Stanislavsky in America

An Actor's Workbook

Mel Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415496698
• eBook ISBN: 9781135252922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theater

Stanislavsky in America explores the extraordinary legacy that Constantin Stanislavski's system of actor-training has left on acting in the US.

Mel Gordon outlines the journey of Stanislavski's theories through twentieth century American history, from the early US tours of the Moscow Art Theatre to the ongoing impact of 'The System' on modern American acting.

This fascinating study by a leading theatre critic and practitioner provides hundreds of original acting exercises, used by the pivotal US figures who developed his teachings, such as Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Bobby Lewis. By going back to these primary sources, Gordon cuts through the myths and misapprehensions which have built up over time.

Part memoir and part practical guide, Stanislavsky in America is an essential resource for anyone wanting to understand Stanislavski's work and his relationship with American theatre.

1
The Stanislavsky System

I have lived a variegated life, during the course of which I have been forced more than once to change my most fundamental ideas.

Konstantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art, 1926

The “Photographic” revolution in theatre

The invention of the photograph produced an enormous shock in the thinking of nineteenth-century intellectuals and artists. From the development of the camera in 1839 to the end of that century, it was becoming clearer that there was another way of viewing the world. “Reality” could be captured on a chemically treated pane of glass or sheet of paper. In painting and literature, a new and more objective treatment of human behavior soon became the vogue for Europe’s middle-class patrons. In addition, the failed social revolutions of the industrial giants France and Germany further diluted the artistic balms of Romanticism and the melodrama. By the 1870s, scientific methodology and political unrest were leading the arts into a “photographic,” or Naturalist phase.

In the performing arts, as always, external transformations occurred more slowly. Although Émile Zola, the leader of the literary Naturalists, declared in 1874 that the French theatre would become Naturalist or cease to exist, few directors or dramatists paid the radical novelist and journalist much heed. After all, it was widely assumed that the very function of ballet, opera, and theatre was to provide fantasy solutions – within accepted entertainment formats – for the average spectator living in a formless and disordered universe. But growing social expectations among the intelligentsia and the subliminal popularity of the photograph changed that.

Already in 1861, Georg II, the German Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, attempted to create an ensemble of serf-actors, who were made to wear actual or extremely realistic replicas of historical dress. Artifacts from previous epochs, like twenty-pound swords and shields, replaced lightweight hand props. Piles of dirt, tree trunks, stuffed carcasses of animals, and other natural obstacles on the stage floor made normal scenic negotiation difficult for the terrified performers but fascinating to watch. Saxe-Meiningen’s amateur actors moved and often sounded like soldiers and noblemen from antiquity and other eras. Like a photograph, little had to be faked or imagined by the performers or spectators. The play became an excuse to view human behavior of the past. Georg II had created theatre’s first time-machine. And within fifteen years, the Meiningen Players became the talk of Central and Western Europe.

In Paris, André Antoine, a twenty-nine-year-old clerk with thoughts of a professional acting career, founded the Naturalist Théâtre Libre fourteen years after Zola issued his manifesto. As young playwrights began to produce Naturalist texts for the 373-seat theatre, so too did Antoine’s trademarked innovations began to appear. Live chickens, hanging slabs of beef (which invariably attracted real flies), stained sofas, and functioning bistros within the proscenium arch startled audiences accustomed to two-dimensional representations. More novel still were Antoine’s ideas on mise en scène. Performers were instructed to stand and speak anywhere on stage as if the audience ceased to exist. (A contemporary circus parody of the Théâtre Libre revealed a clown-Antoine standing with his back to the house. Suddenly the clown-Antoine turned to confront the spectators only to show another hairy, faceless image. The back of Antoine’s head was painted on both sides of the clown’s papier-mâché head mask.)

