A good actor, according to director Louis Fantasia, knows how to kiss -- that is, how to K.I.S.S., an aphorism he borrowed from playwright David Mamet, meaning, "Keep it simple, stupid."
Los Angeles-based Fantasia, a renowned teacher of acting technique, was recently in Tokyo to lead a nine-day workshop on performing the works of Anton Chekhov. I was among the 30 actors, both Western and Japanese, who joined the course to experience firsthand Fantasia's challenging teaching method.
This method -- though Fantasia claims to have no particular program -- draws on many sources. In his discussions of text analysis alone, for example, he cited leading theorists such as Martin Buber, Wilhelm Reich, Karl Jaspers and John Howard Lawson.
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