Turn your analysis into an action you can play.
The authors and their work
You understand the scene. You can explain its themes, identify the conflict, and discuss the character's history. Yet you still have no clear task when rehearsal begins. In A Practical Handbook for the Actor, six collaborators address the distance between understanding a play and having something usable to do inside it: Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previto, and Scott Zigler.
Published by Vintage in 1986, the handbook grew from work with David Mamet, William H. Macy, and Gregory Mosher. Those influences shaped a collaboratively developed account of acting associated with the Atlantic Theater Company and the approach known as Practical Aesthetics. The book's six credited authors brought that work into a practical guide to preparing and playing a scene.
Melissa Bruder's acting and teaching
Bruder studied at New York University and the Stella Adler Conservatory, then began working with Mamet and Macy in 1983. A founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company, she performed in productions including Three Sisters and Boys' Life. She moved to Sydney in 1998 and developed a teaching and coaching practice in Australia, with work in acting, performance, and dialect.
Her teaching includes work at Practical Aesthetics Australia, the Atlantic Acting School, NIDA, AFTRS, and Screenwise. Her career connects the rehearsal approach to different institutions and production settings. The practical concern remains what you can prepare and then do with another performer.
The other collaborators
Lee Michael Cohn is an educator, filmmaker, and director whose Directing Actors: A Practical Aesthetics Approach continued the investigation. That later book considers text, actions, analysis, rehearsal, and the director's responsibilities. Scott Zigler is a founding Atlantic member whose career includes teaching acting, directing the Atlantic school, and work in the American Repertory Theater's training program. Both continued developing the approach through substantial teaching practices.
Madeleine Olnek is a filmmaker and playwright. Nathaniel Pollack's background includes NYU, study with Mamet and Macy, theatre work, and later teaching and multimedia work. Robert Previto is a playwright and director.
Practical Aesthetics in plain language
What can you actually play? The Atlantic Acting School describes training in Practical Aesthetics through concrete, active objectives, imagination, voice, body, and play. You analyze the circumstances of a scene and translate your understanding into a usable action. The school identifies the handbook as a foundational text for its script-analysis work. The book belongs to an ongoing training practice.
You might understand that your character fears abandonment. That can be valuable analysis, but it does not yet tell you what to do in this exchange. You could try to win someone's confidence, get an honest answer, or persuade someone to remain. Your choice must be supported by the actual scene and tested with the partner.
What happens when the partner resists? You adjust. A prepared action can organize your effort without deciding every response in advance. If you need an answer, a joke may encourage you, irritate you, or expose an evasion. You have something to work on. You can discover your next behavior through the encounter rather than reciting an emotional plan.
How you keep your analysis honest
For your own rehearsal, separate what the text states from what you infer. Name a concrete need in the scene and choose an action that serves it. Play a short passage. Then ask which part of your preparation helped you engage with the other person.
You can make your notes more useful by recording decisions you can test. An elaborate interpretation may be intellectually satisfying while leaving you unable to act. A clear task can bring the interpretation into contact with behavior. You do not need to abandon complexity. You need a practical entrance into it.
What you carry forward
Read the complete handbook. Follow Bruder, Cohn, and Zigler into their documented teaching work if you want to investigate the approach further. Your aim is a more dependable connection between the text you study and the live action you perform.
Read further: A Practical Handbook for the Actor and its six authors at Penguin Random House.