While Antoine’s initial success and later notoriety helped launch similar-minded chamber theatres throughout Europe in the late 1880s and 1890s, a less offensive, stylistic offspring of Naturalism, realism, reigned in Scandinavia and the English-speaking world. In Great Britain and North America, mechanical improvements, especially in electric lighting, allowed audience members at huge playhouses to see detailed bodily expression in their leading actors as well as view the most minuscule objects in the super-realistic decor. Program notes often testified to the historical authenticity of the sets and furniture. Suddenly, the fact that the performer playing Marie Antoinette was actually wearing a corset from the eighteen-century queen’s boudoir took on a special theatrical interest. The entire stage now radiated with fascinating detail. The incandescent, carbon-filament lamp, perfected by Thomas Edison, made realism possible in the legitimate theatre.

Technically more important, perhaps, was a perceptual (and unconscious) shift that was brought about through a competing medium – that of the early cinema. When motion pictures became commercially viable in 1895 and 1896, theatregoers quickly learned to watch the enlarged facial images of the performers with greater care. Working without recorded sound in bright, natural lighting and necessarily separated from their intended audiences, film actors had to be judged according to a new means: facial expressiveness and the corporal ability to communicate emotional states.

Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko

The son of a Russian industrialist, Konstantin Stanislavsky was certainly aware of the technological revolution emanating from the capitals of Western and Central Europe. Yet its effects, perceptual or otherwise, on the Moscow stage and acting were much less pronounced than in the democratic or semi-autocratic nations. Completely different factors were at play in the Russian-speaking world at the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1897 when Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko founded the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) at the Slavansky Bazaar restaurant in the shadow of the Kremlin, the ever-present contradictions in Russian society had greatly intensified. Repressive edicts from the Czar’s advisors followed liberalizing legislation; measures to ease social tension went hand-in-hand with brutal (and sometimes disguised) oppression against moderate and radical bourgeois parties as well as minority groups – especially Jews, Poles, and Finns. The still-expanding Russian Empire, dubbed aboard “the prison house of nations,” was ready to fall.

Any Russian theatre that went beyond simple divertissement and entertainment had to be political. Censorship then – and in the Soviet period – penetrated all levels of Russian culture and thinking. Seemingly innocent personal or historical remarks in a Russian play were assumed by audiences and censors alike to be references to the current regime. Stage productions of Shakespearean or classical drama that varied from the accepted canon could easily be interpreted as attacks on contemporary Russian society. A Romeo, for instance, who insanely attempts to climb Juliet’s tower only to begin his monologue with tears and shaking frustration meant something quite different to a Russian spectator than one from Paris, Buenos Aires, or Chicago. Nineteenth-century Russian actors – like their fellow novelists, painters, and philosophers – were frequently called “Lords of Thought,” because their stage activities and character interpretations communicated another, more powerful, social message to their disenfranchised or politically restrained audiences.

A playwright and dramaturge, Nemirovich-Danchenko saw in Stanislavsky a talented and innovative young director; a more-or-less professional actor (having played some seventy-five parts) with strong journalistic appeal; and, perhaps most significantly, a rich source of funding for his “People’s” art theatre. For Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko’s up-to-date literary background and refined production skills were something of a God-send. While these two disparate personalities succeeded in forming the Moscow Art Theatre (the People’s Art Theatre sounded too radical) during their Slavansky Bazaar rendezvous, each disappointed the other within the very first seasons of their unpleasant forty-year partnership. For one, Stanislavsky decided from the beginning that his family wealth would never be used to support their joint project. In addition, Stanislavsky’s restless – some said childish – artistic passion ran roughly against the polished grain of Nemirovich-Danchenko’s conservative, staid tastes.

