Together, Zarrilli and Nascimento provide a detailed engagement with the issues and methods that underlie intercultural acting in our global age. When read alone, however, each book reveals gaps that are at once troubling and provocative. Zarrilli opens by noting that Konstantin Stanislavski developed a personalized yoga regimen ‘as early as 1906’, even though the Russian director's exposure to Indian yoga ‘may have been drawn exclusively from books in his library’ (p. 14). This anecdote normalizes the desire to work across cultures, and sets the scene for Zarrilli's own positioning as an expert practitioner of three Asian martial/mediation arts in which, unlike Stanislavski, he has over thirty years’ experience: yoga, kalarippayattu, and taijiquan. He argues that non-Western source traditions can help today's actors solve a range of dramaturgical problems, but his main objective is applying these psychophysical training systems to what Hans-Thies Lehmann described as postdramatic theatre: performances where there is no longer a conventional plot or characters at the core of the event.

Zarrilli sidesteps a long history of debates about appropriation, exoticism and East–West power inequities. He focuses, instead, on the practical and epistemological breakthroughs that non-Western training may engender. In contrast to American-based method acting, which uses psychology to explain a character's behaviour and motivations, Asian psychophysical training begins by perceiving ‘the actor's breath as energy’ (p. 21). He examines this process, its applications, and impediments to it over three sections.

Part I surveys traditional Western notions of the body ‘as a thing, object, [or] instrument under the command. . . of an all-knowing mind’ (p. 45). Part II discusses the cultural origins and philosophical tenets of yoga, kalarippayattu and taijiquan – arts that help performers to develop what Zarrilli calls an ‘aesthetic inner bodymind’ (p. 55). In Part III, he then presents detailed case studies of how he used psychophysical exercises to address postdramatic challenges found in plays by Samuel Beckett, Ōta Shōgo, Kaite O'Reilly, Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp.

Zarrilli takes a goes-without-saying approach to intercultural directing, whereas Nascimento struggles with academia's ongoing tendency to view intercultural acting as an ‘unclean anomaly’ (p. 20). In Chapter Two, ‘Race, Culture, and the Myth of the Authentic’, she shows how progressive critics often impose the same sorts of ‘tolerance thresholds’ that underlie ‘conservative political agendas’ (p. 26). For example, those who endorse Japanese artists as the sole heirs of butoh dance consign such performers to a racial niche, even if they act to protect a minority culture. In Chapter Three, Nascimento asks scholars to explore ‘the greater, crucial question [of] how borders are crossed and, maybe more important, why’ (p. 58). She also introduces her case studies. First is Ang Gey Pin: a Singaporean performer who began exploring her cultural heritage under the guidance of ‘collaborators outside of her birth culture’ (p. 65). Second is Roberta Carreri, an Italian-born performer who did not study theatre at all until she moved to Denmark and joined the intercultural Odin Teatret.

I question Nascimento's decision to build her argument around the testimony of just two performers. For one thing, the same excerpts from her interviews with Ang Gey Pin and Carreri recur in several chapters. Is this repetition an editorial oversight? Or is there limited evidence to support the thesis about the intercultural actor's agency in relation to directors? Ang's ‘retrieval’ of her family's repressed dialect was clearly prompted by ‘outsiders’ – by ‘theatre teachers and directors’ who had vested interests in unearthing the vernaculars repressed by authoritarian regimes (p. 68). Reading Nascimento alongside Zarrilli is ultimately evocative because one of them (a white man) takes for granted what the other (a racialized woman) works so hard to justify: the right to cross borders in a seemingly limitless era. As a pair, these volumes will surely challenge and enliven many courses on intercultural theatre/performance.