AN AUTHOR LIKE CHEKHOV can only do one thing—kill you. That is what he wants to do. “There are a couple of actors out there? I’ll give them Uncle Vanya and really kill them.” When an author died, we used to say, “Thank God.” From now on, he wouldn’t be sitting out there listening to the play and making suggestions. “Is he still alive? Is he coming? Oh, God.…”
The artist is a revolutionist in society. An actor wants to go into the theater because life is too limited. I am here to equip you to take your place in society as a theatrical artist—not to teach you to be an “actor.” What can solve the problem of repertory theater in America? What is a better way of artistic life than typecasting, the movie-star way? The answer is craft.
Only craft releases talent. If you learn the craft of acting completely, it can become the art of acting—a healthy system that will equip you to play a full range of parts. It requires only a normal body with normal talent. The instrument has only to be normal for the music written. But the size of the actor must be the size of the profession—two thousand years old.
The first thing an actor of size and craft understands is that the play is in the present but deals one million percent with the past. That is the actor’s work to create. It is not in the play. Shaw said, “I’ll do it—I’ll put the whole past into the present so the actors will know what I’m thinking.” He tried. He said, “Candida is not really real. She comes down because Zeus and the gods have lent her to mortal people for a while so she can live like them and teach them.” The curtain goes up and Candida is sitting there knitting and you see she is somebody’s wife. But you don’t know that she is also a mystical figure with deeper meanings. Hard as he tried, Shaw couldn’t really put that in. All that has to be in the actor.
I want to be clear. I think I am known for clarity. I don’t like a mixed-up director who says, “Well, there’s mysticism in this play, and … oh, it’s just so very mystical.” I say, “But what should I do next?” I am the kind of a person who likes to know what I do next. Mysticism I don’t know. I want to give you some keys to how you approach a play.
Chekhov chose to write about the people he admired. He admired them because they were brave and he liked their minds and he was drawn to that society. He said it would never come again—that kind of elegance in the Russian aristocratic intellectual moment when you had the fading out of an entire upper class. It was not at all the same as the English upper class.
If you need somebody to play Henry IV, you send to England. An Englishman knows the speech before the first rehearsal. “Once more into the breach, dear friends.…” He is already finished with it. He doesn’t have to learn it. The English can do that. But the English can’t do Chekhov because they don’t feel.
Chekhov is all feeling. Everything Russian is feeling—every bit of music, every poem. Everything in the Russian landscape is full of the melody of the inside. That is Russia. It is not America. We are agitated, but we are not emotionally free people. We don’t cry when the snow falls. The English are not like that either, and neither are the French. There is only Russia left, with that extreme sensibility of reacting, caring, feeling, laughing with a tear, failing with a smile.
You don’t have that kind of feeling, and you can only get it by the most intense concentration of studying and listening. My advice is to be alone when you read the play. Always throw out punctuation when studying a script. Periods and commas are meant for reading. Go over the script one character at a time. Get the things that talk to you. Masha in Seagull cracks nuts. She knows a woman of her class should not crack nuts, but she is a rebel. She is really delicious. She has a grievance. Always go through the complaints of the characters. In Cherry Orchard, in Seagull, in Three Sisters—people complain about their lot. There is always a sense of “Something is crying in my soul!” It is crying for a love that is not coming. It is a soul cry, a love cry. Keep that sense going, which Chekhov gives them.
To learn is better than to know. Whether it’s a rehearsal or this class, don’t meander in. Don’t be late. Don’t gossip. Don’t discuss your technique. Don’t talk about your teacher or your fellow actors. Never say anything anywhere unless you need to. Convey ideas, not words. An idea is presented in a sequence. Learn to listen for the sequence. Don’t listen for words. Listen for thoughts. Don’t ever talk about what you don’t understand. The most important thing to understand is Chekhov’s idea that life goes on.
Stanislavksy was very interested in that. He told me that when Chekhov died and his widow was on her way to the funeral, she suddenly stopped and picked up a pin. She noticed a pin on the ground, and she picked it up. In doing that, you break the cliché of going to a funeral: life goes on and you notice things, instead of just getting into a trance of “I’m sad.”
That pin is a perfect example of how you can use the stage. There is a lot of food on the stage—tea, samovars, glasses, everybody drinking. By the way Masha pours the vodka, you know how she drinks. This is what Stanislavsky did with Chekhov, how Stanislavsky made one aware. It was a great discovery for acting. Until then, acting was the way the English act. It is impossible to make an Englishman sound like a person. It is not their fault. The language is filled with a certain rhythm which makes it difficult to get the reality. England goes for this kind of acting. The Moscow Art Theater does not.