The major and ongoing quarrel between Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko in fact revolved around their respective backgrounds and uncertain positions of authority within the MAT. As Stanislavsky freely admitted, he was always a poor student, having great difficulties concentrating and carrying through routine tasks. Only subjects that applied to Stanislavsky’s immediate goals stimulated his interests and boundless curiosity. His abstract knowledge of the world was chaotically formed. It was little wonder that Stanislavsky’s writings would later create confusion and misunderstanding. On the stage and in the classroom he proved to be a dynamic teacher. Yet facing a blank page, Stanislavsky felt stymied and blocked. Nemirovich-Danchenko, on the other hand, placed himself in the circle of Russia’s fin de siècle intelligentsia. Friendly with the major writers and dramatists of his day, Nemirovich-Danchenko was considered a protector of the playwright and his words. Stanislavsky’s theatrical concerns lay elsewhere.

Stanislavsky the performer modeled his work on Tomasso Salvini, the emotionally provocative actor who embodied all the achievements – as well as excesses – of late Romanticism in the Italian theatre. According to Stanislavsky, Salvini “lived,” or experienced, the feelings of his characters. His movements and vocal responses always appeared fresh and unplanned. Even into old age, Salvini possessed a special power and full emotional range to engage his audiences magically and forcefully. The young Stanislavsky rejected the common notion that Salvini’s talent sprung from some divinely bestowed, innate gift. A step-by-step method that duplicated Salvini’s acting secrets had to exist. Stanislavsky’s notebooks were filled with such speculation.

For his directing, Stanislavsky found an exemplar that was easier to imitate – Ludwig Chronegk, from Saxe-Meiningen’s company. In fact, Stanislavsky’s amateur theatricals at the Society of Art and Literature in the 1880s and early 1890s outdid the most grandiose of the German’s extravaganzas. Stanislavsky’s basic formula was rather simple but eminently playable: treat all classic and epic spectacles in the detailed Naturalistic mode. Realistic-looking set pieces took their shape from the careful blending of historical artifacts and constructed facsimiles. Stage lighting convincingly resembled the natural and artificial illumination of the street and castle. In the rowdy crowd scenes of Othello and The Merchant of Venice, each figure of the Society’s walk-ons was given a specific character and action à la Saxe-Meiningen. This novel attention to the supernumeraries never failed to please Moscow’s audiences (although years later Nemirovich-Danchenko found such compelling direction more akin to circus antics and satirically labeled them a product of a disease called “Stanislavskitis”).

Stanislavsky himself differed from Western European Naturalists only in the treatment of the principle roles, among which he invariably cast himself. Here Stanislavsky pushed far beyond the traditional stage clichés of the competing Maly Theatre and the foreign touring companies that annually played Moscow during the Lenten season. The Society’s characters were frequently based on living models. This kind of verisimilitude meant implanting external expressive gestures of real people into Stanislavsky’s stage creations. For example, Stanislavsky composed (or “hung”) his character of Othello on a princely-appearing Arab that he observed in a French cafe; his seventeenth-century Uriel Acosta was patterned after Rembrandt’s sketches of scholarly types seen in the Amsterdam ghetto as well as Jews in Czarist Odessa.

The Moscow Art Theatre

In a sense, the MAT that Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko established in 1897 was the amateur theatre ideal. The four- or five-week rehearsal rush of the commercial stage was practically unknown in the MAT. Stanislavsky’s productions could be safely planned and rehearsed nine or ten months in advance. Sometimes whole years were taken up with preparations. Entire shows, occasionally, never opened or were performed in limited previews and then quickly dropped. In addition, like Saxe-Meiningen’s enlightened amateurs, the MAT was organized on the principles of a perfect ensemble – that is, company performers were cast according to a revolving plan. In the MAT’s day-to-day reality, however, the same set of starring actors played most of the leading parts.

One unique aspect of the MAT was its artistic and financial structure. Borrowing from the chamber art theatre tradition of the Théâtre Libre, it produced modern and serious-minded plays that quickly attracted a feverishly loyal audience from Moscow’s intelligentsia and upper classes. (This, despite Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s intention to seek out middle and working-class spectators.) As a commercial venture, the MAT, more of less, triumphed. Although it reportedly sold every seat for every performance on a subscription basis, the MAT constantly required new funding and especially understanding – that is, generous – patrons, but so did the ballet and opera companies of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Moreover, few profit-making theatrical institutions survived the 1918 Revolution. Only those that depended on outside patronage fit into the Soviet models of public art.

