To Tell The Truth: The Adaptive Truth Method (ATM): Companion Workbook (Acting... NOT!)

To Tell the Truth: The Adaptive Truth Method (ATM) Companion Workbook transforms the principles of N.L. Starr’s groundbreaking acting method into a practical, hands-on training experience. Designed to accompany the ATM Core Book, this workbook provides actors, directors, teachers, and students with structured exercises, rehearsal tools, reflection prompts, teaching nuggets, charts, and reusable worksheets that move the method from the page into the body.

The Adaptive Truth Method is founded upon a central belief: the actor’s responsibility is not to manufacture emotion, imitate believable behavior, or demonstrate a predetermined performance. The actor must prepare fully, pursue a genuine need, listen actively, and respond truthfully to what is happening in the moment. “Truth is the destination. Adaptation is how the actor gets there.”

The workbook guides readers through ATM’s Five Anchors: Circumstance, Want, Connection, Choice, and Adjustment. Actors investigate the character’s world, clarify what must be achieved, identify who or what truly matters, select playable actions, and practice changing when new information affects the moment. Dedicated exercises and reflection pages help performers recognize their habits, document discoveries, and develop choices that remain alive rather than becoming mechanical.

The workbook also includes guided emotional-recall activities grounded in responsibility and safety. Actors may explore memory, imagination, sensory details, images, music, substitution, research, and physical action without being pressured to disclose trauma or emotionally harm themselves. ATM treats emotion as information—not proof of good acting.

Directors and teachers receive practical tools for turning result-oriented notes into playable adjustments. Teaching Nuggets offer memorable language that can be carried directly into the rehearsal room: “Do not play the feeling. Fight for the need.” “Preparation gives you roots. Listening gives you movement.” “Your partner is not standing in the way of your performance. Your partner is the reason the performance exists.”

The workbook is useful for independent study, private coaching, acting studios, community theatres, middle schools, high schools, colleges, universities, and professional rehearsal rooms. Beginners receive a clear structure for learning foundational acting concepts, while experienced performers gain a diagnostic system for work that feels forced, disconnected, predictable, or overly rehearsed.

Teachers can use the workbook to organize lessons, assign exercises, encourage reflection, and evaluate students’ understanding of the process. Directors can use it during table work, scene study, character development, blocking, run-throughs, and performance maintenance. Actors can return to its worksheets throughout their careers whenever they need to reconnect with circumstance, objective, relationship, action, or truthful response.

This is not a workbook filled with busywork or questions that lead only to intellectual answers. It is a rehearsal room on paper. Every exercise is designed to help the artist understand the work, test it physically, listen more completely, make stronger choices, and recognize what produces authentic behavior.

Used alongside the ATM Core Book—or as an ongoing rehearsal resource—the Adaptive Truth Method Companion Workbook helps artists build a personal process that is disciplined enough to repeat, flexible enough to adjust, and honest enough to remain alive.

Prepare honestly. Choose boldly. Listen fully. Respond truthfully. Adjust courageously. Then step into the moment and tell the Truth.

Nic Starr is a performing artist, writer, director and producer, who constantly looks to the hills because he knows that's where his help comes from. He has been blessed to have a well marked following in metropolitan Atlanta and its surrounding areas. Nic has graced the Atlanta stages with varying ranges of characters from those of the prolific playwright, August Wilson, to Charles Dickens', A Christmas Carol. You may have seen Nic on Survivor's Remorse, or The Banker. He is currently in NBC's Found, and BET's Average Joe. His directing credits include such short films as Dap Paxton's "What If" and Denise Black's "Things Not Forgotten", featuring the renowned stage and tv actor, Taurean Blacque. He has co-produced the award winning short film "Unconditional", which focused on the challenges of LGBT youth, and is currently in production directing a feature film, the Amazing Ninja, starring Dr. Cornel West. His love for the arts and children motivated him to become an educator for 10 plus years. This ultimately led him to establish a non-profit youth organization which would teach life skills through performing arts: Young Voices United, affectionately referred to as YVU. YVU has established itself as one of the premiere youth organizations in Atlanta, focusing on nurturing the talents of underprivileged youth, who otherwise would not have an opportunity to have their talents recognized. Nic started working with and developing talented youth through Paine College's Etheridge Arts Ensemble.In all this, Nic still finds the time to fulfill his role and responsibilities as the Managing Director of the New African Grove Theatre Company, which he co-founded along with Keith Franklin and Cynthia Williams. In addition to its local performances, New African Grove productions have been performed and recognized at both the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival and the National Black Theatre Festival, and one of only sixteen theatre companies in the nation that have produced all ten plays from August Wilson's "Century Cycle." Nic has performed in all ten. Regardless of his role, whether its actor, director, writer, producer, spouse or father, Nic counts it more than a blessing to be chosen and set apart to make a difference in the lives of people he works with, lives with and loves with...