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The Actor in You

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A Teacher’s Guide for

The Actor In You, Fifth Edition

Share this document by Dr. Robert Benedetti

Thank you for using the Fifth Edition of The Actor in You. This teacher’s Guide has been
revised specifically for this edition.

The Actor in You is designed for use in an introductory college acting course, or for a
course for non-majors in the appreciation of acting, or even for advanced high school students. It

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grew out of the ten editions of my more advanced book, The Actor at Work, which has been in
print for over forty years. The Actor in You encapsulates the essence of the longer book and
writing it presented a wonderful challenge: I had to identify the most important elements of my
approach and find a way to communicate them directly and simply. I learned a great deal by
doing it.

% Though it was written for “beginners,” I believe this book would be valuable for
advanced students and working professionals. Our educational tradition usually moves from
simplicity to complexity; our students move through a discipline as if they were climbing the

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rungs of a ladder, upward toward more and more abstract and complex material. This may be
fine for many disciplines, but in any art, the development of mastery involves digging deeper and
deeper into the profundity of the simple. The most advanced acting class, I believe, should be
indistinguishable in its content from the beginner class. As in Zen, our wish is to develop
“beginner’s mind;” as Ram Dass says, the next door is always there when you are ready to go
through it.
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The truth, I suspect, is that we all have just one acting class in us, and we teach it over
and over in various forms; the student receives it at his or her own level of wakefulness and
understanding, or at that moment when we manage to hit upon the manner of expression that
awakens them, or triggers their discovery. How often has the advanced student said about the
idea of action, for instance, “Of course! It’s so simple! Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” when, in
truth, we have been telling them all along.

The best progression of an actor’s development, I believe, is to work on basics like

centering and breathing and being in action, alternating with forays into various kinds of material
that make various kinds of demands on these basic skills, then returning regularly to the basics
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with expanded experience and richness of understanding. This has been called a “cyclical” rather
than a “sequential” way of learning.

This book was written to save your valuable class time for personal contact with your
students, to help you minimize talk and maximize work time. It offers exercises and principles; it
does not offer formulas or rules. Help your students to treat the book as a source of ideas and
inspiration for their own exploration and self-discoveries. Work in the spirit expressed here by
Joseph Chaikin in The Presence of the Actor:

There is no way to develop talent, only to invite it to be released. It’s a mysterious gift,
no more equally distributed than bright sunny days over a year. The teacher of the actor is

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like the teacher of small children. He looks for the right steps for each student, and when
the student is about to make his discovery, the teacher must disappear. [page 154]

For a fuller understanding of this concept, read Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of
Archery. If I had to choose a single book for acting teachers to read, this is the one.

TIMING OF THE SEQUENCE

As in the previous editions, this fifth edition was intended to offer one full semester
(sixteen weeks) of beginning course work, one Step in each week. However, the material is so
distilled that I think the experience would be even more valuable if it were stretched over a full
year.

This edition has been reorganized, and I believe the progression of work is now correct
and would urge you to maintain it. In a full-year curriculum, I would suggest spending half of a
semester on each of the four parts, with perhaps a bit less time spent on the first part. Some of
you, however, may choose to start with Part 2, which begins core scene work, especially if your
students have other classes that address the voice and body work covered in an admittedly
cursory way in Part 1. In any case, do not rush! It is more important that what is done be done
well than that the entire sequence be completed. Let the work take its natural course.

Some steps will take longer than others. The first and second, for instance, could be
combined as a single week’s work, whereas the basic exercises for the body and voice in Steps 3
and 4 are more beneficial if they are repeated over a period of time, and should be revisited
regularly even as the class proceeds through the remaining steps. Likewise, the fundamental
concept of action presented in Part 2 is the central concept of the entire book and ties all the
other material together; I could imagine devoting an entire year to Part !.

Also be sure your students read and understand the introductory section for each part; we
all know the tendency to skip prefaces and other introductory material. (And please be sure that
each exercise is read as well, even if it is not used in class.)

STEP BY STEP TEACHING AIMS

PART ONE: The aim of the first five steps is to introduce fundamental concepts and
information, and to prepare the student’s body, voice, and attitude for the work in the later steps.

Step 1: This first step was intended for those with no previous experience of acting. However, it
raises some issues about the qualities and ethics of good acting that even advanced actors may
benefit from considering. It sets priorities about what we want to accomplish in the course of
study as a whole.

Step 2: This presents a brief history of western acting, and is worth considering even for
somewhat advanced students.

Steps 3, 4, and 5: These three steps present a mini-course in relaxation, centering, voice, speech,
collaboration, and the proper frame of mind for the actor. The aim is to integrate and prepare the
student’s organism to respond as fully as possible to the work that follows.

I think nearly all teachers of voice, speech, and acting would agree that relaxation and centering
are good places to start. This step presents time-tested exercises to set the student on the path, but
this work must be repeated with regularity for the rest of the course.

If your students are also taking classes in voice and movement, you might skip Steps 3 and 4; at
least discuss my approach with the teachers of those classes to ensure coherence.

