is one of my favorites. I find it liberating and reassuring, and his methods are so simple they might seem easy to dismiss. Except that they work! "Taking it off the page" is really the backbone of Guskin's method, and it is a sure-fire way to get to the truth on stage. I've been using Guskin's ideas for a few years now. In a nutshell it is the same as "dropping in" text, "personalizing", or any other number of terms. But Guskin's explanations are so clear and compelling it makes you want to run right out and try them, and that is really the best thing to do.Guskin says his work is about "being free to let the phrase or line take me wherever it goes at that moment." It's breathing the line in, breathing the line out, then saying it and allowing whatever associations come up to be present. Simple. Not easy.
Harold Guskin is an actor, director, teacher, and acting coach to the stars including Kevin Kline, Peter Fonda, Glenn Close, and James Gandolfini - just to mention a few. So he must know something about what makes actors tick. But I find working with the ideas he sets forth in his book to be so liberating. The breath is never wrong. If we follow our impulses we will always be interesting. Others may not "get it", but we'll at least be making choices that aren't stuck in the pedestrian.
Get this book now. His advice on auditioning is particularly helpful. Where else do you find somebody saying "Don't memorize!" Of course the brilliance of that is it allows you to be free to memorize more easily. But acting is not memorizing as many of us have been taught. Guskin reminds us what true acting is really all about. The answer lies in the imagination given flight by the breath in each moment.
I had How To Stop Acting sitting out on my desk yesterday when some friends came for a visit. One guest picked up the book and said, "Are you quitting acting?" She thought it was a book about how to exit the industry. Now that's the book I want to look at next!
