The Five Approaches to Acting Series by David Kaplan is a comprehensive acting approach that deals with theory and practice for both beginning and advanced actors. David Kaplan's The Five Approaches to Acting Series contains his five approaches to acting: identifying tasks, playing episodes, building images, learning the world of the play, and telling a story.

Each approach has its own definition of what it means to act, what it means to act well, what it means to be a character in a performance on stage, and, by extension, what it means to be a person in "real" life. Each approach covers history, theory and examples of its practice.