True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor by David Mamet

exciting if you’re not excited; and you can’t be excited if you’re thinking about nothing more compelling than your boring old concentration, self-performance, and good ideas.
    A friend once had dinner with Margaret Thatcher and reported, “You know, I couldn’t believe it myself, but there’s something sexy about her.” And I’m sure there was. She was gadding about, at the top of her game, having her own way, plotting, scheming, commanding. What did he find sexy? Power.
    Exercise your own power in your choice. Make a compelling choice and it’s no trick to commit yourself to it. “Concentration” is not an issue.

TALENT
    A concern with one’s talent is like a concern with one’s height—it is an attempt to appropriate prerogatives which the gods have already exercised.
    I am not sure I know what talent is. I have seen moments, and performances, of genius in folks I had dismissed for years as hacks. I’ve watched students of my own and of others persevere year after year when everyone but themselves knew their efforts were a pitiful waste, and have seen these people blossom into superb actors. And, time and again, I saw the Star of the Class, the Observed of all Observers, move into the greater world and lack the capacity to continue.
    I don’t know what talent is, and, frankly, I don’t care. I do not think it is the actor’s job to be interesting. I think that is the job of the script. I think it is the actor’s job to be truthful and brave—both qualities which can be developed and exercised through the will.
    An actor’s concern with talent is like a gambler’s concern with luck. Luck, if there is such a thing, is either going to favor everyone equally or going to exhibit a preference for the
prepared
. When I was young, I had a teacher who said that everyone, in the course of a twenty-year career, was going to get the same breaks—some at the beginning, some at the end. I second and endorse his observation as true. “Luck,” in one’s business dealings, and “talent,” its equivalent onstage, seem to reward those with an active and practicable philosophy.
    The Pretty Girl or Boy will grow old, the “sensitive sophomore” will have to grow up or pay the consequences, the wheel will turn, and hard work and perseverance
will
be rewarded. But a concern with talent is a low-level prayer to be rewarded for what you now are.
    If you work to improve those things about yourself which you may control, you will find you have rewarded
yourself
for what you have become. Work on your voice so that you may speak clearly and distinctly although wrought-up, frightened, unsure, overcome (the audience paid to hear the play); work on your body to make it strong and supple, so that emotion and anxiety do not contort it unpleasantly; learn to read a script to ferret out the action—to read it not as the audience does, or as an English professor does, but as one whose job is to bring it to the audience. (It’s not your job to
explain
it but to
perform
it.) Learn to ask: What does the character in the script want? What does he or she do to get it? What is that like in my experience?
    Pursuit of these disciplines will make you strong and give you self-respect—you will have worked for them and no one can take that from you. Pleasure in your “talent” can (and will) be taken from you by the merest inattention of the person on whom you have deigned to exercise it.
    A common sign in a boxing gym: B OXERS ARE ORDINARY MEN WITH EXTRAORDINARY DETERMINATION . I would rather be able to consider myself in that way than to consider myself one of the “talented”; and—if I may—I think you would, too.

HABIT
    W e tend to repeat those things we have repeated. It’s not especially laziness; it’s just the way we are constructed. It is the way our mind works. How can we use this propensity to our advantage? By
habitually
performing the tasks of our craft in the same way.
    In the theatre, as in other endeavors,