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Acting: The Gister Method. By Joseph Alberti, in collaboration with Earle R. Gister. Boston: Pearson, 2013; pp. 192.
Earle Gister was one of most influential American acting teachers during the latter half of the twentieth century. His notable faculty positions were: chair of the Carnegie Mellon (CMU) Drama Department (1960s and '70s); acting teacher at City University of New York (1970s and '80s); chair of the Yale School of Drama's MFA acting program (1980s-97); and master teacher of acting at the Actors Center in New York (late 1990s-2012). His students are some of America's most distinguished actors (Sigourney Weaver, Liev Schreiber, and Angela Bassett, among others), and upon his death in 2012 an outpouring of appreciation attested to his influence. (A memorial service at the Actors Center in April 2012 and a Facebook page, "Friends of Earle Gister," elicited hundreds of superlative comments.) Less well-known than Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, and Uta Hagen, Gister nevertheless trained as many excellent, reputable actors as they did. His training methods combined Stanislavski's technique with text analysis, and he was greatly influenced by American acting teacher Paul Mann. I studied acting with him at CMU during 1970-74; he introduced me to Mann and recommended that I study with him upon graduation.
Joseph Alberti's Acting: The Gister Method, based on his dissertation, attempts to collate, systematize, and define "the Gister acting method" by illuminating his philosophy, exercises, and primarily his astute dramaturgical analyses. Alberti researched Gister at Yale during the late 1980s through mid-1990s, chronicling and recording his...