Require no sets, props or costumes. Monologues: 7 for women, 9 for men, and 4 optional. Dialogues: 12 woman/woman and 8 man/man. Playlets: 20 with various cast.

(Applause Books). Based on his own experience and the teachings of his celebrated but distant father, Lee, John Strasberg defines the talent of becoming real in a role. He surveys the traditional partition between life and theatre, and urges actors to make it a dynamic living membrane through which vital elements may pass. John Strasberg has written his own intensely personal story about his father's work and the Strasberg dynasty. It is a painful odyssey during which he relives the often demanding role he played as son to a man who was the central father figure to a generation of American actors.

Voskuil argues that Victorian Britons saw themselves as "authentically performative," a paradoxical belief that focused their sense of vocation as individuals, as a public, and as a nation.

"Clarifies why understanding Mark Twain's writing is essential to understanding enduring patterns and problems in American culture. Conversely, it compellingly illustrates why one does not fully understand Mark Twain's work unless one has some understanding of America's preoccupation with performance, conspicuous display, and the mental sciences."--Howard Horwitz, author of "By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America" "In place of the strictly literary frame of reference that has previously organized the Twain canon, Knoper productively focuses on the spectrum of theatrical attitudes whereby Twain reconfigured his culture's race and gender hierarchies into the power to construct social realities differently. This work is sure to play a significant role in the reinvention of Mark Twain for the New American Studies."--Donald E. Pease, editor of "Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon" "Knoper takes up quintessential aspects of Twain's writings, mind, and career. . . . [He] is brilliant in enunciating clearly and coherently ideas and attitudes that Twain either held confusedly or intimated almost unintentionally."--Louis J. Budd, author of "Our Mark Twain"

The Invisible Actor presents the captivating and unique methods of the distinguished Japanese actor and director, Yoshi Oida. While a member of Peter Brook's theatre company in Paris, Yoshi Oida developed a masterful approach to acting that combined the oriental tradition of supreme and studied control with the Western performer's need to characterise and expose depths of emotion. Written with Lorna Marshall, Yoshi Oida explains that once the audience becomes openly aware of the actor's method and becomes too conscious of the actor's artistry, the wonder of performance dies. The audience must never see the actor but only his or her performance. Throughout Lorna Marshall provides contextual commentary on Yoshi Oida's work and methods. In a new foreword to accompany the Bloomsbury Revelations edition, Yoshi Oida revisits the questions that have informed his career as an actor and explores how his skilful approach to acting has shaped the wider contours of his life.

From the celebrated film critic and author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, a fascinating look at some of the cinema’s finest actors and how they approach their craft "Open to any page and you’ll become enthralled by the...tales of forgotten film lore, childhood memories, sexy gossip.”—Philip Kaufman, director Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Anthony Hopkins, Carey Mulligan. When we watch these remarkable actors in a performance, we see only Sophie, Stanley Kowalski, Hannibal Lecter, or Cassie from Promising Young Woman. How are they able to transform our world in this way? How and why do they do what they do? In Acting Naturally, David Thomson sheds light on the actors who have shaped the film industry. He shrewdly analyzes these stars—among them, James Dean, Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington, Louise Brooks, Riz Ahmed, Sir Laurence Olivier, Viola Davis, and Jean Seberg—revealing how a sly smile, an extra-long pause, even a small gesture of the hand can draw in an audience. And he takes us behind the scenes to examine casting and all the other moments leading up to “Action!” Through intimate anecdote, humor, and the insight born of a lifetime watching and analyzing film, Thomson explores the real reasons why we go to the movies and looks at how they influence our lives. This book is not only necessary reading for an insider’s view of the industry but also a surprising investigation of the relationship between acting and living.

For nearly 25 years, expertise has been considered an important testing ground for theories of cognition. Cognitive scientists have examined experts as diverse as chess masters, waiters, field-hockey players, and computer programmers. Recently, increased attention has been given to the arts, including dance, music appreciation and performance, and literary analysis. It is therefore somewhat surprising that--except for the authors' program of research dating from the late 1980s--virtually no studies on the cognitive processes of professional actors can be found in the literature. These experts not only routinely memorize hours of verbal material in a very short time, but they retrieve it verbatim along with the accompanying gestures, movements, thoughts, and emotions of the characters. The mental processes involved in this task constitute the subject of this recent research and are described in detail in this book.

The Perspective of the Acting Person introduces readers to one of the most important and provocative thinkers in contemporary moral philosophy

How do our eyes process and communicate the data needed for us to negotiate the world around us? This book exploits recent technological advances in eye tracking systems to present a state-of-the-art account of human vision. It explores practical implications, for example in driving, playing sports, and ergonomics.

Acting concentrated both the aspirations and anxieties of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, where theater was a defining element of urban sociability. In Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France, Jeffrey M. Leichman argues for a new understanding of the relationship between performance and self. Innovative interpretations of La Chaussée, Rousseau, Diderot, Rétif, Beaumarchais, and others demonstrate how the figure of the actor threatened ancien régime moral hierarchies by decoupling affect from emotion. As acting came to be understood as an embodied practice of individual freedom, attempts to alternately perfect and repress it proliferated. Across religious diatribes and sentimental comedies, technical manuals and epistolary novels, Leichman traces the development of early modern acting theories that define the aesthetics, philosophy, and politics of the performed subject. Acting Up weaves together cultural studies, literary analysis, theater history, and performance studies to establish acting as a key conceptual model for the subject, for the Enlightenment, and for our own time.