SKU: 978-1-60182-180-5 The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting

The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting by David Kaplan is the complete collection of his five approaches to acting with an additional section that deals with comparing, choosing and combing the different approaches. This is an excellent acting textbook that deals with theory and practice for both beginning and advanced actors.

David Kaplan's The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting contains his five approaches to acting: identifying tasks, playing episodes, building images, learning the world of the play, and telling a story. Each approach has its own definition of what it means to act, what it means to act well, what it means to be a character in a performance on stage, and, by extension, what it means to be a person in “real” life. Each approach covers history, theory and examples of its practice.

In The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting David Kaplan considers acting to be an art of human relationships, an art woven to other arts and sciences, to history, to psychology, to current events.

Anyone interested in the study of acting will instantly realize that The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting is a comprehenive approach to studying acting. As David Kaplan explains, "If we can agree that acting involves the theory and practice of human relationships — not just the relationships of actors with actors, but of actors with audiences — then the study of acting merits attention from anyone interested in behavior, character, and a relationship to the world from which ideas about such things evolve."

About the Author

David Kaplan is an author and theater director who stages plays around the world with professional companies in indigenous languages and settings. He is a former Fellow at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, the repository of Tennessee Williams’ literary estate. He has experience directing Williams’ repertory around the world.

In 2003 Mr. Kaplan staged Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities of a Nightingale in Cantonese at the Hong Kong Repertory Theater. Seasons past include directing the first Russian production of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer (the subject of a TASS documentary), a Sufi King Lear in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, performed in the Uzbek language and broadcast on Uzbek television; Genet’s The Maids in Ulaan Baator, Mongolia, performed in Mongolian. In America he has staged his own adaptation of The Circus of Dr. Lao in Los Angeles, Tennessee Williams’ The Traveling Companion at WestBeth in New York, and Williams’ Frosted Glass Coffins in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival.

David Kaplan is also the author of Tennesse Williams in Provincetown (Hansen Publishing Group, 2007) and articles on such varied subjects as Eudora Welty and Andres Segovia, the history of Shakespeare productions in Central Asia, the American monologist Ruth Draper, the twenty-first century freaks of Coney Island USA. His translations of Chinese poetry from eighteenth century Japan will appear in the journal Alehouse early 2007.