Jordan Beswick, C.S.A.

“I must warn you, at this point, to avoid examination of any past experience which you have never talked about or wanted to talk about. Here you will be on dangerous ground because you will not know what will happen to you, and without an understanding or a degree of objectivity to the experience it is useless to you artistically. There are teachers who actually force actors into dealing with something buried (their response to the death of a parent, or a trauma of a bad accident). What results is hysteria or worse, and is, in my opinion, anti-art. We are not pursuing psychotherapy. If you feel mentally sick or disturbed and in need of it, by all means go to a trained doctor or therapist, but NOT an acting teacher.”

“Sometimes you ask, ‘What if I work for a headache and it stays with me?’ I can only answer, ‘Work for an aspirin.’ ”

Once during auditions for one of his plays, the multi-award winning playwright, Harvey Fierstein, stopped an actor mid audition from further massacring his text. When asked politely to stick to the lines, the young man fired back an impertinent,

“Actors usually use only the superficial characteristics of their type. Their idea of reality is to be natural, simple and direct. And they have to be brought to understand that reality means dealing precisely and intensely with whatever the play is concerned with.”

– Lee Strasberg, at the Actors Studio

“The actor must have full belief in whatever he thinks and says on the stage. A good deal of routine acting work merely consists of finding substitutes for that faith and belief. But when the actor can really believe, when he allows himself really to think, when his imagination really functions, he does not need clich