Jeff Zinn Chats, Signs THE EXISTENTIAL ACTOR at The Drama Book Shop Today

The Drama Book Shop welcomes coach and actor Jeff Zinn for a discussion and signing of his book, The Existential Actor: Life and Death Onstage and Off, tonight, November 11th at 5:00pm. The author will appear at The Drama Book Shop's Arthur Seelen Theatre to discuss the book. The event, which is free to the public, will be followed by a signing. Copies of Mr. Zinn's book will be available for purchase on the main floor of the shop.

Jeff Zinn has been acting, directing, teaching, and writing about theater for more than 30 years. He is best known as the artistic director of Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT) where he produced and/or directed more than 150 productions. As an actor he made his Equity debut as Danny in the original off-Broadway production of David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," and appeared on Broadway with Derek Jacobi in "The Suicide." He lives on Cape Cod.

"The Existential Actor is a book for the thinking actor, and the finest actors I've known are just that. The best actors bring it all together body, heart, spirit,and mind. This book is for the actor who thinks about craft and influence, who thinks about the relationship of performance to living, who thinks about doing and what that doing means. Acting is a metaphor and it's a mirror, and, so, a theory of acting, if true, shows us to ourselves. Jeff Zinn knows this. He knows it as an actor, director, teacher, and thinker. His theory of everything is simple and revelatory." - Todd London

In "The Existential Actor: Life and Death Onstage and Off", actor, director of more than 150 productions, and theatrical teacher to a generation of students, Jeff Zinn draws upon his more than thirty years of experience and expertise to write "The Existential Actor: Life and Death Onstage and Off", a 232 page instruction manual that begins with the informative introduction "Four Elements: A new Theory for the Theater". Deftly organized into four major sections: Life and Death (Mortality Salience - Awareness of Death); A Brief History (Why We need a System; Aristotle, Diderot, Delsarte, & Fey; The Move Toward Truth; Beyond Stanislavski - The Post-Modern); The Four Elements (Shape; Action; Transaction; Surrender; Putting It All Together); Plays (Death of a Salesman; Ibsen's Heroic Women - Hedda and Nora; Chekhov's People - A Search for Meaning; Hamlet - Gods and Ghosts; The Existential Actor). Enhanced with the inclusion of a six page Bibliography and a three page Index, "The Existential Actor: Life and Death Onstage and Off" is very highly recommended for community theatre, community library, and academic library Theatre/Cinema Studies reference collections and supplemental instructional reading list. It should be noted for those aspiring to become professional actors that "The Existential Actor: Life and Death Onstage and Off" is also available in a Kindle edition. --Midwest Book Review, Robert Cox, Editor-in-Chief

The Drama Book Shop, a 2011 Tony Award Honoree for Excellence in Theatre, is located at 250 West 40th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. Events are free to the public. For more information on this and other events, visit www.dramabookshop.com.