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

falsity and self-loathing, as it, inevitably, must have been. For concentration cannot be forced.
    Your concentration is like water. It will always seek its own level—it will always flow to the most interesting thing around. The baby will take the cardboard box over the present it contained, and as Freud said, a man with a toothache can’t be in love. A new pack of cigarettes might be important if one has not had one for a month, but interest in it might pale before a first intimate encounter with a new partner, interest in which would fade next to the death of a parent, which would be of importance secondary to escape from a burning building.
    Interest or investment in one’s own powers of concentration is, finally, just another rendition of self-absorption and, as such, is a complete bore. The more you are concerned with yourself, the less you are worthy of note.
    The more a person’s concentration is outward, the more naturally interesting that person becomes. As Brecht said: Nothing in life is as interesting as a man trying to get a knot out of his shoelace.
    The person with attention directed outward becomes various and provocative. The person endeavoring to become various and provocative is stolid and unmoving. We’ve all seen the “vivacious” person at the party. What could be a bigger bore? It’s not your responsibility to do things in an interesting manner—to become interesting. You are interesting. It’s your responsibility to become outward-directed. Why not direct yourself toward the actions of the play? If they are concrete, provocative, and fun, it will be no task at all to do them; and to
do
them is more interesting than to
concentrate
on them.
    Concentration cannot be forced. It is a survival mechanism and an adaptive mechanism, and it will not stand down and stop making its own connections simply because we’d like it to. Acting, finally, has nothing whatever to do with the ability to concentrate. The ability to concentrate flows naturally from the ability to choose something interesting. Choose something legitimately interesting to do and concentration is not a problem. Choose something less than interesting and concentration is impossible.
    The teenager who wants the car, the child who wants to stay up an extra half hour, the young person who wants to have sex with his or her date, the gambler at the racetrack—these individuals have no problem concentrating. Elect something to do which is physical and fun to do, and concentration ceases to be an issue.
    If it’s not physical, it can’t be done (one can wait, but one cannot “improve the morals of a minor”); if it’s not fun, it won’t be done. (One can “suggest methods of self-improvement,” but one wouldn’t want to do it; on the other hand, the same objective might be restated actively, and we’d find it easy to “tell off a fool.”)
    Choose those actions, choose those plays, which make concentration beside the point. Believe me, if concentration is an issue for you, it will be one for the audience. When you choose the play you are burning to do, you will, likely, choose those actions and objectives within the play which are similarly fun. You not only have a right to choose actions which are fun, you have a responsibility—that’s your job as an actor.
    Here is a bit of heresy: Our theatre is clogged with plays about Important Issues; playwrights and directors harangue us with right-thinking views on many topics of the day. But these are, finally, harangues, they aren’t drama, and they aren’t fun to do. The audience and the actor nod in acquiescence, and go to their seats or go onstage happy to be a right-thinking individual, but it is a corruption of the theatrical exchange.
    The audience should go out front and you should goonstage as if to a hot date, not as if to give blood. No one wants to pay good money and irreplaceable time to watch you be responsible. They want to watch you be exciting. And you can’t be