Want To Read The Book of Actors?
A Life Where All The World is Your Stage
It seems strange to some that by pretending you can express the hidden side of you. But professional play can make it safe to explore the breadth and depth of human life ... as well as its light and dark sides.
By putting on one mask, you often have to remove the one you are wearing ... the one that you donned to get by, be accepted, appreciated, loved and respected. We all don masks to hide the ugly (read unwanted) sides of ourselves or highlight the praised and rewarded behaviors (aka sides) of ourselves. Often those are the sides that please others or are useful to them.
Sometimes, instead of the pain and loneliness of being undefined, we adopt the role most suited to us ... or the one assigned by our family or friends.And so we become the class clown, the jock, the cheerleader, the thespian, the storyteller, the artist. Not realizing that we often merge our identity with the roles we have adopted or been given. And when we try and change ... or grow ... or quit playing the game ... others often do not want to see who we really are underneath all the pretence of being the perfect boss, the rising star, the victim of fate, or whatever script we were assigned or picked up and ran with.
Acting for a living gives us the world's permission to play lots of roles .. the villain, the martyr, the hero, the sage, the unknowing fool ... and treat it all as a good day's work. The mask, the script, the sense memories can all be let go when somebody calls "cut" or "that's a wrap!" or if you are really lucky ... "that's enough of that sh@#".
Pretending for a living is hard work ... and getting paid for it is even tougher unless your work is at the level of excelling, mastery or transcendence. But those that truly excel earn very handsome salaries ... as well as fame and its darker companion notoriety.
Do I have what it takes to succeed? What are the critical tasks and challenges along the path to stardom and success? Who are good mentors to follow and who have become living signposts of where danger lurks along the acting path?
These are just some of the questions explored in the Book of Actors ... and when the pages are ready, you can click on the image above to open the book.