The trust exercises in Step 5 are meant to open the student to interaction with his or her fellow
actors. They have all been in use for many years, and are a fond echo of the sixties and seventies.

PART TWO: Steps 6 through 10 are the heart of the book. Here we develop the idea of action,
making the critical point that it takes both internal and external forms. We also stress the
fundamental idea that dramatic action occurs between characters. The aim is to experience the
flow of give and take that moves a scene.

In Step 6 we discuss the actor’s state of mind and present the important concepts of dual
consciousness and public solitude. However, it matters not whether a student understands these
concepts unless they can experience them – and if they can, I’d skip conceptualizing abut them
altogether. Helping them to understand indicating, however, can be very useful in critiquing their
work later.

In all, Part 2 tries to direct the student’s attention away from emotion and character and toward
action, which produces both. I try very hard, in both teaching and directing, to avoid even talking
about emotion and character. Step 7, in particular, introduces the critical idea that entering into a
full experience of the character’s action and circumstances produces transformation. This is the
real value of stressing the idea of action and is central to the entire book.

In Step 7, the students must pair up and choose a short scene to which they will apply everything
that follows, and this is a crucial choice. See the section, SELECTION OF MATERIAL, below.

Step 10 hopes to help the student understand the way in which dramatic action is structured, and
seems to me a necessary prerequisite to being able to break a scene down. This step is a quick
course in Aristotelian structural analysis. Again, this must live as an experience in the muscles,
not as an idea in the mind. I was ambivalent about whether this Step should be part of Part 3, but
since it appears consecutively to Part 3, it works as part of a mini-course in script analysis.

PART THREE: These three steps continue a mini-course in script analysis, and develop the
central idea of action in greater detail.

Step 11 is a basic mini-course in Aristotelian character traits as taught to me by my mentor,

Oscar Brockett. This Step also presents the loaded idea of emotional recall: I believe that
emotional recall happens automatically if the actor is truly experiencing what is happening in a
scene. Therefore, one scarcely needs to use it as a conscious technique, and as I point out,
Stanislavski eventually abandoned it. The argument about it divided Lee Strasberg, for whom it
was paramount, and Stella Adler, who returned from later observation of Stanislavski saying that
it had been abandoned. I was unsure of whether I should mention it at all, in fact, and did so only
because it is expected by so many teachers and students. I present it only as a last resort sort if an
actor is unable to empathize with the character, or has trouble entering into the work in a

personal way. But in general, I don't like it and stress, as Stanislavski did, that it must never be
used in performance. Besides, I think some acting teachers misuse personal material from
students’ lives and tread dangerously close to the edge of psychotherapy. Yes, the student – as I
say often – must invest themselves in the material personally, and internalize the action and
given circumstances, but the specifics of how this is achieved must be the student’s private
business.

Step 12: Learning to experience the character’s needs, action, and world personally is, of course,
the greatest step, and can, all by itself, produce wonders. And yet, this is perhaps the most
contentious area among different schools of acting technique. The argument can be summed up
by considering the matter of identification between actor and character. Stanislavski always
urged the actor to "experience" the character’s action and world, rather than to “become” the
character. He spoke not of identification in the sense of the actor losing himself or herself in the
role, but rather wanted the performance to be a fusion of actor and character. He even sometimes
used a hyphenated phrase to identify a role, like Stanislavki-Trigorin. My desire, then, is to stress
that the character becomes a new “version” of the actor’s self, but one which meets the demands
of dramatic function. This is, for me, the most important single step in the book, and presents the
heart of the acting process. If the student can be helped to experience the specific flow of
arousal-strategic choice-action-objective, we will have achieved our aim, for this is how the
Magic If becomes real, transformative experience. The inner monologue exercise, by the way, is
one of those dangerous ones that can mislead more students than it helps. Use it cautiously.

Step 13 in particular is a woefully brief attempt to awaken the student to the psychophysical
implications of a good text. My own background in Oral Interpretation convinces me that
internalizing a good text – that is, achieving organic congruence with it – can be the starting
point and basis for the actor’s work. However you can do it, try to move the student’s
relationship to the text out of the left brain and into the right. The work of my friend Cicely
Berry is very good for this – I recommend especially her book Text in Action – and I have been
able to incorporate more of this in my longer book, the tenth edition of The Actor at Work.

PART FOUR: The remaining three steps are a mini-course in the day-to-day acting process
itself. This could be an entire semester’s (or year’s) work by itself, following what has gone
before.

Step 14: This extends the previous moment-by-moment into the larger patterns of the through-
line and superobjective. It is difficult for the student to experience these concepts when working
only on a single scene; perhaps attending a performance together and then discussing these
concepts as they lived in the performance would help.

Step 15: Many users stress the usefulness of the practical matters introduced here, and you may
want to make more of it than I have.

Step 16: Again, there is a lot here, but I think we do want the work of the course to result in
some kind of closure, and it is valuable to end the term by presenting the work as a short
program of scenes for an invited audience. This step makes that possible.

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