory with regard o acting and directing. . . True and False is a revealing book of the highest order and a pleasure to read"—Anthony Hopkins
 
"Hard-edged, pragmatic and idealistic. . . . Every actor or would-be actor should read this book."—Chicago Tribune 
 
"Trenchant...Meet’s pared-down, occasionally cryptic prose can make powerful sense."—The New York Times
 
"This book should be read and considered by everyone who acts."—Steve Martin 

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