WELL, GEE. It's bad enough I feel I have to warn you off a good book. But now the April issue of Dramatics has arrived and it looks like I also have to warn you off the introductory material--it was printed in italics so you could tell it was introductory--to the selections from the book that were published in that issue. So let's do that first.

By inference of being mentioned in the same paragraph, the introduction manages to make you associate Frank Hauser and Russell Reich's Notes on Directing--the good book in question here--with a couple of great ones, namely Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Don't make that association. Please. It won't help your directing any and it might cause you to overlook ways to make constructive use of Notes on Directing.

For starters, no creative writer worth her salt would ever begin at Strunk and White. You'd be infinitely better off to start at Funk and Wagnalls. That's a dictionary. At least then you'd be learning new content. Trust me, starting at Elements of Style just won't work, unless, of course, you want to immediately censor yourself into mundane mush by worrying about correct usage and suchlike when you should be busy working your butt off trying to say the unsayable. Once you've got the unsayable said, there's plenty of time to go back and wrestle it into form by engaging in little skirmishes with Strunk and White. If you're having a good day you may have written something so compelling that Strunk and White lose almost as often as they win. After all, it's a living, evolving language with which we're working here, or trying to.

The point is that Elements of Style is commonly misused by teachers of English as a kind of recipe that keeps writers in the box when they should be finding their own unique voices. And that you or your teacher might, having noted the comparison between that book and Notes, also mistake Notes for a recipe book. The last thing we need right now in this business is a "recipe" for good directing. They're everywhere, and they're as dangerous as they are useful. My fear is that you'll be tempted--and I say this because oh so many of my students are thus tempted--to use a lovely book like Notes that way. Don't. You'll be cheating yourself out of the proper use of some really important information. More than that, you'll be missing a really important conversation that just might help you find your voice as a director.

The comparison with Sun Tzu is also worth examining. I used to make directing students read The Art of War. They hated it. I think it was because Sun Tzu's understanding of the craft of warfare came with too much context for my students, came with too much wisdom, if you will, to allow unthinking application of his principles.

One of the things that makes The Art of War a great book is that you can't read anything in it without being forced to examine your own environment as closely as Sun Tzu was examining his. And being really smart about the subject at hand while making three thousand years of other readers (and you) do that kind of examination of their own situation at the same time--that's wisdom. Reich hasn't quite figured out how to pull that off yet. Notes contains a quote from Elia Kazan saying "Before you do anything, see what talent does" and one from costume designer Patton Campbell saying every play should have at least one great costume moment. Other than those, I didn't find much in Notes wise enough to send you back to look at the ground on which you're standing before you willy-nilly apply what you might mistake as "Hauser's Rule."

Not that that's what Hauser and Reich want you to do. It's just that--presented as they are without specific context coming in the form of stories that begin "Y'know, that one time I was working with Dame Judy [sic]..." in which the note was proven right or maybe even proven not so handy--you're left with nothing but, well, a rule.

MY ORIGINAL LEAD for this rant was going to be, "If you're going to read just one book on directing, this ain't it. On the other hand, if you're going to read four or five books on directing, maybe this book should be fourth or fifth." And I meant it. I still do.

So, my editor asked me, if this is fourth or fifth what would be the first one? Well, that's entirely up to you, although I do have my druthers. As far as I'm concerned, the best book ever written about directing wasn't written, it was edited, and not by a director but by a dramaturg. It's Arthur Bartow's collection of twenty-one amazing interviews, The Director's Voice. Bartow asked all those basic questions about directing that the rest of us are just too cool to ask, and all twenty-one directors, bless their hearts, answered them. Read it cover to cover and you'll know damn near everything there is to know about directing.

The trouble is, it's all stories about specific productions and what worked or didn't work in them, and there's no real subject index so you'll have to piece the lessons together for yourself. But, and trust me here, it's the very grounded nature of the stories that makes the hunt for how-to's worth the effort.

In the same way Sun Tzu forces you to compare his context to your own, the stories in Director's Voice won't let you think any two occasions or contexts are the same. Still, if you listen with an ear to your own ground, Arvin Brown will teach you how to learn from actors and what to do when all else fails. Rene Buch will teach you how to be stylish on a shoestring. Robert Falls will show you how to get your own life into your art. Zelda Fichandler will teach you how to find the kernel of a play and how to block it, too. And Lloyd Richards and Douglas Turner Ward will teach you how to play with living playwrights. As a bonus, Ward will show you how to win a Pulitzer Prize on ten days' rehearsal. One of the strengths of The Director's Voice is that it throws a bunch of contradictory ideas at you and forces you to pick and choose among them. Right there on the page you'll be struggling with your craft like an artist, not painting by numbers. There are probably five or six good candidates for the second and third and fourth best directing books. Let me just point at a few of them.