I saw a lot of the Moscow Art Theater. Stanislavsky said to me, “If you want something, go—don’t wait.” So I went a lot. Once when I was sitting in the Moscow Art Theater, I noticed that the actors on stage noticed me in the audience. They hadn’t seen anything like me in a thousand years. Gloves and makeup. That was not their audience. It was not like our crazy theater here at all. Their greatest actor, [Vasiliy Ivanovich] Kochalov, in Resurrection had some steps leading down to the pit, and he came down to speak his speech and there I was, and he saw me. He was late with his cue. He didn’t mind being late with his cue by taking the time to notice me. All the actors did it once in a while. Every actor in the Moscow Art Theater with their great Method did that. They looked at the audience to see who was there. So they are not dumb. When they don’t want it, they throw it away.
What matters is you and your own creativity and your own choices at every level in every element of the equation, every step of the way. I cannot give it to you. I can only give you some keys and some exercises to help you out of the void.
In realism, big ideas come out of ordinary language. It is the actor’s responsibility to live with ideas and know how to find them in the conflict of values and period of the play. The great realistic plays are not entertainments. They use middle-class elements to serve the exalted idea. Find what is universal in the common language.
In all great writing there will be an idea that pertains to all time—transcends the local and goes into eternity. “Man struggles for survival, with God, society, family, morality.” It can’t be solved, but man makes an effort. Theater means ideas that pertain to man. Take them as high as you can reach.
The ideas are the stretch for the actor. They must speak to him and he must fill them and make them his own. The realistic form demands it. Let the idea that has size affect you—let it give you the size it deserves—DO IT MAXIMUM. Your presentation must be as large as the idea.
Bring in some revelation—a miracle, perhaps—and do it without words. Make us see it. The birth of Christ or the resurrection, maybe. Reveal it, lift the veil off. Work on revelation. Then do it with as few words as you possibly can.
Find ten different circumstances where you cannot compromise. Take a big idea you will fight for—from life, from a play, from an essay. Is it Lincoln at Gettysburg? Kennedy at the Berlin Wall? Joan of Arc leading her troops? Whatever you choose, paraphrase it. Take it off the page. Be ready to present it. Find the thing that fascinates you. What arrests your attention? What is beautiful about it? What is horrible? Take it and, in two minutes, develop and complete it in your own words. Words mask us. Fancy words mask us more. We must use words to reveal, not mask, ourselves.
In your speech or your essay, pick out the words that are enormous—words with dramatic impact. Develop a sense of words. Be passionate of words. Develop your love of words and a real choice of words. Cultivate your ability to see something new in them a hundred times, not just the tiny physical things they indicate. It will help you to know the difference between “vile” and “evil,” or “divine” and “fabulous.” If your text says, “That woman is fierce,” live up to the word “fierce.” Give it its worth and inherent value. If you don’t know exactly what it means, look it up. Look it up even if you do know. Then make the selection of meaning that is proper for you and the situation. Invest commonplace language with emotional truth.
Now combine those last two exercises above and use them for the Warren Report on JFK’s assassination. Have you read it? If not, you’re a fool. Get it and read it over a few times. Do you believe the single-killer or the conspiracy theory? I don’t care what you think personally. Take both ideas and put them in your own words. An actor has to be able to present an idea, pro and con, on any subject in or out of a script. The truth of the idea must be second nature in your stage voice.
Make the difference in ideas big. Don’t rush them—take the time to find and express them.
If you hear something terrible about somebody you love, your reaction must be on the basis of what you know, not what you say you know. Do not play personal conflicts. Always play the conflict of significant ideas. The discussion of opposing ideas opens up and goes beyond immediate reality. When a change is portended in that discussion, you have a large situation. Is it right? Is it good? Where will it lead? Depth in realism means what is under the lines in you—that part of the idea, the relationships and the issue that is beneath the prosaic lines and in you.
In realism, make the small action complicated and deep. Immediately put the literary idea into the theatrical size that the theme demands.
In A Doll’s House, the last scene between Nora and Torvald is a fight to the death. Know what that fight is about. In the action of fighting, all of you goes outward. As you do the action, give birth to it. Let it happen as it goes on. If you work to get the maximum, then you can do any large or small action with the belief and experience in you. Then, if your partner attacks you from her deepest beliefs, you can fight back with your deepest beliefs. Justify your own sense of right deeply.
When you see the beautiful or the miraculous thing—speak it out. Go from one wondrous thing to another. When you see it, stretch to the sky. Such passages in Ibsen or Chekhov are above the reality—they go out to the world that is created by the actor. They are not just intimately delivered to a partner.
