Acting: The First Six Lessons

Documents from the American Laboratory Theatre

Richard Boleslavsky, Rhonda Blair, Rhonda Blair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136939853
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Acting: The First Six Lessons was first published in 1933 and remains a key text for anyone studying acting today. These dramatic dialogues between teacher and idealistic student explore the field of acting according to one of the original teachers of Stanislavsky's System in America.

This new edition of an essential text is edited by Rhonda Blair and supplemented for the very first time with documents from the American Laboratory Theatre. These collect together a broad range of exciting unpublished material, drawn from Boleslavsky's pivotal and unprecedented teachings on acting at the American Laboratory Theatre. Included are:

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• "The Creative Theatre Lectures" by Richard Boleslavsky

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• Boleslavsky's "Lectures from the American Laboratory Theatre"

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• "Acting with Maria Ouspenskaya, " four short essays on the work of Ouspenskaya, Boleslavsky's colleague and fellow actor trainer

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• A new critical introduction and bibliography by the Editor.

Acting: The First Six Lessons

Richard Boleslavsky

Introduction

The Way of the Lancer brought immediate literary acclaim to Richard Boleslavski, spelled with an “i” after the manner of his Polish ancestors. The book was variously called a work of genius, the best human document of the events preceding the Russian Revolution, a masterly narrative biography, a new writing of history. But no matter what else critics said of it, they almost invariably added that it was intensely dramatic, obviously the work of a mind trained in the theatre. As rightly they might say, for the uniform of an officer of the Polish Lancers and the change from “y” to “i” was no disguise for Richard Boleslavsky, an actor of the Moscow Art Theatre, Director of the Moscow Art Theatre Studio and, in America, Director of the Laboratory Theatre, of many successful plays on Broadway, of films in Hollywood.

What many of the critics seemed to miss, however, in this splendid book and its sequel, Lances Down, was the fact that Boleslavsky’s style and point of view, dramatic as it undoubtedly was, had little to do with the art of the writer of plays. Way of the Lancer was not the product of a dramatist’s mind, turned narrator, but of an actor’s mind. One is almost the converse of the other. The actor is usually word-shy and inarticulate. Often he does not know what it is he does or how he does it, that makes him an actor. Even when he knows, it is difficult for him to say it or write it. He can only express it in action. His language is a language of movement, of gesture, of voice, of the creation and projection of character by things done or left undone. The dramatist, on the other hand, works easily with words, writes fluently, interprets character, situation, and events, manner and method in his own terms. So far as the art and the craft of acting have been written of at all, it is usually the dramatist or the critic who has written of them. That is why there is so little in print really to explain the actor to himself and to his fellows.

Talma, Fanny Kemble, Coquelin and, among the moderns, Louis Calvert and Stanislavsky stand out as actors who have tried to interpret acting. But Stanislavsky’s fine contribution is welded into the text of his autobiography, My Life in Art, and all the rest are, generally speaking, an effort to create a philosophy of acting rather than to analyze the elements of the art of acting or to establish a technique for the player. Must an actor have experienced an emotion to portray it; will he portray it better if he actually renews the feeling every time he assumes it; shall acting be far removed from life, or as close to it as possible? Such are the problems these actor-philosophers set themselves to solve. And with the illustrations drawn from high experience, their writings have greatly illumined the field. They have clarified the fundamental laws of the art for many artists. But they do not help an actor to learn the elements of his craft.

So that, in a way, these essays of Boleslavsky’s, these First Lessons in Acting, in dialogue form, stand alone in their field. Gayly as they are told, there is not a word in any of them that is not seriously to the point, that is not calculated, out of long years of work and study as an actor and as a director in the professional and in the art theatre, to help a young actor on his way. They actually select his tools for him and show him how to use them. And that is a grateful task. For while an actor’s tools are all within his own body and mind and spirit, they are by their very nearness harder to isolate and put to special use than tools of wood and iron. Concentration and observation, experience and memory, movement and poise, creation and projection—an actor must make them all the servants of his talent.

In an article he wrote some years ago on the Fundamentals of Acting, Boleslavsky himself defined the field he covers here. “The actor’s art,” he said, “cannot be taught. He must be born with ability; but the technique, through which his talent can find expression—that can and must be taught. An appreciation of this fact is of the utmost importance, not only to students of acting but to every actor who is interested in the perfection of his art. For, after all, technique is something which is perfectly realistic and quite possible to make one’s own.”

The basis of this technique, the mere development of the actor’s physical resources, although he recognizes and stresses its importance, is not what Boleslavsky calls “technique”. The training of the body he likens rather to the tuning up of an instrument. “Even the most perfectly tuned violin,” he goes on to say, “will not play by itself, without the musician to make it sing. The equipment of the ideal actor … is not complete unless he has … the technique of an ‘emotion maker’ or creator; unless he can follow the advice of Joseph Jefferson to ‘Keep your heart warm and your head cool’. Can it be done? Most certainly! It is merely necessary to think of life as an unbroken sequence of two different kinds of steps. … Problem steps and Action steps. … The first step is for the actor to understand what the problem is that confronts him. Then the spark of the will pushes him toward dynamic action. … When an actor realizes that the solution of a certain part may consist merely in being able first, to stand on the stage for perhaps no more than one five-hundredth of a second, cool-headed and firm of purpose, aware of the problem before him; and then in the next one-five-hundredth of a second or, it may be, five or ten seconds, to precipitate himself intensely into the action which the situation requires, he will have achieved the perfect technique of acting.”

First to know rightly what to do, and then to do it rightly. That is all. It seems little enough. But it is not by chance that Boleslavsky puts the visits of The Creature, who is the subject of these lessons, months, sometimes years, apart. He is thinking practically, not wishfully. He knows the length of the road she will need to travel between lessons. He knows that in acting more than in any other art a little less than good is worlds away from good. An actor cannot be made between luncheon and dinner. He accepts the fact that the profession may take a lifetime of work and that it is a profession well worth the work of a lifetime.

Edith J. R. Isaacs

1 The First Lesson

Concentration

Morning. My room. A knock at the door.

I:	Come in. (The door opens, slowly and timidly. Enter a Pretty Creature of eighteen. She looks at me with wide-open, frightened eyes and crushes her handbag violently.)
THE CREATURE: I … I … I hear that you teach dramatic art.
I:	No! I am sorry. Art cannot be taught. To possess an art means to possess talent. That is something one has or has not. You can develop it by hard work, but to create a talent is impossible. What I do is to help those who have decided to work on the stage, to develop and to educate themselves for honest and conscientious work in the theatre.
THE CREATURE: Yes, of course. Please help me. I simply love the theatre.
I:	Loving the theatre is not enough. Who does not love it? To consecrate oneself to the theatre, to devote one’s entire life to it, give itall one’s thought, all one’s emotions! For the sake of the theatre to give up everything, to suffer everything! And more important than all, to be ready to give the theatre everything—your entire being— expecting the theatre to give you nothing in return, not the least grain of what...