Five Approaches to Acting Series, Part Four: Inhabiting the World of the Play

by David Kaplan

Inhabiting the World of the Play, Part Four lays out a ten-part plan for actors to analyze a play and ways to create individual roles within plays. Inhabiting the World of the Play, Part Four gives practical applications in rehearsal and performance, explains how to apply a world of the play analysis to a text, and points actors towards available examples in film. A world of the play analysis is especially useful for plays that require heightened Shakespeare, Genet, Ionesco, for example, but also its an approach very useful for "realistic" plays. You think Neil Simon's characters have the same rules in life or onstage as Tennessee Williams's characters? Think again.

62 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

David Kaplan is the author of Tennessee Williams in Provincetown (Hansen Publishing Group) and The Five Approaches to Acting (Hansen Publishing Group). He is a theater director who stages plays around the world with professional companies in indigenous languages and settings. He is a former Fellow at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, the repository of Tennessee Williams’s literary estate. He has experience directing Williams’s repertory around the world.

In 2003, Mr. Kaplan staged Tennessee Williams’s "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" in Cantonese at the Hong Kong Repertory Theater. Seasons past include directing the first Russian production of Tennessee Williams’s "Suddenly Last Summer" (the subject of a TASS documentary); a Sufi "King Lear" in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, performed in the Uzbek language and broadcast on Uzbek television; and Genet’s "The Maids" in Ulaan Baator, Mongolia, performed in Mongolian. In America, he has staged his own adaptation of "The Circus of Dr. Lao" in Los Angeles, Tennessee Williams’s "The Traveling Companion" at West Beth in New York, and Williams’s "Frosted Glass Coffins" in Birmingham, Alabama. He is also the curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival.

David Kaplan is also the author of articles on such varied subjects as Eudora Welty and Andres Segovia, the history of Shakespeare productions in Central Asia, the American monologist Ruth Draper, the twenty-first century freaks of Coney Island USA. His translations of Chinese poetry from eighteenth century Japan will appear in the journal Alehouse early 2007.