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
comprehensive 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."