Stanislavsky in Focus

An Acting Master for the Twenty-First Century

Sharon Marie Carnicke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000299496
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Recitazione e provini

Stanislavsky in Focus brilliantly examines the history and actual premises of Stanislavsky's 'System', separating myth from fact with forensic skill.

The first edition of this now classic study showed conclusively how the 'System' was gradually transformed into the Method, popularised in the 1950s by Lee Strasberg and the Actor's Studio. It looked at the gap between the original Russian texts and what most English-speaking practitioners still imagine to be Stanislavsky's ideas.

This thoroughly revised new edition also delves even deeper into:

• the mythical depiction of Stanislavsky as a tyrannical director and teacher
• yoga, the mind-body-spirit continuum and its role in the 'System'
• how Stanislavsky used subtexts to hide many of his ideas from Soviet censors.

The text has been updated to address all of the relevant scholarship, particularly in Russia, since the first edition was published. It also features an expanded glossary on the System's terminology and its historical exercises, as well as more on the political context of Stanislavsky's work, its links with cognitive science, and the System's relation to contemporary developments in actor-training. It will be a vital part of every practitioner's and historian's library.

1
Demythologizing Stanislavsky

While Stanislavsky’s name has dominated debates about acting in the Western world for nearly a century, most actors routinely identify his System with the Method, developed in New York during the Great Depression and popularized by Strasberg. Dynamic processes gave rise to this identification: actors of the Moscow Art Theatre inspired a generation of US actors, while they themselves struggled to survive in the political climate of post-revolutionary Russia; émigré actors taught in a foreign tongue to students whose cultural assumptions differed dramatically from their own; abridgement of Stanislavsky’s books in the US and their censorship in Moscow further obscured his face; and finally, the very nature of acting practice encourages individual modifications of the System’s techniques.

A map that traces the migration of Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky’s System throughout the world, therefore, would show two major points: New York and Moscow. In both cities, actors seized upon Stanislavsky’s work as primary and essential. In both, teachers who had studied with the master passed their understanding of his practice on to the next generation of teachers. That generation in turn passed it on to our teachers, and we to our students. Both theatrical centers created tradition-bound approaches to the System that subsequently spanned the globe. From Moscow, Stanislavsky’s ideas spread to Eastern Europe and Germany; from New York, they traveled to Western Europe, to Great Britain, to Scandinavia, and as far as Japan. Both traditions, however, paint retouched portraits of the historical Stanislavsky.

In the United States, conditioned by a Freudian-based, individually oriented ethos, actors privileged the psychological techniques of Stanislavsky’s System over those of the physical. The Method, as it became known in New York, defined itself primarily through this one aspect of the multivariant, holistic System. Thus, the transmission of Stanislavsky’s ideas to the US, their linguistic and cultural translation, and their transformation by the Method created a pervasive veil of assumptions through which we in the West commonly view Stanislavsky. While this filter has illuminated some of the System’s premises (most notably those that involve psychological realism), it has also obscured others (such as those drawn from Symbolism, Formalism, and Yoga).

Stanislavskian lore, developed in Soviet Russia and claiming greater fidelity to the master’s teaching, is no less suspect than the Method. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the dictates of Marxist philosophical materialism and the collective imperative of post-revolutionary Russia exalted Stanislavsky’s physical training of the actor as his most complete and scientific technique. Thus, the Russian version of the System became identified almost exclusively with yet another aspect of Stanislavsky’s approach—the Method of Physical Actions. Again, some issues (action, behaviorist psychology, and Realism among them) are illuminated, but others (those from Symbolism, Formalism and Yoga) obscured.