A modern play makes the actor dig for its meaning and find out why the playwright wrote it. You go first to the meaning, then to the circumstances. How does the play grow? You must know the important moments in the play, where the growth is, and conversely you must know what is not important. This first stage of approaching a part—finding the idea and plot as well as the style and form—is best done alone.
When the idea can be lifted from the page, you are in the second stage. That begins when you have the sequence in your mind. You start saying it aloud. In your room, on the street—anywhere. Then in a rehearsal space. Then you get used to the playing area and you get additional action from the partner.
You must communicate the real meaning of each word you speak and motion you make, but never by rote memory. You must always leave room for improvisation and spontaneity, which is the third stage of your art. The key to that is conflict.
Obstacles help the action. Put them in if they are not there. The element of an obstacle yields growth. Overcome the hurdle and go on to what exists now. Make it oblique—don’t make it direct. Make things oppose your action. Put the urgency in the action. In realism, find the way to do it rather than say it. Start using creative surprises in the action. Bring in planned accidents that you need. There are no real accidents on stage, only planned accidents. Don’t be afraid of your voice, body, or approach. If you are afraid to fail, you will never succeed.
When working on any scene in a script, it would help you to do some work with a pencil and paper first and put down the following headings:
I. Action
II. Physical Objects and Controls
III. Mood and Soul
This is the breakdown of what you must know and use and take advantage of in the process of creating a character. Draw the set, too. If you know the place and your own and all the other characters’ lives before they enter, you will be able to relate to them and to idea sequences instead of words. If you take the things you compile in the first three categories and arrange them into a series of clear steps, you will be able to come into each scene knowing how to carry out what the author indicates for you.
The stage takes away the living truth. We put it back from the nature of our actions. The facts are boring. What can I contribute to them? Know the difference between showing and doing. Know the difference between the convention of doing and the life of doing. To act is easy; not to act is hard. Don’t give nature to life; take nature from life.
An action can be won or lost, simple or complicated.
Complicate action. Reflect on complication. Like and immediately respond to things. Get off your pedestrian ass onto your theatrical feet. You’re ready to act when you’re full of material.
Listen actively. Give up resistance—stop holding back. Don’t talk away the subject. When and where does the action start? If it starts in you, the words will then tumble out. It will finish when it stops in you.
An action is doable. It takes place somewhere. It has its nature. Nothing physical can be “acted”—no speech defect or regional dialect or anything else. It must be done by a technique which has become second nature. Everything physical done on the stage must be second nature to the actor.
Whatever is needed for an action, nature can supply. One will always be truthful to any action if one lets nature be his guide. Give your action only what it needs.
Everything you do has a nature. Never do things because they are comfortable. Always do things because of their nature. Understand the nature of the most simple action and give the truth to it. Don’t just bring your own mannerisms to it. The person who bores me most is the person who is dying to show me what a temperament he has.
Know how to do the action and then smarten it up—know the difference between the stage reality and the life reality. Create a real attention as you do it. The attention must be multiple. The audience is interested in the complexity of the actor much more than in the facts.
Choose an action—e.g, sit down in chair, powder your nose, put on a sweater, comb your hair, read a paper—and do it simply. Do it again and complicate it. Then complicate it again. Change the action but not the nature of the action.
The nature of Total Listening is IN. The nature of Total Looking is OUT. The nature of Total Speaking is OUT. The nature of Total Relating with others is both out and in.
Reach! Don’t pull back from people. Ask, “Where do I pull back when I shouldn’t?” If you have nothing else to do, LOOK. Don’t pull voice, body, feeling, or anything else back. GO OUT. Truly give the action its own life and follow through to its end. DO it—don’t say it. Use the set and prop objects truthfully, letting their nature feed you. PERSONALIZE the doing by putting yourself and your life into your actions.
Concentrating on the doing of the action will lessen distraction and give you coordination free from tension and actor’s anxiety. Distraction is countered by what you’re doing, if you’re really doing it. But have spontaneity. If you like something, respond quickly to the thing about it that excites you. ACTING IS DOING. Fill yourself with material by seeing and then go to the image. See the image—but particularize and economize it. Don’t let unspecific chatter drain your image. DON’T BE GENERAL!
Always be able to finish anything you are asked to do. Knowing the END of a direction will give you the security of doing the action. Always carry out your action fully each time. Each time, do it—don’t repeat it! The nature of the theater is having to do things over and over again. They must be really DONE each time.
Life, too, has a way of making us lose things from repetition. But in art, every time you create it must feed you and you must feed it. Real life exhausts itself. Facts are not for actors. In acting, the thought provokes everything. You don’t repeat. You find it again. Don’t ever listen to another actor on stage without thought. Be active and personal in your listening. TRAIN YOUR EAR TO THINK.
