Two New Books, One Southern Story
There's a particular kind of loneliness that comes with loving theatre in the Southeast. Many of us know the feeling. We’ve felt it in a black box in Louisville at a Sunday matinee, or in a college hallway in Winston-Salem where someone just told you, gently or not, that if you're serious about this, you should probably move to New York or Los Angeles, or at least Chicago or Atlanta, somewhere the industry “actually lives.”
But the industry lives here too, and in many smaller markets across the United States, like Nashville, Portland, and San Diego. It lives in the rehearsal rooms, university studios, and community stages scattered across our country, in the actors and teachers who decided that "somewhere else" wasn't the only place to build a life in this craft. This fall, two of them with Southern roots are proving it in print.
Sonya Cooke (she/her) Associate Professor of Acting, Head of Undergraduate Performance, Louisiana State University’s School of Theatre
Sonya Cooke, an Associate Professor of Acting and Head of Undergraduate Performance at Louisiana State University's School of Theatre, has released the second edition of Seven Pillars Acting: A Comprehensive Technique for the Modern Actor through Routledge. And Nicole Brewer, one of the most sought-after voices at our own SETC conference over the years, has published The Antiracist Theatre: Crafting Theatrical Collaboration with Haymarket Books. Neither book needed New York or Los Angeles to exist. Both were forged, in large part, right here in the classrooms and workshops of the South.
When Cooke first published Seven Pillars Acting back in 2018, it was already unusual: a genuinely innovative, comprehensive acting technique, the kind that doesn't come along often, built by someone who had lived the career she was teaching toward. She'd worked steadily in film, television, and theatre, run her own studio, and spent years watching actors get stuck in the same place, overthinking a moment rather than simply living in it. The Seven Pillars were her answer, a set of distinct, teachable elements that give an actor a structure to lean on instead of a mystery to chase.
What's struck people about Cooke's work, from her students to the teachers who've since been certified in her method, is how usable it is. As one description of the book puts it, it isn't trying to replace an acting class. It's a bridge from technique to real-world application, something an actor can return to on their own, without needing a guru in the room. In her own words, from the book itself: “acting is often less about learning something new and more a process of unlearning what you already believe you know as the actor.”
That idea, that the work is as much about letting go as it is about building up, feels like it could only come from someone who's spent real time in a classroom, watching a student white-knuckle their way through a monologue before finally relaxing into the truth of a moment. Cooke has spent that time. She joined LSU's faculty as a professor of acting, and from Baton Rouge she's continued to grow a technique now taught at universities across the country. This new, expanded second edition, nearly 400 pages, sharpened and deepened from the original, is proof that a technique refined in the South can hold its own on any serious actor's bookshelf, anywhere.
If you've spent any time at an SETC conference over the past several years, there's a good chance you've already sat in a room with Nicole Brewer and maybe felt something shift. Brewer is the originator of the Antiracist Theatre model (ART), and for years she has brought that work directly into our region, leading sessions at SETC and returning again and again to the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where her workshops have become something, people specifically travel for. Long before her framework had a book behind it, Southern theatre-makers were already doing the work in the room with her.
Nicole Brewer (she/her) Lecturer in Acting, David Geffen School of Drama at Yale
Now that work has a home in print. The Antiracist Theatre: Crafting Theatrical Collaboration, released this fall from Haymarket Books, lays out the philosophy Brewer has spent over sixteen years developing, a practical approach built around harm reduction, harm prevention, and relationship repair. It isn't a book of abstractions. Brewer takes the words we throw around in rehearsal halls and season announcements, words like accountability and abuse, and actually defines them, then gives readers exercises to sit with their own position, power, and privilege inside the room. She's said “the goal was never just to expose inequity or celebrate diversity as a talking point. It's to build the courage to actually change how the room runs.”
What makes the book land, especially for those who've encountered Brewer in person, is that it carries her actual voice, direct and warm, occasionally funny, never letting anyone off the hook but never leaving them without a way forward either. Playwright Lynn Nottage called it “an important and necessary book.” For educators and directors across our region who've been trying to figure out how to actually do the work rather than just talk about it, Brewer has now handed us a workbook.
It's easy, working in a smaller theatre market, to feel like the meaningful work happens somewhere else and eventually gets shipped down to us secondhand. These two releases are a reminder that it doesn't have to be that way. A rigorous, widely-adopted acting technique has developed and grown out of a university theatre department in Louisiana. A framework now shaping conversations in rehearsal rooms from London to Los Angeles was road-tested, in part, right here in the Southeast.
None of this happened because it was easy. Cooke built her technique studio by studio, student by student, over years, long before Routledge came calling for a second edition. Brewer kept showing up to do the harder, slower work of changing rooms one workshop at a time, long before a publisher offered her a book deal. That's the actual shape of a career built outside the major markets. Not a shortcut. Just steady, serious work that eventually gets seen for what it is.
If you're an actor, teacher, or artist in our region who's ever wondered whether staying here means settling for less, let these two books be your answer. Pick one up, or both. Teach from them. And the next time someone tells you the real work happens somewhere else, you'll have two very good reasons to disagree.
Seven Pillars Acting, 2nd Edition is available now from Routledge: https://www.sevenpillarsacting.com/
The Antiracist Theatre: Crafting Theatrical Collaboration is available now from Haymarket Books: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-anti-racist-theatre-crafting-theatrical-collaboration-nicole-m-brewer/be7b1c0f01ef8418?ean=9798888906026&next=t