Returning to the well: the Actors Center is an oasis for actors hungry to learn--and survive.(Special Section: Approaches to Theatre Training 2004)(points of access to the Actors Center)

American Theatre, January, 2004 by Tolan, Kathleen

LOOKING AT LIFE THROUGH THE LENS OF THE ACTOR'S CRAFT--examining the interplay of imagination and reality, circumstance and feeling, the physical and the emotional--is what draws many of us into the theatre. It is in the work of the actor that we experience the careful unpeeling of layers of intention, resistance, identity and desire; the release into one's wildness; the delineation of a gesture; the refining of physical and mental powers to support the leap to Shakespeare's verse or Beckett's silence; the extension of the self to the fictional character who rises from the page to create the alchemy of the theatre.

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That alchemy would never happen, of course, without attention to the actor's practical requirements: to get...

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