While both centers tapped the same source, their creative readings of the System proceeded along different lines, establishing not only competing traditions but competing truths about the master’s work. Neither of the two approaches found Stanislavsky’s study of avant-garde and Eastern arts of more than passing interest. Neither integrated the mind and body of the actor, the corporal and the spiritual, the text and the performance as thoroughly or as insistently as did Stanislavsky himself. Both considered Stanislavsky’s work in the Realist style most compelling. In short, two doctrines evolved from the same source, each gaining the force of unambiguous authority within its own culture, while the source itself receded into a vague and misty past. The real Stanislavsky was relegated to anecdotes that took on mythical rather than historical force.

When the Actors Studio in New York invited me to serve as interpreter for a visiting director of the Moscow Art Theatre (who had himself studied with one of Stanislavsky’s last pupils), I watched these two traditions collide. For many months in 1978, I whispered translations of Lee Strasberg’s critiques of scenes and exercises to Sam Tsikhotsky,¹ who whispered back to me critiques of his own. When the Russian directed Strasberg’s protégés in a workshop production of The Seagull, I translated their differing interpretations about the same techniques. With Tsikhotsky’s stress on action and the cast’s concern with emotion, their views embodied the evolution of Stanislavsky’s ideas.

Moscow’s position on the map causes no surprise. Born there, Stanislavsky worked there until his death. Similarly, that the System would somehow conform to the tenets of Marxism in communist Russia raises few eyebrows. Russia has always produced arts of political engagement, and the difficult relationship between arts and government after the revolution is generally known.

But New York’s competing importance in developing Stanislavsky’s work bears a closer look. The historical reasons for New York’s position on this map involve a passionate and mutually beneficial relationship between Stanislavsky and his American students. Despite political hostility between the USA and the USSR, this Russian actor and director left an indelible imprint upon the American imagination. After enjoying routine successes in Paris, London, Berlin, and elsewhere throughout Europe, Stanislavsky incited an especially enthusiastic and creative impulse in young American theatre professionals when he and the Moscow Art Theatre visited in 1923 and 1924. Rather than remaining passive spectators, content to enjoy the achievements of Russian theatre from the auditorium, these admirers actively sought to make Stanislavsky’s theatre practice their own. Their avid adoption represents the first step in establishing New York’s importance.

In 1965, when members of the Moscow Art Theatre again visited New York City, Lee Strasberg testified to this special relationship. He greeted them as more than “honored colleagues,” and explained to the Actors Studio that:

The theatre of which they are a part […] played a role in our lives of such value, that we can hardly think of it as a foreign theatre. … I think, that many people in America think, that Stanislavsky must be an American. Otherwise how could he have possibly influenced the American theatre to the extent that he has?

(LS A12:16 February 1965)

He echoes Stanislavsky’s own 1924 assessment: “In America now, MAT is considered an American theatre” (SS IX 1999:154).

Stanislavsky’s influence on US acting remains indisputable. His former students emigrated and taught in New York and Hollywood: Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, Andrius Jilinsky, Leo and Barbara Bulgakov, Vera Soloviova, Tamara Daykarhanova, and Michael Chekhov among them. The Group Theatre and the Actors Studio consciously modeled themselves upon his work. His inspiration spawned numerous acting schools and workshops throughout the country, even moving into American colleges and universities. To this day, theatre professionals tend to position themselves in relationship to him. Some, like Stella Adler and Joshua Logan, grounded careers in brief periods of study with him. Others, like Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner, invoked his name, even while arguing with him. Adler once said that, “The Group Theatre contributed to a standard of acting that transformed the American theatre” (Chinoy 1976:512). More precisely, this transformation occurred through Stanislavsky’s inspiration, influencing three generations of actors.

