Notes to an Actor

Actors always ask for notes on their performance, and they will take them from just about anyone. While people in other pursuits tend not to ask for performance ratings, actors demand them.
Ron Marasco's Notes to an Actor grew out of the actor's profession - which, the author notes, is "such a mysterious art." It is learned by experience, by trial and error, and by succeeding and failing. In his years as an actor, director, scholar, and teacher of acting, Mr. Marasco found that most acting books were either outdated classics that were rarely read, or quasi-textbooks that actors only "skimmed." So he developed Notes to an Actor, a compact, user-friendly book geared specifically to the way actors work.
Written in a conversational, director-to-actor style, the book is based on the innovative idea that notes, given one on one, are the essential tool of creative learning. Practical advice is the core of Mr. Marasco's chapters on Perspective, Rehearsal, and Performance. Deeper issues of the actor's art are considered in chapters on Talent and Greatness. The book offers usable how-to notes on acting in Comedy, on playing material with Style, and on moving back and forth between Stage and Screen (after all, actors have to make a living with their art).
Clear, intelligent, and beautifully written in a "shop talk" way, Notes to an Actor is the best book of its kind to appear in years.

Ron Marasco is professor of theater at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.