Performance
A durable actor-training text joins close observation, action, substitution, and disciplined rehearsal.
Thoughts and feelings stay suspended in a vacuum unless they drive a chosen action, and it is what a character does that reveals the person playing it. So an actor should not try to display a condition. The job is to actually have it, believe it, and deal with it through what the scene requires.
A bare instruction like "he rises" looks and feels false unless the actor knows what the character is getting up to do. In the words the book borrows, the reason for walking is destination. Behaviour becomes believable when it is rebuilt around reaching a simple objective.
An actor makes a character's situation real by quietly substituting people, objects and events from their own life for those in the play. The substitution is finished only when it has merged with this partner, these events and these props, and it produces an action. At that point the actor may even forget the original source, and that is fine.
People picture themselves narrowly, but each of us can also be childish, stupid, angry or arrogant. An actor who refuses to find a trait in themselves can only imitate what such a person would do from the outside. So a wider, more honest sense of one's own identity is the raw material for playing others.
Recalling a past emotional event can recreate both the feeling and its physical signs, such as sobbing or laughter. It is hard to do because emotion is the moment we lose reasoning control, and we instinctively avoid reliving that. The author sets a limit: leave alone experiences you have never wanted to talk about, because acting is not psychotherapy.
An actor should not decide ahead of time what to think during a scene. If they hold concrete things in mind, real people, places and objects, fitting thoughts will arise on their own as they act. In the same way, listening means taking in how something is said and what you feel, not only the words.
Memorise lines and their inflections too early and they become impossible to shake off. Likewise, the actor should throw out first impressions of a play and reread it many times. Research should stay about a tenth of the work: just enough to stir the imagination, with the rest coming from personal, subjective exploration.
Not everything from real life belongs on stage. Only details relevant to the action should be used, and some genuine behaviour just distracts an audience. For example, people rarely hold constant eye contact in conversation, so actors shouldn't either. A scene also has no tidy turns, because a partner is never really "through" and neither should you be.
If an actor tells others what personal memory they are using, those people start judging the original memory instead of meeting the action happening in front of them. Keeping the source secret keeps everyone's attention on the scene.
The author called her book "Respect" rather than "Love" or "Fun" because she saw respect for the art fading in both teaching and practice. She values work, responsibility, truth and commitment over dreams, and doing your own best over trying to be the best. She judges by her own opinion of her acting and that of a few trusted people.