From the Academy Award®-winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction. I've been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life's challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call 'catching greenlights.' So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops. Hopefully, it's medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot's license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears. It's a love letter. To life. It's also a guide to catching more greenlights-and to realising that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck.

What goes on in the body and mind of an endurance athlete at the limits of performance? How do they relate to the world around and prepare for the task ahead? Offering a refreshing perspective on training in the cross-lighting of aesthetic and athletic processes, this book focuses on the learning, mastery and creative adaptation of technique in performance. From traditional and physical actors to runners, boxers and other sports practitioners, it is about performers: their bodies, trainings and experiences. It interrogates what it means to prepare and train as a performer in the early 21st century. Writing from extensive experience in physical theatre and long-distance running, the author combines insights from both disciplines along with theatre history, sports science and perspectives like embodied cognition and affective science. From the kind of thoughts that go through the mind of an actor or a runner, to the economy and aesthetic of their movement and to how they feel about it, this book sheds light on the performing body and its capacities for action. Topics covered include attentional focus and distraction, affordances and equipment, ‘choking’ and stage fright, physiological regulation and effort perception, pacing and play, optimal flow and creative improvisation, and intentionality and automaticity in expert performance. The volume presents an informative and thought-provoking account accessible to readers interested in theatre, dance, performance, running, athletics, and sport.

The book offers a compelling combination of analyis and detailed description of aesthetic projects with young refugee arrivals in Australia. In it the authors present a framework that contextualises the intersections of refugee studies, resilience and trauma, and theatre and arts-based practice, setting out a context for understanding and valuing the complexity of drama in this growing area of applied theatre. "Applied Theatre: Resettlement" includes rich analysis of three aesthetic case studies in Primary, Secondary and Further Education contexts with young refugees. The case studies provide a unique insight into the different age specific needs of newly arrived young people. The authors detail how each group and educational context shaped diverse drama and aesthetic responses: the Primary school case study uses process drama as a method to enhance language acquisition and develop intercultural literacy; the Secondary school project focuses on Forum Theatre and peer teaching with young people as a means of enhancing language confidence and creating opportunities for cultural competency in the school community, and the further education case study explores work with unaccompanied minors and employs integrated multi art forms (poetry, art, drama, digital arts, clay sculptures and voice work) to increase confidence in language acquisition and explore different forms of expression and communication about the transition process. Through its careful framing of practice to speak to concerns of power, process, representation and ethics, the authors ensure the studies have an international relevance beyond their immediate context. "Drama, Refugees and Resilience" contributes to new professional knowledge building in the fields of applied theatre and refugee studies about the efficacy of drama practice in enhancing language acquisition, cultural settlement and pedagogy with newly arrived refugee young people.

A work of startling originality when it debuted in 1938, Thornton Wilder's Our Town evolved to be seen by some as a vintage slice of early 20th Century Americana, rather than being fully appreciated for its complex and eternal themes and its deceptively simple form. This unique and timely book shines a light on the play's continued impact in the 21st century and makes a case for the healing powers of Wilder's text to a world confronting multiple crises. Through extensive interviews with more than 100 artists about their own experience of the play and its impact on them professionally and personally – and including background on the play’s early years and its pervasiveness in American culture – Another Day’s Begun shows why this particular work remains so important, essential, and beloved. Every production of Our Town has a story to tell beyond Wilder’s own. One year after the tragedy of 9/11, Paul Newman, in his final stage appearance, played the Stage Manager in Our Town on Broadway. Director David Cromer’s 2008 Chicago interpretation would play in five more cities, ultimately becoming New York’s longest-running Our Town ever. In 2013, incarcerated men at Sing Sing Correctional Facility brought Grover’s Corners inside a maximum security prison. After the 2017 arena bombing in Manchester UK, the Royal Exchange Theatre chose Our Town as its offering to the stricken community. 80 years after it was written, more than 110 years after its actions take place, Our Town continues to assert itself as an essential play about how we must embrace and appreciate the value of life itself. Another Day's Begun explains how this American classic has the power to inspire, heal and endure in the modern day, onstage and beyond.