The End Of Acting: A Radical View (Applause Acting Series) - Hardcover

Hornby, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1557831009 ISBN 13: 9781557831002

Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2000

Synopsis

From Richard Hornby's preface: This book is written for those who act, those who teach acting, and those who are interested in seeing it. It is both a theoretical work and a call for action. This book is an unashamed attack on the American acting establishment ... The concepts derive from my graduate seminars in acting theory and history in the School of Theatre at Florida State University ... Much of the feistiness of those classes carries over into this book ... If my arguments serve only to stimulate new dialogue, they will have been valuable.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Acting in America has staggered to a dead end. Every year tens of thousands of aspiring actors pursue the Hollywood grail and chant the familiar strains of the Stanislavski "Method" in classrooms and studios across the nation. The initial liberating spirit of Stanislavski's experiments has long ago withered into rigid patterns of inhibitions and emotional introspection. According to Richard Hornby, the Method now "shackles American acting". With his iconoclastic new work, The End of Acting, Richard Hornby dismantles, tenet by tenet, the American Method as promulgated by Lee Strasberg and other pretenders to the Stanislavski dynasty. Hornby separates the myth from the Method in his exploration of Stanislavski's original initiatives and the proprietary feud over his theories which continues even today.

From Publishers Weekly:

Lee Strasberg's Method, for nearly 50 years the revered sine qua non of American acting, gets a scathing going-over in this stimulating tract by the head of the theater department at UC-Riverside. Hornby argues that the Method's central tenet, the use of personal feelings in a role, prevents actors from fully grasping or expressing a play's meaning. He provides a valuable summary of Konstantin Stanislavsky's system, the putative basis for Strasberg's work with the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio, to demonstrate that Strasberg ignored Stanislavsky's emphasis on physical action and the script's ``given circumstances'' in order to focus singlemindedly on emotional memory. Hornby states passionately and persuasively that such often despised ``externals'' as speech and movement enable an actor to communicate, and even more deeply feel, a character's essential nature. He doesn't offer anything really new--members of the Group Theatre made many of the same criticisms of the Method nearly 60 years ago, and American Repertory Theatre director Robert Brustein has been calling for more stylistically varied actor training for decades--but theater lovers will find much to ponder in his zingy restatement of a central argument about American acting. Photographs.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1557831009
• ISBN 13: 9781557831002
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 305