I learned about this book when reading “Confessions of a Public Speaker” (see my review). My idea was learning a bit about acting, which theoretically would help me being more comfortable when speaking and would teach me a couple of things about behaving on stage. Not that you can learn a lot of acting by reading, I was thinking more of an inspiration thing. But anyway.

The book is not written as a typical “textbook”, but as a sort of novel telling the story of a group of people that is going to acting lessons. That was really surprising at first, and felt awkward, but after a couple of pages I got used and it wasn’t a problem at all. Actually the result is probably better than what it could have been with a normal “textbook” style. The content itself really changed the way I see acting and strengthened the respect I have for actors (in that sense it reminded me of “Off-Off Broadway”, that episode of “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends“). However, it felt like learning by reading something that is only tangentially related to what I wanted to improve (speaking in public) didn’t help me a whole lot. Now what I want is to take some improvisational theatre classes (see Teresa Brazen’s chronicle to see what I mean) :-D

In summary, it’s a very good book and it looks like a useful companion if you are interested in theatre and you are learning (by doing!), but I’m not sure how much it helped me in my goal.