A Practical Handbook for the Actor

Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previto, Scott Zigler & David Mamet

4 annotations Dec 2022 data

Conclusion

  • Acting requires common sense, bravery, and a lot of will: the common sense to translate whatever you are given into simple actable terms; the bravery to throw yourself into the action of the play despite fear of failure, self-consciousness, and a thousand other obstacles; and the will to adhere to your ideals, even though it might not be the easiest thing to do.
  • When truth and virtue are so rare in almost every area of our society the world needs theatre and the theatre needs actors who will bring the truth of the human soul to the stage.

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  • Stanislavsky said, "Generality is the enemy of all art," and nothing could be truer. If your action is in general, then everything you do onstage will be in general. The specificity of an action such as "extracting a crucial answer" will bring you to life much more than the vagueness of "finding out something."

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  • By getting to the essential action of what the character is doing, the actor has stripped away the emotional connotations that might be suggested by the given circumstances of the play. For example, in this scene Joe is in love with Lorna, but the essential action is getting her to take the chance. By concentrating on getting her to do something, and not on trying to be in love for the duration of the scene, the actor will find himself in the world of the concretely doable, not in the nebulous world of feelings outside the actor's control. The essential action, then, is what exists in the scene when you eliminate all ideas about what you think the author is saying the character feels at any given moment in favor of what he is trying to accomplish. The idea of Lorna dumping Moody for Joe involves all the emotional aspects of a romantic triangle, but what is essential as an end result is one person trying to get another person to take a chance.