Irreverent Acting

Book excerpt: Eric believes that this book is the "craft bible," since it focuses entirely on the craft an actor must acquire in order to fulfill dramatic material. The book explores the seven major obligations related to material--time and place, relationship, emotional, character, thematic, historical, and subtextual--and from there goes on to define choices and explain how to use them to fulfill those obligations. The third element of the craft, the choice approaches, is the practical work the actor must do to create the choices. Out of the current thirty-one choice approaches, only twenty-two are explored in this book. The remaining nine are investigated in subsequent books.