The Young Actor's Notebook is a guide for those entering the industry. It offers easily absorbed information and quick tips on how to approach auditions, rehearsals and performance. Quotes about acting are interspersed with insights into common challenges encountered when transitioning from student to professional. A number of acting-focused mantras are provided to help center the mind. Not meant to be read all in one siting, you can read a sentence one day, a mantra the next. Space is provided to take notes. Easily portable, you can keep it nearby to refer to before any performance or use as a space to record creative insights. This book is about how to be a professional in an emotional and demanding creative field. Consult it when you need. It is about you, for you.

Scenes especially selected for young thespians -- taken from such major plays as The Effect of Gamma Rays and Member of the Wedding -- are supplemented with acting tips, preparatory exercises, and directions.

Marian Engel emerged as a writer during that period in Canada when nationalism increased and “new feminism” dawned. Although she is recognized as a distinguished woman of letters, she has not been widely studied; consequently we know relatively little about her and her craft. The material collected in Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute...” is a major step in redressing that neglect. Extracts carefully chosen by Christl Verduyn from Marian Engel’s forty-nine notebooks — notebooks Engel began in the late 1940s and which she maintained until her death in 1985 — track Engel’s creative development, illustrate her commitment to the craft of writing and document her growth as a major Canadian writer. The notebooks also portray Engel’s surprising leaps of logic, her fascination with the bizarre, the eclecticism of her reading and the depth and variety of her thinking. Finally, they present moving documentation of a woman facing cancer and early death. Christl Verduyn’s illuminating introductory discussions to each of the notebooks unobtrusively guide us in the reading of these sometimes difficult writings. Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute...” leaves readers with a vivid sense of Canadian culture during the 1960s and 1970s. It provides insight into the literary life of one of Canada’s significant woman writers, including her connections with other Canadian writers, and will be of special interest to scholars working in the field of literature.

This volume features monologues taken from historical and legendary sources.

The way some introductory acting books are written, it seems that a literal leg break is your best option. In The Young Actor's Handbook, Jeremy Kruse, an actor, writer, producer, and director who teaches method acting, acting for camera, improvisation, and sketch comedy at The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York, mends this mangled genre, distilling invaluable lessons and years of experience down to a lean, mean, intuitive hundred page primer. Rather than bludgeoning the uninitiated with dense paragraphs, vague concepts, and opaque examples, The Young Actor's Handbook ignites the beginning actor's creative soul with inspirational acting exercises, acting theory, writing exercises, and insight into what it means to be an actor. This concise and pragmatic manual will guide and inform the young actor, beginning actor, novice acting teacher, or anyone who wants to understand acting through a broad and diverse survey of essential knowledge. The teachings of Richard Boleslavsky, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen, Michael Shurtleff, Lee Strasberg, and Constantin Stanislavsky are eloquently and accessible rendered, as are basics of script analysis, camera technique, the audition mindset, agent acquisition, and the actor's life. Whether you're a curious novice, veteran acting teacher, or even an interested observer, The Young Actor's Handbook will enhance your understanding of this vast and rewarding craft.

"Befriending Bertha centers on three children - a boy who can't stop talking, a girl who can barely speak and another girl who claims to drive her own Cadillac - drawn into an unlikely bond. They weave a web of fantasy and drama in which they seek refuge from the problems they face in reality. When these two worlds collide, each of the kids must face the challenge of dealing with truth while keeping hope alive."--BOOK JACKET.