My first acting class with the playwright David Mamet began inauspiciously. I arrived late. I had intended to be on time. I wasn’t. To be sure, it wasn’t the only class I’d ever been late for, so at that point my lack of promptness could have qualified as a habit. As such, it may have been tolerated by other professors my freshman year at New York University, but it was not acceptable if a student wished to continue attending David’s class. He used my example to reason that it’s easier to arrive 15 minutes early for an appointment than to try to be on time. Chastened by a turn in an unflattering limelight of my own making, I took the cue and broke the bad habit of arriving late for class by supplanting it with another habit—arriving 15 minutes early.
Most people know David Mamet as one of America’s premier dramatists, the Pulitzer-winning author of such contemporary classics as American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna. They may also have seen some of the films he’s written or directed—The Untouchables, Wag the Dog, House of Games, among others. What they may not know is that he has taught and lectured on the craft of acting for more than 30 years at various institutions, including NYU, Harvard and Yale.
Ironically enough, habit came into play again during the second class of David’s that I attended. This time it was David who indulged a habit—of smoking a cigar as he conducted class. Back then a cigar was a signature prop for David, and, this being the early 1980s, such behavior didn’t raise the eyebrows it might today. In any case, neither I nor my fellow classmates had the temerity to raise an objection, but in hindsight, this bit of unconventionality is fairly notable for a man who enjoined his students to eradicate bad habits from their work and their lives.
What was truly memorable about that particular class, though, was the sheer ebullience that overtook David as he held forth, cigar in hand, about the craft of acting. So energized was he with youthful zeal for his subject that at one point he leapt in the air to make a point and landed decisively on an ashtray kept on the floor for his cigar remnants, his shoe smashing the ceramic receptacle to flinders. Surveying the damage wrought by his earnestness, he shrugged his shoulders and carried on with class, undeterred.
I recently witnessed David conduct another acting class in which he no longer broke ashtrays (having heeded his own call, he quit the smoking habit years ago) but still retained the same enthusiasm for what he was teaching, the same vigor and dynamism as a speaker that he had as a young man of 34. He jazzed the students that day much as he had two decades ago, when he first assembled a formalized program under the aegis of the Atlantic Theater Company to teach the craft of acting. Little more than a mantle used for not-for-profit incorporation status, the name would be adopted in two years’ time, with David’s blessing, by an acting ensemble that would go on to mount well over 100 productions (and counting) for stage and radio, and whose educational offshoot would be an acting school that has graduated over a thousand students since its inception.
So it was 20 years ago this past July that I and a group of about 25 eager acting students found ourselves in the midst of the verdant exuberance that is a typical Vermont summer, attending a six-week intensive acting-training workshop led by David and his good friend, actor William H. Macy. Out of this workshop emerged the core group that would begin producing plays under the Atlantic name in 1985; two years after that, Mamet’s training program would evolve into the Atlantic Acting School, now located on the fringe of the increasingly gentrified meatpacking district on the West Side of Manhattan. But it was on the serene campus of Vermont College in Montpelier that we first learned David’s innovative approach to acting and dedicated ourselves to the application of its concomitant philosophical ideals.
For the most part, we were NYU undergrad drama majors, but we were joined by a handful of others who, in time, would come to be known by the acronym FODs (Friends of Dave’s). In 1983, these ranged from a prominent New Yorker cartoonist’s wife, to the 15-year-old-daughter of local artisanal baker friends of David’s, to one of the well-known Cusack actor siblings from Chicago. Even David’s then-wife, actress Lindsay Crouse, attended classes and took part in improvised acting exercises, called etudes.
Up the hill from sleepy downtown Montpelier in a third-floor classroom of the ornate Second Empire-style College Hall, we examined theory, philosophy and practical technique as it applies to the craft of acting. Bravery, will and common sense were the three simple watchwords we were to keep in mind as we faced a summer of schooling that was to prove challenging, stimulating and, finally, immensely rewarding.
Most of us in attendance that summer had studied acting elsewhere and had come away dissatisfied. Dubious training exercises were supported with flimsy justification. Instructors could not always explain clearly what they taught and were even defensive if you dared question them. We were too intimidated to hold teachers accountable for what they said and so remained frustrated and resentful. We weren’t necessarily seeking a new way, just one that we could truly grasp hold of—a more concrete, sensible approach to acting. This burning desire for clarity, a way to cut through the mystery and confusion, compelled us to seek someone who could lay out, simply and cogently, a course that appealed to reason, not one governed by caprice; a gateway to truthful performance that didn’t rely solely on intuition or merely winging it, but derived its results from thoughtfully considered analysis.
