The Intent to Live: Achieving Your True Potential as an Actor

by Larry Moss

For more help, read Edward

Dwight Easty’s excellent book on sense memory, On Method Acting.

Physical Sensation Exercise

Bonnie and Clyde,

Laundry and

Bourbon by James McClure

only bad acting is general; life never is.

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

you can use to create a character sensorially is to play a condition of weather.

The Importance of Being Earnest,

Bullets over Broadway,

The Member of the Wedding,

Lust for Life,

Personal Object Exercise

The Object

of Beauty. I suggest—no, I demand—that you rent this film

the film Stanley and Iris,

Chéri,

a play by Anita Loos

East of Eden

A League of Their Own

Sweet Bird of Youth,

Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses

August Wilson’s The Piano

Lesson,

Gladiator,

Williams’s Orpheus Descending

He tells her the story of the autographs from great musicians who have signed his guitar, and each one is

like a special part of his family. Time after time, I have watched young actors bring in that scene without having worked

on the h...

West Side Story,

Fiddler on the Roof, and

West Side Story.”

The Days of Wine and Roses,

Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.

Mike Leigh’s film Secrets and Lies,

Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit,

The Iceman Cometh

Lanford Wilson’s Burn This.

Three Sisters.

Three Sisters.

David Mamet’s indictment of sensory work as useless.

In the right hands, the specific use of sensory work intensifies the meaning of a scene and brings the writer’s world

alive on...

“moment to moment”

means that you don’t miss a moment, that you’re so present in the scene,

Great moment-to-moment acting takes place in the now of now

Strindberg’s one-act play The Stronger

David Rabe’s

In the Boom Boom Room