An Actor Prepares is an account (using a fictional name) of the Father of Method Acting—Stanislavski—that details how a young actor takes the lessons taught in acting classes by an older experienced director and applies them to practice when outside of class. Although ostensibly an instructional manual for actors, there is a novelistic feel to the book thanks to the author’s decision to split his own personal history and experiences into two characters: the eager young actor and the experienced Director. Ultimately, this decision also succeeds in expanding the lessons to be gained from that specifically geared to performers to anybody working in an industry in which putting on an act or acting out a role can be applied.
Structurally, An Actor Prepares is part monologue in diary form and part Socratic dialogue. The diary element recounts what the young student learned and how he tried to apply it as homework outside of class. The scenes inside the class are also a part of the student’s recounting, but is written in the form a Socratic dialogue in which the students arrive to perform for the Director by using what new information they have learned. Alternative opinions and viewpoints thus become part of the journalistic discourse in which the purpose is to justify the authority of the Director’s approach to acting in opposition to existing “artificial” forms much in the same that the purpose of Plato’s dialogues is to justify the authority of Socratic philosophy.
Obviously, this makes the central point of readership the accumulation of theory to applied to the goal of becoming a performer. From that point of view An Actor Prepares belongs on the bookshelf alongside Shurtleff’s Audition and Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting as essential texts for anyone considering a career as an actor. What is important to keep in mind, however, is that acting talent is not prerequisite for success only within the world of drama. (In fact, in many cases, the requirement of talent in order to achieve great success on the stage or screen seems to have been suspended entirely). The adoption of a persona that is not one’s own and the successful presentation of that person to the right audience under the right circumstances is a requirement met by perhaps a majority of people every day who have never stepped foot on a stage or appeared in front of a camera in their lives.
The central lesson that the Director tries to instill in the young students in An Actor Prepares is the quality of truth. What is acting, after all, but getting someone to believe a lie? A lie need not be deceptive; sometimes it is merely a mechanism for selling. Likewise, acting sometimes is required sell a truth that others don't or won't or can't accept or see. Whether it selling a car to customer or selling your potential as a mate to a resistant object of your desire, this is an aspect of acting for which literally everyone should prepare.
