Back in the Eighties, writer David Mamet and actor W H Macy started teaching a bunch of kids from the NYU drama division.
They called it the Practical Aesthetics Workshop and as a piece of summer homework, several of the students were asked to write up what they'd done. The result of this was published by Vintage Books under the title A Practical Handbook for the Actor.
The book is an extremely pragmatic one, it is a slim volume (often found for as cheaply as £5 in some online shops), it concerns the practical job of the actor, simplifying hundreds of years of actor training and entirely revolutionary in its sweeping aside of most of it.
The main differences are that they treat character as an illusion that the audience needs to create for themselves and they also do not believe that actors need to manufacture emotion on stage.
They called it the Practical Aesthetics Workshop and as a piece of summer homework, several of the students were asked to write up what they'd done. The result of this was published by Vintage Books under the title A Practical Handbook for the Actor.
The book is an extremely pragmatic one, it is a slim volume (often found for as cheaply as £5 in some online shops), it concerns the practical job of the actor, simplifying hundreds of years of actor training and entirely revolutionary in its sweeping aside of most of it.
The main differences are that they treat character as an illusion that the audience needs to create for themselves and they also do not believe that actors need to manufacture emotion on stage.
