In a cultural climate where literary study and theater practice often seem out of touch and out of sympathy with one another, reading and acting tend to be viewed as dissimilar, if not mutually exclusive, occupations. One is private, mental, passive - and something that we all do. The other is public, physical, active - and something that only a few highly trained practitioners do.
David Cole maintains that to act means first of all to make physical the act of reading. But since the act of reading has its origins in bodily activity, Cole contends that in acting, what was once physical becomes physical again. Drawing his evidence from both the history of reading and the major theoretical accounts of the reading process (reader-response, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist), Cole reveals acting to be the recovery of a "lost" physicality of reading and shows how the principal tasks of an actor can be seen as attempts to recover this lost physicality.
Cole's study examines a variety of reading scenes from plays from the Greek to the postmodern. Finally, it considers the relationship of a dramatic author to actors and audience as essentially that of a writer with two different readerships, concluding that the playwright is one who writes the dissemination of reading. Acting as Reading will appeal to scholars, teachers, and students of literary criticism and theory; to actors, directors, and playwrights; and to those in dramatic literature and criticism who seek to root their thinking in the realities of theater practice.
Provocative account of acting as a physicalization of the act of reading
