True and False

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.