Book reviews: Mastering an American Accent by Rebecca Gausnell

This is a useful reference book for older Year 13 students attempting an American accent for an A Level piece or an Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill school production. It is very technical and so is perhaps more suited to older students, or certainly those applying to university or Drama school. The first 49 pages are dedicated to an introduction and a section on the mouth, with exercises for the face, tongue, jaw and lips. While this section is very technical and perhaps not the most riveting of reads, I did find myself wanting to get into making the sounds and exploring the accent itself. However, like any exercise, this is an absolute necessity if the accent is going to be ‘mastered’, no matter how repetitious some of the activities are.

The book is separated into useful sections: ‘The Mouth’, ‘The Sounds’, ‘The Details’, ‘The Music’ and ‘The Performance.’ Some sections are useful in picking apart how to approach the accent itself and an element I thought worked terrifically well was the breaking down of specific vowels and consonants and how these differ when approaching an American accent. There are various passages from a range of plays, many of them contemporary, and acting students and drama teachers will find this very helpful. This connects the exercises to plays and characters, rather than relying on speaking tongue twisters and practice sentences.

The dimension that really makes this book work is in the voice files that accompany each of the sections, allowing the actor to practise in real time, which I found useful. These are accessed through a SoundCloud link which means an individual could practise with headphones or a teacher could play to the whole class. The quality of these is good and varied and certainly made for a much more interactive experience. The troubleshooting tips running alongside this allow you to see where you may be going wrong, certainly useful for the trickier mouth placement exercises.

Although the book does cover the musicality of the accent, it would, I feel, have been useful to have referenced areas of America, such as the New Jersey accent, a Midwest accent, and so on. This would allow actors to be able to work on a specific American accent in relation to the play that they are studying or rehearsing.