The success of the MAT in both its Czarist and Soviet periods was not unrelated to the cultural and psychological needs of its audiences. To a certain extent, the MAT was seen as an outré theatre despite its semi-official status. Stanislavsky’s first production in 1898, Czar Fyodor Ivanovich, elicited pre-production excitement because of the imminent censorship issue. Written in 1875 by Alexei Tolstoy, Czarist censors immediately read a present-day critique in the treatment of Russia’s sixteenth-century court. Only through Nemirovich-Danchenko’s able negotiation was the play released for the stage. Later the texts of Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky, as well as Nikolai Erdman and Mikhail Bulgakov in the 1920s and 30s, all suffered some form of mutilation from government bans. Censorship, of course, cannot stifle thoughts and feeling; in many cases, it sharpens them. Government suppression of speech only imposes a dichotomy between the spoken word and the internal ruminations of the speaker. Stanislavsky’s theatrical emphasis on his characters’ Subtext, or unspoken thoughts, was linked to this Inner Monologue. The touching realism of Chekhov’s plays, which Nemirovich-Danchenko and the playwright himself believed to be implicit in the scripted text, eerily worked with more conviction still on stage through Stanislavsky’s exploration of the characters’ hidden impulses and thoughts. Chekhov often disagreed with Stanislavsky’s approach, where moods and feelings were created through frequent and intense pauses – Stanislavsky added some one hundred of these in The Cherry Orchard alone. But the dramatist admitted belatedly that the MAT’s Naturalistic means of expression and moody rhythms produced a powerfully communicated stage presentation, even if the simple language of his plays was overlooked. It could be said that Stanislavsky’s second theatrical innovation, after his detail-filled direction, was in the application of the Inner Monologue to realistic playscripts.

Curiously, spectators intuited political sentiments in the Subtext of the MAT’s productions even when Stanislavsky did not want them to. During a 1904 production of Enemy of the People, for instance, revolutionary students interrupted Dr. Stockmann’s monologue on the immorality of majority or mob rule with applause and cheers. Feeling that they deliberately misinterpreted the speech’s meaning, Stanislavsky wanted to stop the production. (Similar problems arose in the Soviet era.) Ironic smiles, thought-filled silences, hesitant gestures, and downward glances – all the trademarks of the MAT’s style of acting – revealed a serious and often spiritual means of theatrical communication, but being nonverbal it risked sweeping misinterpretation.

The creation of the System

During the initial heyday of the MAT, approximately 1899 to 1905, Stanislavsky taught no method of acting. It could be said that he hardly taught acting at all, except to tell inexperienced performers to concentrate on the designs on the side curtains rather than to gaze into the audience’s faces. By all accounts, there was no need for an intense regimen of actor-training, other than schooling in voice and movement. Stanislavsky’s performers, among the best in Russia, trusted his direction and did what the master requested of them. In the time-honored technique of Russian regisseurs, he instructed them on each gesture and movement. Problems of stage fright and growing stale with the constant repetition of performances were handled in hazardous ways. For example, the nervous excitement that overcame the MAT players at the opening of Chekhov’s The Seagull in 1898 was assuaged by the indigestion of valerian drops and frantic devotional prayers.

Stanislavsky used no methodological app...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The Stanislavsky System
• 2 American Laboratory Theatre
• 3 The Group Theatre
• 4 Russian Émigré Teachers
• 5 The Actors Lab in Hollywood
• 6 Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio
• 7 Stella Adler
• 8 Bobby Lewis
• 9 Sandy Meisner
• Appendix: Studio Programs
• Selected bibliography
• Index