Truth: Personas, Needs, and Flaws in The Art of Building Actors and Creating Characters (Hardcover)

by Susan Batson (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Stanislavski, Strasberg, Meisner, Adler, Berghoff, Hagen, Mamet...now Batson.

Like all great performers, Nicole Kidman approached her role in The Hours as a creative collaboration. Kidman knew that portraying Virginia Woolf on screen required a truth that she as the actor and Woolf as the character shared. Enter acting "alchemist" and "technician of the spirit" (The New Yorker) Susan Batson. Batson's process gave Kidman the tools to find that truth and honed her performance from the inside out. She won an Oscar® for her work.

In TRUTH, the most sought after acting guru in Hollywood and on Broadway distills her half century's experience as an actor, teacher, and personal coach into a step by step process for creating a character from first read-through to final performance.

Debunking a century's worth of myths about "method acting," Batson identifies the unifying forces of Need, Public Persona, and Tragic Flaw to unite the actor with his or her character. Need is the primal, unfulfilled desire that a character's Public Persona hides. Tragic Flaw is the confrontational dramatic behavior that erupts when the character's Need and Public Persona clash. TRUTH shows how actively defining and understanding these three principals leads to the most truthful performances possible.

A must-read for beginning actors, a wake-up call for working actors, and an indispensable reference for writers, TRUTH reveals the inner game of telling stories and creating vivid, three-dimensional life out of words.

From the Back Cover
From the introduction by Nicole Kidman

I first met Susan Batson in New York just a week before I made Peacemaker. We worked together in earnest for two years on Eyes Wide Shut in London and on every film I've done since, wherever they've taken us. This book you hold is called Truth, and that title precisely describes the core of the work Susan Batson and I do together.

I can't create unless I have truth--I have to feel it. Susan helps me to find the truth in myself and use its purity, intimacy, and honesty to make my work real. She's helped me to nurture and protect truth in myself and in the characters that I've played. What I've learned from Susan is how to keep the truth alive no matter what. There's so much more to acting than just creative success. It runs thicker and deeper than that. It has to--it's in my blood, it beats through me. I know that it's in Susan's blood, too. I feel like we've been together my whole life.

A great teacher can make anything seem possible. So many of the actors I've admired and idolized and, in a few lucky instances, been blessed to work with, were shaped and inspired by teachers who opened them to the possibilities of their art. Among actors, Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, and Jeff Corey are just as legendary as their pupils Marilyn Monroe, Robert Duvall, and Jack Nicholson. I am confident that Susan Batson will go down in history as one of acting's legendary teachers. I only hope that my work can contribute to her legend.

I'll always be grateful that I found her. And now, through this book, you've found her, too.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Rugged Land (February 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590710533
• ISBN-13: 978-1590710531
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #204,030 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the ultimate teacher, a true teacher, July 9, 2007

By	Dr. Bailey McDaniel "jencub" (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Brilliant, generous, unique teachers have the potential to change a student's life. Rarely does a student (or even reader) have the sheer luck to come across a teacher who possesses it all: a "coach" with the unique ability to be sensitive to each individual's particular needs; a mind like a steel trap (with an expansive body of knowledge, references, and even more important, real-world experiences unmatched by her competitors; an almost altruistic sense of service and generosity to one's "students" (students in life and in acting); and of course, a no-nonsense backbone that kicks a novice in the pants when s/he needs it, but just as easily provides a hug (or money for dinner) when s/he needs that, instead.

Nicole Kidman is exceptionally successful as an actor, so it's fitting that her words grace this book's Introduction. But anyone who has ever met Ms. Batson or had the great fortune of knowing/studying with her personally knows firsthand that the kind, flattering, almost hyperbolic description provided by Kidman is completely accurate. The heart, wisdom, humility, and power that define Ms. Batson, as well as what she provides to those lucky enough to learn/have learned from her in person, seems to be as meaningful to Oscar winners (Kidman, Juliette Binoche, etc.), as to the hundreds of anonymous actors and former actors to inhabit her classrooms.

Buying/possessing this book is a good idea for anyone concerned with "truth," anyone with a penchant for the performing arts, or really, anyone interested in the important, sometimes painfully difficult art of introspection and living life more authentically.

