Action: A Guide for Actors

This work is a straightforward approach to the creative process of actor training. Combining principles of verbal and nonverbal communication with the basic tenets of Stanislavski’s approach, it includes a step-by-step guide for reading, analyzing, and preparing a text for performance. The book also provides a template for rehearsing a sonnet, a soliloquy, and scenes from plays of heightened language ranging from Shakespeare, Moliere, and Congreve, to Ibsen, Shaw, and Lynn Nottage. Using improvisation, games and exercises with a series of tools designed to enhance the creative process, the book outlines the specific steps necessary to engage in the basic tenets of acting: overcoming obstacles and playing action-based objectives. Enlarging the field of study to include status, opposition, and releasing, as well as scansion and an emphasis on operative words and images, the actor emerges from this training process prepared to play any text, in any style, under any circumstance, with confidence, ease and a sense of joy.

Sabin Epstein has served as codirector of the advanced training program at the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco, head of acting for the Old Globe/University of San Diego MFA acting program, and head of performance skills for National Theatre Conservatory in Denver, Colorado, and as resident or guest director of numerous acting training programs throughout the United States. He lives in Denver.