Enter Mamet. David himself had been a student of acting prior to his career as a playwright. In the late 1960s he enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City where he studied acting under the tutelage of Sanford Meisner. Though greatly influenced by this co-founder of the legendary Group Theater, David admittedly was a poor student and was not asked to return for the second year of the program.
Nevertheless, he resolved to soldier on and, in time, determined a practical, practicable acting technique for himself, drawing from the later teachings of the great Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky (ideas that had superseded those Stanislavsky himself had written of in earlier works such as An Actor Prepares) as well as what he had learned in classes with Meisner and what he had gleaned from his own research. Mamet crystallized these ideas—philosophical precepts of the aesthetics of theatre and the practical application of those theories—into an acting technique he would term “Practical Aesthetics.”
That summer, we students were participating in an oral tradition dating back almost 60 years—learning handed down by and refined through generations of teachers, the line of which went like this: from Stanislavsky; to two founders of the Group Theatre, Stella Adler and Harold Clurman (who had met Stanislavsky and discussed acting theory with him in 1934); to Meisner; to Mamet; to us. They all honed what they had learned in their own way, but the fundamentals remained the same: teaching acting as a craft via this practical and practicable approach.
The focus of the training in David’s class was on a particular form of script analysis, dubbed the Method of Physical Action: The actor looks at a scene from a play and distills from it a physically accomplishable objective, or “action,” that he then goes out on stage to achieve using the words of the playwright. This action has to be physically possible (as simple and easy as opening a window or closing a door), in line with the playwright’s intentions for the scene, and fun for the actor to do. Thus juiced with a concretely identifiable task to complete, the actor attempts to accomplish that objective by working “moment-to-moment” off the other actors in the scene. It’s compelling for an audience because they see the actor committed to the single-minded pursuit of an objective despite the extraordinary obstacles set before him, recognizing, at least on a subconscious level, that perhaps they, too, have the capacity for courageous acts of will.
Using this method, script analysis is the homework the actor does, choosing assiduously worded, galvanizing actions he then habituates himself to in rehearsal (the semantics of this step in the process being an integral part of the analysis, as what you tell yourself you’ll do in rehearsal, i.e., the action, you’ll do on stage). Here, we were working much like scientists, applying our intellect in order to properly lay the groundwork for the performance to come.
Macy’s class concentrated on what is known as “repetition,” an exercise intended to heighten an actor’s awareness of “the truth of the moment”—which is to say, what’s truly going on at any given moment in a scene, thus enabling the actor to act on that perception impulsively but in a way that best helps him achieve his objective, or again, “action.”
By melding script analysis and repetition, the idea, simply put, is to prepare, then improvise: not the lines of the play, of course, but the ways in which the actor tries to achieve his objective, based on what other actors are doing on any given night and adjusting accordingly. So, in performance, our work is not unlike that of a boxer, as he feints and jabs in an “improvised” attempt to score a KO. As David defined it, acting is living truthfully moment-to-moment under the imaginary circumstances of the play, thereby bringing to the stage the life of the human soul.
Habit was the bass line underscoring all that we learned in David’s and Bill’s classes. We read William James’s essay “Habit,” from his Principles of Psychology. David rarely missed an opportunity to expound upon the virtues of habit. Get in the habit of working correctly and this ethic will keep you in good stead through the rest of your career. “What you rehearse is what you’ll perform,” David would often say. So do your homework thoroughly, come to work prepared and rehearse sedulously. “If you fail to plan, plan to fail,” was the converse warning. What we were learning in class and the work ethic to which we were habituating ourselves would “make the difficult easy, the easy habitual and the habitual beautiful.” For further insights, we were directed to the writings of the Stoic philosophers Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, as well as to Aristotle, Freud, Joseph Campbell and Bruno Bettelheim.
The appeal of the technique was its practicality. The fact that we were free to concentrate solely on achieving a concrete, physical, do-able objective and allow emotion and inflection to come of the difficulty (or ease) of that pursuit was a very liberating idea.