Perhaps even more remarkably, Stanislavsky also captured the popular American imagination. His relationship with the general audience, too, has lasted into our own generation. The figure of Stanislavsky has become our archetypal image of the acting teacher. In the 1987 film, Outrageous Fortune, two would-be actresses vie for places in a highly competitive acting workshop, run by an Eastern bloc tyrannical teacher whose name sounds suspiciously like “Stanislavsky” (Dixon 1987). In Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman, himself a Method actor, plays a Method actor who is fired from a series of commercial jobs when he applies Stanislavsky’s theories inappropriately (Gelbard and Schisgal 1982). In the Broadway musical, A Chorus Line, one of the auditioning performers exposes her humiliation when she feels “nothing” in distorted versions of Stanislavsky’s sense memory exercises (Hamlisch and Kleban 1975). Even the android character of Data in television’s Star Trek: The Next Generation studies the Method in his attempts to understand human emotion through acting (Lazebnick 1991). Such parodies in the popular media testify to how thoroughly Stanislavsky has entered into general discourse. Audiences do not have to be theatre specialists to get the joke.

Rarely has a culture been so riveted for so long about the technical aspects of an art. During a 1956 session at the Actors Studio, Strasberg marveled at the phenomenal public interest:

Actors have been thought about in the past … Duse versus Bernhardt … But […] I think this is the first time in the history of theatre … that general people—the barbershop and beauty parlor attendants—are discussing the work of the Actors Studio […] I must say that this is unusual.

(LS 2:10 April 1956)

Strasberg bemoaned the price he and members of the Actors Studio paid for such attention. He felt that this inappropriate curiosity forced actors and teachers to explain themselves “unnecessarily” to those who could never understand the experience of acting. “I’m a little bit miffed, I’m a little bit disturbed, and I’m a little bit amazed,” he said (LS 2:10 April 1956). Harold Clurman, co-founder of the Group Theatre, agreed: “The truth of the matter is that the system should never have been made a subject of conversation, a matter of publicity, or Sunday articles, for it does not concern the audience, or, for that matter, the critic” (1957:39).

Public curiosity was fueled by a sense of mystery surrounding the practice of Stanislavsky’s System in the United States. During the 1930s, when the Group Theatre created a community of actors who lived as well as worked together, the public imagined them as members of an esoteric cult from which outsiders were excluded. Consequently, the press found them fascinating. This not altogether sympathetic and sometimes prurient interest climaxed during the 1950s, ironically piqued by Strasberg’s adamant attempts to protect his actors from the gaze of observers while they experimented with their art. While he complained of the public’s interest, he seemed unwittingly to spur it on. On one occasion, for example, he invited a young writer to watch an actors’ session. When the guest offered a comment, Strasberg exploded in an angry attack. “You—on the outside—here your presence is a sufferance, it is an interruption to us, it is an interference with our work” (LS 101A:1960).² While Strasberg had a real point to make—that the cumulative work of the Studio could not be understood without serious and prolonged study—rumors of such outbursts also served to escalate interest.

Perhaps the adoption of Stanislavsky by the theatre community and public curiosity about his methods would have been enough to insure that New York become a central disseminating point on our map. However, Stanislavsky himself granted special importance to the work conducted there in his name. During his 1923 and 1924 tours he welcomed the enthusiasm of his American admirers. At home, he was castigated by Russian avant-garde artists for old-fashioned, outmoded work and attacked by politicos for bourgeois and capitalistic sentiments. He feared that his creativity was flagging; he was losing confidence in his work. In New York, he unexpectedly found new students, eager to extend his work into the future. He looked to them as saviors of his art, which was indeed perishing in the artistic and political climate of Moscow. While he flirted with the notion of emigration, he attempted to capitalize on the economic opportunities the US offered him and his theatre: he toured in a grueling schedule of performances, pursued a film contract, and turned himself into a writer. The most lucrative of these opportunities turned out to be writing; he published his first two major books, My Life in Art and An Actor Prepares, in the United States in English, a language which he could neither speak nor read, before he issued them in his native language. Money alone, however, did not prompt his unusual decision. He also hoped to evade Soviet censorship which was forcing his System into uncomfortable Marxist molds. His decision to publish in the United States resulted in commercially abridged books, but it also irrevocably granted New York its unique place on the map of migration, second only to Moscow.

