Acting now

If you thought the most challenging aspects of a career in acting would involve choosing the "right" roles and dodging the paparazzi, think again. Success requires a tremendous amount of hard work, creativity, and dedication, as you'll learn from some of the industry's most respected names in Acting Now: Conversations on Craft and Career. Very little has been written about how modern actors really work, nor are there many published comparisons of the various methods of training for stage and film. Acting Now is a riveting collection of fifteen interviews with actors, coaches, directors, and producers, exploring the difficulties and rewards of being an actor today. The book presents an open interchange of ideas about acting technique, training, and careers. Those interviewed address artistic challenges in the real world, the practical difficulties of a career, and the ways the modern entertainment industry shapes an actor's artistic path. Vilga's conversations with entertainment world insiders provide multiple, even clashing viewpoints, permitting the reader to make his or her own comparisons and conclusions. Acting Now also chronicles American theater and film in the late eighties to mid-nineties, a particularly exciting period of great challenge, expansion, and changing opportunity. The interviewees are Stella Adler, Harold Baldridge, Tanya Berezin, Andre Bishop, Robert Brustein, Ellen Burstyn, Robert Falls, Marilyn Fried, Spalding Gray, Henry Kimsey-House, Scott Macaulay, Austin Pendleton, Nell Pepe, Juliet Taylor, and Nela Wagman.