Taking our cue from the Stoics, we were concentrating only on those things within our control—intention, will—and getting shut of those things not within our control—emotion, our “performance.” Gone was the burden of “I have to cry in this scene tonight.” The difficulty lay in getting your objective from your scene partner, a task whose exertion may or may not induce tears or laughter on any given night. Whichever way one’s emotions went, they came out of the doing of the task at hand, were therefore truthful in the moment, and so that much more affecting to an audience.
Though all of this may sound rather heady, the atmosphere in the classroom was highly charged and invigorating, not at all enervating. This was due in no small part to David’s dynamism and enthusiasm as a teacher. He was utterly firm in his convictions about what he was teaching, passionate in his devotion to his theories and to his belief that the theatre is a place where morality and ethics are shaped and defined.
His passion was contagious; we took it up with an ardent fervor and eagerly paid attention in class—not out of blind obedience, but because a fuse had been lit. Experience and knowledge, perhaps even wisdom, beckoned, and we craved to know more. Bracing intellectuality permeated the air as we set our minds to work, analyzing, semantically forging words into actions. The mental sweat poured forth. There was no lack of volunteerism among the students. So keen were we to work that often there was a mad dash to assume one of the two chairs used for exercises in front of the class.
David’s class could be nerve-wracking. His demand that you bring 100 percent of your effort to bear every day was challenging and intimidating. If you didn’t bring that level of commitment to class, he would know, so acute was his reading of your body language and your choice of words. This was both scary and astonishing. David’s own experience of working the repetition exercise for so many years enabled him to look at a person and know even the most seemingly imperceptible of thought and mood shifts. “You can’t hide human emotion,” he’d say. More often than not, his perceptions were on target. The shrill, piercing steam whistle marking the start of the lunch hour at the Montpelier Granite Works down on the Winooski River coincided with the end of David’s class at high noon and was, at times, a welcome sound.
Ever the wag, David used his sense of humor as a teaching tool. On one particularly glorious July afternoon, he exalted puckishly and, we assumed, rhetorically, “Gosh, who’s feeling summery today?” Several hands went up, concurring that it was indeed a spectacularly beautiful day. Selecting one of the upraised hands, David said, “Ahhh, Sarah. Would you then summer-ize for us the technique and the philosophical precepts we’ve learned thus far in class?” Chagrined by such a hoary ruse, Sarah sputtered her way through a summary of all that we’d learned. A request like that from David wasn’t viewed so much as a discomfiting annoyance fraught with potential embarrassment, but as an obligation to be bravely met. David created an atmosphere in class that made you want to rise to a challenge.
Macy’s approach to teaching was seasoned by his years of experience as an actor. Despite a penchant for short-sleeved Izod shirts turned up at the collar (happily, it was said this reflected his then-wife’s taste more than his), respect nonetheless had to be paid to the guy who’d originated so many roles in David’s plays, not the least of them being Bobby in American Buffalo. To us aficionados of David’s work, that in itself was awesome chops. Though not quite as hortatory in style as David, Bill’s blunt honesty and streamlined approach cut to the heart of things. That summer, he said that while you may encounter grief from colleagues who should know better, in a lot of plays “that suck hippo d—,” what’s important is to rise above the b.s. and “make it [the experience] beautiful.” This Zen-like approach saw him through his less heralded turns as an actor. When his career took off after his performance in the film Fargo, he became fond of saying that it had taken him 20 years to become an overnight sensation.
Distractions that summer at the campus on the hill were few. Consequently, we got a lot of work done. With David’s own extraordinary work ethic serving as a paradigm and the simple demands of the curriculum forcing us to hunker down, we kept our noses to the grindstone. He challenged us. We pushed ourselves. The weeks came and went, heat waves ebbed and flowed.
Conducive as the environment was to keen study and hard work, we’d have been fools if we hadn’t taken advantage of the pleasures a summer in Vermont has to offer. Softball on the Vermont College quad. Swimming at the Woodbury quarry. An afternoon picnic at David’s renovated early-19th-century farmhouse. Invigorating hikes to Camel’s Hump or Mount Mansfield, the highest peaks of the Green Mountains. Sitting on a hill at night overlooking the Winooski River, watching for shooting stars. Simple, bucolic, life-affirming. We were city folk gently adjusting to the slower pace of “Vermont time.”
