Dylan Baker, director, Tony and Emmy Award-nominated actor: “All actors go through a journey, a quest, searching to find the inner workings of a human. Ellen Adair illuminates that lonesome exercise, sometimes hopeless, sometimes thrilling, through her poetry. Any actor, in fact, any person who has contemplated the actor’s process, will celebrate Ellen’s ability to bring that journey into vibrant focus with her excellent book of poems.”
Brennan Brown, actor, The Man in the High Castle; Chicago Med; The Sinner: “Ellen Adair defies the description ‘actor-turned-poet’—she is a poet, full stop; and a glorious poet at that. With far more delicate precision than any memoir or how-to handbook on performance technique could hope to attain, she illuminates and records the intensely intimate, bone-deep process of embodying a character. With virtuosic simplicity and attention to detail, she masterfully uses language to capture what is, paradoxically, beyond the verbal. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand what it’s like, on a metabolic level, to inhabit a role.”
Matthew Carey Salyer, poet; scholar: “Curtain Speech is a beautiful work, not only on the merit of its individual poems—which are, indeed, masterful, playful, and formally striking—but also because it is so brilliantly structured as a complete book . . . Adair is cast, crew, writer, and director. Her mind is the stage and we in the audience sit alongside Inigo Jones and Ben Johnson entranced.”
Charles Morey, playwright and director: “The poems in Curtain Speech are ostensibly about the theatre, acting, the actor’s process, and some of the authors and characters Ellen Adair has played in her young career. But all these poems live far below the surface of their subject matter and are really all about “being” and “seeming;” about the actor that lives in all of us, about the very nature of story-telling, language and narrative. Like all good writing, ultimately Adair writes about what it means to be human.”
S. A. Griffin, actor, poet, editor: “A masterful achievement by actress and poet Ellen Adair, Curtain Speech is a joyful, lyric revelation and stunning journey that will inspire readers to rise at curtain call in thundering ovation.”