As a former acting student of Ms. Batson's (I'm a college literature professor now), I always listen for her name when one of her more famous "students" receives an award on television. Once, perhaps at the Oscars, Kidman referred to Ms. Batson as her "guru" and a "spiritual godmother." For those fortunate few of us who can also boast former classroom experience with Ms. Batson, we nod our head in agreement - she is just that. The lessons she offered me nearly ten years ago (lessons about acting, I suppose, but more so, about life, about growth) are still a part of my daily life, how I practice living. For that reason, anyone with an interest in learning more about "truth" would certainly benefit from buying this book.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars No more acting "gurus" please..., May 26, 2008

By	Tom Connolly (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

I wonder what Adele Thane would think of Ms Batson's combination of psychotherapy and "laying on of hands"? (I was in Miss Thane's theatre too). Note Batson's stable of stars: Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Chris Rock, Madonna, and Sean Combs--among other worthies. Imagine any of them in a play? Try hard, here's what you might find if you talk to anyone who was there: people only recall that Nicole Kidman took off her clothes on stage in "The Blue Room"; Sean Combs almost single-handedly dragged down all the other performances in the stage revival of "Raisin in the Sun." Madonna in "Speed the Plow"? if you sat beyond the second row you wouldn't have known she was on stage. Ms Batson talks about the dreaded phenomenon of "personality"--hmmmm what do all of her charges have in common? Could they be Hollywood STARS trading on that element of personality they possess? She retails the anecdote about hours of "the work" she and Nicole Kidman put into a multi-page monologue during "Eyes Wide Shut." After the crew applauded, Kubrick said "great--wrong movie." In short, all that "work" was irrelevant to the performance. Not to Kidman, of course, to her it was vital. This sums up the speciousness of this whole approach. This self-indulgent, internalized, aesthetic masturbation matters only to the cult of true believers who write checks to their guru and then feel better about themselves. Of course it also matters to the guru who cashes the checks and reigns over them. Really though, this is not much different from a personal trainer or dietician, or any other of the hangers-on who latch on to movie folk. Batson claims that she is more necessary than ever because filmmakers have no time for rehearsal--that's because movie makers know what they are doing and what they are working with--a product made by an industry. Stop and think dear reader: this is a disquisition on the art of acting from a coach who prides herself on helping Chris Rock achieve his performance in "I Love My Wife." I do not mean to imply that it is easy to perform such roles or to say that these performers do not do good work. I only ask that we recognize that there are only two things that matter in a performance: can the audience see it and can they hear it. To talk about any kind of internal craft with screen acting is nonsense. Pudovkin demonstrated that in the first and to date only valid study of film acting technique--back in the silent era. He famously demonstrated that an actor's facial expression could be made irrelevant when the director cuts away from the actor and contextualizes the actor's emoting. Batson's own proud rehearsal of Nicole Kidman's "work" on her monologue in "Eyes Wide Shut" demonstrates Pudovkin's point too. One doesn't have to bring up Shakespeare or Sophocles to reveal the theatrical worthlessness of all this regurgitation of Strasberg. Read what David Mamet has to say about trying to perform a "role" as if it were a person. A playwright does not create a human being; a playwright creates a function of the play's plot or theme. Madonna no doubt felt wonderful after she was "putty" in Batson's hands and that is wonderful for Madonna. It means nothing to the script she was performing or the audience who had to watch her. Batson's book is irrelevant to the theatre and to art, but rates FIVE-STARS as a self-esteem manual.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best acting books that I've read, June 7, 2007

By	J. Liu "An actor, just like you" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My acting instructor recommended Susan's book and I have to say that it was worth its weight in gold. As a working actor, I've continually been on the search for practical techniques to help me build characters and breakdown scripts. Susan's book shows you exactly how to do that in a very clear, precise way. What I particularly liked was her use of the need-persona-tragic flaw paradigm that has helped me create characters quickly for cold reads. I almost don't want to give out this secret because I want to be selfish and keep it to myself, especially in this highly competitive industry, but I can't deny that this book is one of the best. I've already recommended it to several of my actor friends before even writing this review.