Truth: Personas Needs and Flaws in The Art of Building Actors and Creating Characters

About this book

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. Batsons 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 centurys 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 centurys 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 characters Public Persona hides. Tragic Flaw is the confrontational dramatic behavior that erupts when the characters 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.