Although better known as a playwright and film-maker, David Mamet started his artistic career as a teacher of acting. In this essay Christophe Collard contextualizes the influences, evaluates the implications, and criticizes some of the implementations of his ‘Practical Aesthetics’ by bridging the divide between Mamet's aesthetic theory and its concretization in practice. Often mistaken for a disingenuous appropriation of the so-called ‘Stanislavsky System’, Mamet's derived ‘Method’ arguably is more functional than original. Nevertheless, Collard argues that his confusion between various interpretations of these precepts is deliberate and serves primarily a reflexive purpose, as illustrated here with an analysis of Mamet's rehearsal play A Life in the Theatre. Christophe Collard works as a research fellow in American theatre and drama at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels), where he recently completed a doctorate about media and genre crossings in the work of David Mamet.