A Practical Handbook for the Actor

I really like this acting book. It's very short, simple, and useful. While it might not equip the actor to deal with every challenge they will encounter, I believe the basic technique of scene analysis they outline will serve actors well in approaching any text-based performance. I trained with a teacher who believed in many of these ideas, and after spending some time with this action and reality of the moment oriented technique, I have come to believe this is an effective approach to acting. I would recommend this book to any actor and am assigning it to my acting students.

With that said, I do have a few issues with it:

-The introduction by David Mamet is ridiculous. I don't appreciate how he trashes a bunch of other acting training exercises and refers to these teachers as fraudulent. It is especially egregious that he describes holding other methods of acting in contempt as a symptom of the approaches to acting training he criticizes, when he is doing exactly that in this introduction! I also disliked his style of writing wherein he attempted to describe his experiences as if they were mine (“You have...”) this stylistic approach rubbed me the wrong way. Perhaps more importantly though, I have a fundamental disagree with the core idea - that some methods of acting are superior to others. No. There is no one way (or “right” way) to act or train actors. Some methods and tools will be more effective for specific actors than others, but just because the mirror exercise or “hearing the music with your toes” didn't do anything for Mamet, doesn't mean it might not do something for others.

-Similarly, the authors like to use words like “must” a lot. This implies there is only one right way of doing things. I'm not a huge fan of this.

-The book uses terminology that may differ from the terminology many actors will be familiar with. To a certain extent, this is unavoidable. But using a term like “action” to mean “objective” (and “through-action” or “through-line” instead of “super objective”) seems like a bit of an odd choice and runs the risk of creating confusion in the minds of inexperienced actor or students who may be used to different terminology.

-This book frequently makes use of the outdated and patriarchal convention of making use of masculine pronouns in a universal way (as if “he” meant “all humans”). It's not a super contemporary book, but some readers may be confused and believe the ideas contained in this book only apply to men. Additionally the subtle implication of using masculine pronouns as the default pronoun is that men are the default people. I doubt this what the authors meant, especially the women authors, but it is nevertheless a dated and problematic element.

-Finally, the book makes reference to a number of plays without necessarily giving a lot of context about those plays. They're all old (duh, it's an old book), and there isn't a lot of diversity reflected.

Despite these shortcomings, I nevertheless believe this book is meritorious and offers a lot to the actor in a short page count. Read it, and then try applying these ideas to a scene, monologue, or role.