About the Book:

This book is essential reading for any actor navigating the jungle of acting training.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, director, and teacher gives you a blunt, irreverent, unsparingly honest guide to acting that overturns conventional truths and tells you what they really need to know. David Mamet advises aspiring actors on topics such as judging a role, approaching the part, working with the playwright, undertaking auditions, and the relationship with agents and the business in general.

True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor is provocative and inspirational book on the job, craft, art, and life of the actor. David Mamet, who studied with Group Theatre giant Sanford Meisner, is unmistakably clear that actors now do not as a rule come up through the fiery furnace of the theatre. Spending your time trying to earn your living in the theatre will teach you a lot of lessons pretty quickly, because you're working with an audience. The people working exclusively in movies and television, or in a studio, for that matter, don't get the opportunity. He provides a devil's advocate's point of view of the very idea of formalized training for actors: "The audience will teach you how to act.... The classroom will teach you how to obey." 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.

David Mamet slaughters some of the profession's most sacred cows and 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.

True and False is bold, witty, and as controversial as the author's plays.

What people say:

"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

"This book should be read and considered by everyone who acts." — Steve Martin

"True and False is vigorously aggressive and laddishly unsubtle. It sets its sights on what Mamet dislikes and despises — theatre academics, drama teachers, pretentious directors - and then blazes away." — The Independent

"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

About the 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 the Oscar-nominated The Verdict. His more than twenty plays include the Pulitzer Prizewinning Glengarry Glen Ross. His other awards include a Tony Award, an Academy Award, two OBIE Awards, two New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and Outer Circle, Society of West End Theatre, and Dramatists Guild Hall-Warriner Awards.