The Actor's Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Stage Performers [Paperback]

Jackson R. Bryer (Editor), Richard A. Davison (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2001

Interviews with seventeen leading stage performers.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Actors are frequently interviewed but rarely allowed to talk about much more than their latest show. Thus, large swatches of even the most prominent actors' lives--early struggles, creative processes, first triumphs--usually remain unexplored. Not in these interviews of major American stage actors by a variety of critics, journalists, and scholars. In them, such grizzled veterans as Jason Robards, Julie Harris, and Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy say genuinely interesting things about the breadth and depth of their careers. (Robards' comments about how doing long runs of O'Neill affects one's psyche are especially interesting.) They also include conversations with younger, baby-boom-generation actors, such as Blythe Danner, Stacy Keach, Nathan Lane, and Cherry Jones. Reading these colloquies, one wishes the anthologists would have included a few interviews with the Liev Shreibers and Ethan Hawkeses of the theater--actors in their twenties who have discovered how to balance the demands of film and the siren call to actors that the theater sounds. That is just a quibble with an otherwise fascinating collection. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

This collection offers insight into seventy-five years of acting in the American theater through previously unpublished interviews with seventeen of its most accomplished performers. From Jessica Tandy, who made her stage debut in 1927, to Nathan Lane, who first appeared on Broadway in 1982, these actors help preserve the details, nuance, rhythm, and magic of performances that might otherwise be lost with either the artists or the audiences who were lucky enough to have seen them. Many of the actors recall legendary performances that inspired them; in speaking of their own work, they also have much to say about their contemporaries. As they tell their own stories, tracing their professional lives from repertory theater and summer stock to Broadway and beyond, we hear their perspectives on the art of acting, their insights into the characters they've played and the directors with whom they've worked, and their views-from the inside-of the world of American theater. Taken together, the observations and opinions of these seventeen masters provide a lively and absorbing perspective on the theater of the last half century.

The actors interviewed are: Zoe Caldwell, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Blythe Danner, Ruby Dee, George Grizzard, Julie Harris, Eileen Heckart, Cherry Jones, James Earl Jones, Stacy Keach, Shirley Knight, Nathan Lane, Jason Robards, Maureen Stapleton, and Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (February 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813528739
• ISBN-13: 978-0813528731
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,256,895 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)