Stanislavsky’s influence in the US was far from cohesive or coherent. In the theatre world, obsession with his System has led to seemingly endless hostility among warring camps, each proclaiming themselves his only true disciples, like religious fanatics, turning dynamic ideas into rigid dogma. This splintering of the Stanislavsky tradition in the US began as early as 1934. Stella Adler, then a member of the Group Theatre, traveled to Paris to seek the master. She returned with new perspectives on acting and openly challenged Lee Strasberg’s authority as the Group’s sole acting teacher. Her words amazed the company. But rather than inspiring new collaborative experimentation with the System, her report divided them. As actress Phoebe Brand recalled, “It was like being either a Republican or a Democrat. People were staunch adherents of one side or the other” (Chinoy 1976:516). Thus, Adler insured a rift in the US theatre that exists until today. Others, like Sanford Meisner, Robert Lewis, and Elia Kazan, jumped into the fissure.

Confusion reached such a fevered pitch that in 1957, Lewis, also of the original Group, attempted to sort it out by giving a series of lectures for professional actors entitled Method or Madness. He spoke at the Playhouse Theatre in New York on Mondays at 11:30 p.m. after the curtains of Broadway had rung down. When the series sold out, actors without tickets tried to “crash” but were turned away. The lectures became “the hottest ticket in town” (Lewis 1984:279).³ However, Lewis hardly stemmed the tide of debate.

Out of this extraordinary turmoil, a theatrical and cultural revolution was taking place. While Stanislavsky’s ideas touched off something very deep in the American psyche, his adopted culture also transformed them. As Lewis noted, the Stanislavsky System “was slowly being distorted into the American ‘Method.’ […] The ‘Method Actor’ was born” (Lewis 1984:279). US actors were translating and mistranslating a Russian system into English, and their creative work often lacked clarity. Moreover, while his English language books went uncensored, their abridgement added to the on-going confusion. As Lewis chided, “I have never been able to find out precisely what [‘the Method Actor’] meant but, depending on which camp you’re in, you hate him or you worship him” (1984:279).

Once adopted, adapted, and ultimately transformed, the Method came to dominate stage and screen in the US. Indeed, the Method’s particularly strong impact on cinema acting during the 1950s significantly enlarged its sphere of influence. Stanislavsky’s ideas began to loop back to Europe through an American filter (Bjornage 1989). Actors worldwide learned about Stanislavsky from Americans; even his writings were translated from the abridged English editions. Drawing a map of the System’s migration throughout the world calls visual attention to this unexpected but highly charged Americanization of Stanislavsky’s work.

This book examines the history and premises of the System in order to take the reader beyond common knowledge to what Stanislavsky himself had professed. On the one hand, I lay bare the transformation of the System into the Method. With the deaths of Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and an entire generation of US teachers who set the Method in motion, we have reached the end of an era in American theatre. It is time to dispel the Method’s hegemony over the interpretation of the System in the West. On the other hand, I expose Soviet conditioning of the System. With the dissolution of the USSR and the opening of musty archives that had been sealed during Stalin’s time, significant new information about Stanislavsky’s life and artistic endeavor is coming to light. In the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, the rate of publications about Stanislavsky in Russian has escalated unbelievably. These materials allow us for the first time to understand the full impact of Soviet censorship on Stanislavsky.

A fresh look at the two traditions which sprang from the same source uncovers hidden aspects of the System that contain germs for newly revitalized readings of Stanislavsky by upcoming generations of actors.

I first experienced the importance of such an inquiry when I compared Stanislavsky’s English books with their Russian counterparts. I was studying with an acting teacher in New York who passionately considered himself “anti-Stanislavsky.” Since I could speak Russian, he sent me to check on the original terminology. Thus, I discovered how widely Stanislavsky’s Russian books vary from their standard English versions. At first glance, An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role look one half as long as their Russian versions. Stanislavsky’s attitudes toward his work and his students seemed to shift before me. His Russian persona had a twinkle in his eyes. He was not only the tyrannical dictator who demands iron d...