The Actor’s Menu: A Character Preparation Handbook by Bill Howey
The Essential Guide to Creating Powerful, Believable Characters. BUY BOOK - $14.95 plus $4.00 shipping total $18.95. Contact Carla Howey at actorsmenu.com to pay with PayPal, Zelle, or Venmo. BUY eBook $5.95
Whether new to the business or a seasoned professional, this handbook provides actors with a personal, active approach to discovering and developing their talent. Beginning with appetizers and ending with desserts, actors learn how to prepare a character in the same way that a master chef chooses the most complementary dishes for a feast. From typecasting to reinventing a character’s story, actors discover the key ingredients that will enable them to use their own unique qualities and emotions to develop strong, believable characters that people are interested in watching. How to identify and resolve problems such as hidden agendas that can disable an actor’s work; distinguish between perception, feeling, and emotions; and find lasting sources of inspiration are among the issues explored. The importance of imagination, words, and story as well as the difference between intellectual and visceral choices (and the impact of each) are also discussed.
View Book’s Table of Contents.
Fresh Approach For Actors
With this book a seasoned acting teacher and coach demonstrates a fresh new approach to character preparation for actors from experienced pros to those who just want to learn how to act. You can create powerful, believable characters for theatre, film or video using Bill Howey’s innovative Actor’s Menu approach.
Acting Workshop in a Book
The Actor’s Menu provides powerful tools for building the stories and the characters that are the heart of any performance, including the technique of reinvention – learning to see a character in a new, visceral, emotive light. The Actor’s Menu really is an acting workshop in a book!
Using the Menu
An actor creates his menu based, in part, on the honest response of an audience and from his or her own personal choices. Actors will know which choice to make because that will be the ingredient that will best tell the story in the script and makes an impression on the audience, in a workshop or a casting session.
The Actor’s Menu Acting Tips
Get an impression from the script. Use that to reinvent a character. (See page 152)
Make your objective personal to you. (See page 124)
Remember: Your job is to affect an audience. (See page 162)
Don’t make choices because of Hidden Acting Agendas. (See page 22)
Claim the stage. (See page 168)
Use masking to reveal subtext. (See page 144)
Develop as you go. (See page 175)
Find your emotional sweetspot. (See page 112)
BUY BOOK – $14.95 plus $4.00 shipping total $18.95. Contact Carla Howey at actorsmenu.com to pay with PayPal, Zelle, or Venmo.