There were visitors that summer, too. More FODs. But these were the working professionals. Greg Mosher, David’s longtime director, came out from Chicago to guest lecture. The children’s author and cartoonist Shel Silverstein, bizarrely gravel- and squeaky-voiced at the same time, sporting a bald head, full beard and tight bell-bottom jeans. The actors Peter Riegert, James Tolkan, Jose Santana and Colin Stinton showed up. All of them had been or were about to be in David’s plays. Anyone to have had the good fortune to see Colin play the title role in David’s play Edmond, or Gaev in David’s adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, understood why Mamet called Colin “a national acting treasure.”
Elaine May paid a visit, sat in on one class, and promptly dubbed us all “Mamet moonies.” Apparently, to some, David was the Baal Shem Tov and we, his disciples.
But was it mere proselytizing? To the degree that teaching anything is, I suppose. But the end result was not to smugly indulge a penchant for “converting the ignorant.” Such presumption is not only vulgar, but debases the spirit of what we, as students of acting, and David and Bill, as teachers, were striving for. As David put it, “Our job here is to create, not to reform our acting partners or John Simon.” If one were to apply the Method of Physical Action to the workshop that summer and distill its essence, it could be seen as a desire on the part of the participants to inculcate habits that turn the art of acting into a discipline that both enlightens and entertains, provokes and inspires.
I regularly go back to the notes I took in class for guidance. David’s style may have been didactic, but it was also undeniably charismatic and stimulating. Part of what made him so appealing as a teacher was that he held himself accountable for what he taught. If you had a question about how what he was saying related to the craft of acting, he would explain. He spoke what he firmly believed to be the truth, and even when you were unsure about accepting everything as such, it was tough to argue with his logic and the staunchness of his convictions. Add to that a lashing sense of humor and you had the formula for a thoroughly engaging, highly motivational teacher.
One day, David discoursed on an actor’s proper rehearsal etiquette, behavior designed to maintain a harmonious work environment. He lamented the sometimes poor comportment of theatrical workers, decrying those who would indulge their emotions rather than constructively address disagreements that might arise. Neither were directors exempt from his sights that day, as he disparaged those who felt that if they had to “do something interesting” with a play, they “didn’t understand the play.” He was on an irate jag, so much so that at one point, his wife Lindsay stopped him by saying, “Why are you so angry?” He seemed almost stunned to realize how much his emotions had overtaken him, this man who so often invoked the Stoics in telling us how to deal with such matters. By way of contrition, David shifted his philippic to an eloquent, stirring coda, suggesting that instead of blaming others, one should take a more stoical outlook. He concluded by saying, “If you want to live in a perfect land, you’ll create it in your heart, and, as Christ said, ‘You’ll shine and spread happiness and love to others around you.'” To my right, down the row of fellow students seated in their chairs, pens were scribbling furiously to capture this amazing and inspiring bit of extemporization.
Though we all came together that summer in 1983 for one purpose, life’s vagaries dispersed many of us to the winds. Some went to Los Angeles to seek fame and fortune, some back to New York to work diligently in the theatre. Several went on to teach what we’d learned from David and Bill. Sadly, two of our number contracted AIDS. Another was rumored to have been struggling with a heroin habit. One eventually found the love of her life and moved to Australia to make a home. Others simply seemed to vanish, whereabouts unknown.
A core of us, heeding David’s echo of Chekhov’s exhortation to the students at the Moscow Art Theatre to “create the theatre in your own hearts,” did just that, and this year, the season at Atlantic includes new plays by Jez Butterworth, Keith Reddin and Howard Korder, as well as Ionesco’s classic The Bald Soprano.
In the summer of 1984, Mamet and Macy headed back to Montpelier for their second and final turn at heading up the workshop. For reasons I’m still obstinately willing to dispute, I wasn’t asked back to that six-week program. Though I would eventually continue my studies with David and Bill after this brief hiatus, missing that second summer at the time was devastating. Who knew what the future held? The training in which I had found so much inspiration seemed derailed. Thus for me began a lifetime of what all actors must endure on a regular basis: coping with rejection. Years later, I would stumble across some small comfort for my failing from, ironically enough, David himself. Visiting the Neighborhood Playhouse one afternoon, I happened upon David’s headshot hanging on the school’s alumni wall. I took note of the inscription David had penned and I had to smile. It reads: “Take heart. They didn’t ask me back either.”
Jordan Lage is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company, based in New York City.