Cole and Chinoy's forty-year-old Directors on Directing is a kind of precursor to the Bartow. You'll want to play in it some. Pay particular attention to the back end of the book where the "working papers" are. If you cross-reference those with the history section in the front, you'll do just fine. And if you're in need of, say, a Cliff's or Monarch Notes on directing, take a look at George Bernard Shaw's entry. He'll teach you how to do it all in six pages. (You might want to skip the section about reading the actors the play; Shaw was a playwright, remember. On the other hand, Hauser and Reich are right about getting the playwright to read it to you.) Shaw will even tell you where to sit and when to sit there. And his advice about what actors know and when they know it is, well, right.

Reich, in his "Recommended Reading" section, points to Harold Clurman's On Directing. He's right. Go there. But--that same advice again!--please don't read it as a textbook. A couple generations of students have done that now and most of them have come away with the recipe intact but haven't managed to hear the voice of the man who literally and metaphorically wrote the book. Clurman's is a great, concerned voice. Read his book for that. Reich also says nice things about William Ball's A Sense of Direction and he's right about that one, too. If nothing else, Ball will give you a lovely little lecture about scapegoating actors.

And if you just can't figure out all that "stage picturization" stuff and absolutely demand to read a textbook, content yourself with just the composition and picturization chapters in Dean and Carra's Fundamentals of Direction. Nobody's ever done it better.

And then there's Stanislavsky in Rehearsal and any number of Mamet's things and Jon Jory's book of Tips. And Notes on Directing. At some point in your way through this list you should spend some time with it, because if you're any kind of imaginative reader at all (and if you aren't, why are you interested in directing?), you'll have enough context to see Hauser and Reich's Notes for the help they are.

So how should you use Notes on Directing? Start at Appendix V: Recommended Reading. Read 'em all. They're a terrific bunch of books. I can vouch for all of them except Joseph Lowman's book on teaching, but based on Reich's taste in the rest of the list, you can bet I'll be stopping by the local library this weekend to borrow it. Add two more books: Jeff Young's series of interviews with Elia Kazan (Kazan: the Master Director Discusses His Films) and Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building, which is the introduction to Reich's Alexander recommendation (A Pattern Language) and which explains the necessity for including context when making books like Notes.

When you've read all those and spent some time relating them to the other things you've read and to your own experiences with directing or directors, it's time to read Notes on Directing straight through. But do stop after each note to do the following. Try to remember a story from your other reading or your own directorial experience that will provide a specific situational context for that note. After that you can use it and the book as you will.

I think, by the way, that consciously or unconsciously, what happened to all the folks who gave this book its rave reviews is that they provided their own situational context for each note and responded as if they read them there. I mean, far be it from me to carp about the opinions of Dame Judi Dench, Edward Albee, Robin Wagner, Jerry Zaks, Mark Lamos, Richard Eyre, and Sir Ian McKellen. They're almost a pantheon of personal theatre heroes and each of them says nice things about Notes on the dustcover. And if it didn't happen to them, I know it happened to me. For every note, I had a tale. By the end, I'd had a really good time rummaging through my store of anecdotes about directing, arguing with some notes (notably the explication of note 62, "Talk to the character, not the actor," which makes me shudder at the thought of what seems to me to be lying to actors), agreeing with many more (especially 17, "Don't always connect all the dots" and 67, "Never express actions in terms of feelings" and 109, "Style has its reasons"). But, mostly, the treat and the learning came from coupling the contents of Notesto the tales and thus the contexts I'd brought with me.

So I really want you to have a lot of context to bring when you read this book. You can do it another way if you want to, but don't be surprised if your work turns out to be shallow in a way I'm sure Hauser's and Reich's has never been.

Like I said, it's a good book. Just be careful how you use it. Reich says, "We have given the book the voice of an assertive instructor, one whose favorite words are 'do this,' 'don't do that,' 'always,' and 'never.' Frank and I could have taken a milder, more suggestive approach, but better, we thought, to overshoot and provoke than to risk having all the impact of a marshmallow." As we like to say in the theatre, well, that's a choice. Trouble is, there are voices missing. And the missing voices are the ones I'd most like to hear, namely Frank Hauser's and Russell Reich's.

Michael Burnham is an actor and director, and a member of the theatre faculty at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.