The Great Acting Teachers and Their Methods (Volume 2)

FOLLOW UP ON THE EVOLUTION OF ACTING PEDAGOGY

In this follow-up to his first volume that has become an essential classroom text, Brestoff examines all new teachers and exposes the origin of today’s ideas and exercises that acting students are practicing. What is the rationale behind the lesson? Why is it useful? Whether they can be called revolutionary or evolutionary, the conflicting theories of these teachers result from outrage and disgust.

Andre Antoine, Jacques Copeau and Michel Saint-Denis represent a virtually unacknowledged yet powerful French influence on acting and actor training in the United States and abroad.American Realist teachers known as the passionate questioners, such as Elia Kazan, who is disgusted with Broadway’s commercialism, Uta Hagen and David Mamet, and two influential “outside-the-box” teachers, Anne Bogart with her Viewpoints work and Keith Johnstone, creator of Theatre Sports, are also featured.While differences among the various acting theories and practices are noted and analyzed, so too are exciting and unexpected connections among them revealed.