Actions must be DOABLE. Break down the overall action into its doable elements. Action means doing, not feeling. Find the things you like and can do to advance the plot. Don’t make artificial choices. Start with what most involves you and see where it takes you. Use the circumstances to feed your action and give it life. Put yourself into the facts you use.
Take ten “activity” actions from Ibsen and Strindberg and Chekhov scenes and put yourself into what is needed. Take action that needs a great deal of doing, like trimming the Christmas tree in Doll’s House, for example. Think of everything that must be done with trimming that tree. Let the lines come out of the action—don’t pick the thing you cannot do. Ask what can you do rather than what can you feel. Turn the fiction into reality—use the thing that makes it personal for you. In preparing the food for the big holiday meal, personalize and talk about it before you go to the line “Such a big turkey!”
Inner justification is the thing that belongs to the actor. It does not come from the object. Provoke action through justification. Justify it without the words, because the words stink. Live in the circumstances for an hour without saying a word.
In realism, you enlarge the big life-and-death arguments by enlarging the justification. That element of need must be added, and it will help. Always justify every action. You build your attitude toward your partner through justification, too.
Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing? Why am I doing it?
Inner justification has to do with what is behind the text. It has less to do with the object than with why the object is used in a certain way. The WHY belongs to the actor. Choose something you need for justification. When you reach for the justification, stay within the realm of your own believability. What happens before must influence the justification as the plot builds. If you take the thing that really works for you and your action, then the words will come out of an inner experience.
Motivate everything you do. If you do an action, the reason must help you. Spontaneous justification gets you to go.
Pick a scene from Chekhov and do all your movements in it unmotivated. Then go through the movements and motivate them all. See and feel the difference.
Take and do the same action spontaneously ten times for different reasons: e.g., the act of shaking hands, saying goodbye, trying on gloves. Get your different circumstances each time, know what you need, and justify what you do. Break the action down into all of its component parts and spontaneously justify each one. Make the justifications fit the circumstances.
Choose a partner and improvise several variations of a scene with a different spontaneous justification for each one: e.g., a man comes into a room and a girl must stop him from doing whatever he is doing or wants to do. The first time, she rejects him. The second time, she helps him. The third, she stalls. Different justifications excite truly different temperament switches. Why does she help him take the car or keep him from taking it? Speak to each other from different places in the room.
Provoke the circumstances to complicate your actions. The physical things you do are part of an action in circumstances. In realism, life is fed to the actor through circumstances. Live off the circumstances. If the circumstances are truly created, an actor can justify his use of them in a personal way, making logical and correct choices.
Pay attention to sequence: An action must grow up or down, or you better just give it up. Find the growth in the action through the plot. Emotion comes out of action. Never look for the emotion—you’ll drive it away. Let it come out of what you’re doing. You draw from the circumstances of the play. Improvise first, to totally involve yourself in the moment—then later go back to the play. There’s not always time to find the moment in our lives—go to the circumstances.
If you are having a picnic and it starts to rain, know and justify the things you do when you are enjoying or tiring of something. What can you do to drag out or speed up the action of leaving the picnic? Let the life of the doing come through in your use of the objects. If you pack the blanket, let the truth that’s in the blanket come through. Go from one thing to another continuing the action and living truthfully in the circumstances.
Remember that you are looking for the doable actions, so go quickly but specifically to the details you can use. Take the act of waiting, for example. When waiting, don’t just sit back and be bored. That leads to lethargy. The action of waiting can be boring, but there is a world around you. An action always takes place in a world. Waiting in a subway is different from waiting in a theatrical office for an audition or waiting for your costume to be mended right before your entrance. Know the difference. Take the things you would humanly use in that circumstance and filter it through your imagination until it belongs to you.
Don’t stay with a detail unless you see that it grows. Then go on with the detail and add lines. It all starts to develop from the action. Do lines out of the action.
Sometimes things that happen have nothing to do with the action. Let life come into the action. The phone rings. It’s irrelevant—one doesn’t give up the action for the irrelevant, but life often intrudes on your action, and you can use it in the circumstances. Let the outside life in.
Improvisation: You are playing a small role or chorus part in a show. You are in the dressing room getting into costume, but you’re having a hell of a time getting your girdle on. Put on the girdle, take off the girdle, look for another one.… Suddenly the stage manager comes in and says one of the leads is sick, and you’re the understudy. You’re caught in the middle of this girdle thing. You call in another actress for help. Maybe she’s your sister. She thinks it’s funny. You don’t. Or maybe you do, in part. The lines come from your circumstances with those girdles. Filter them through your imagination, experiencing that which makes it difficult or easy. Then let the lines spill out.
The truth comes out of the humanity of the doing. Be in the truth of living in that circumstance. You know consciously about one millionth of what you know. Be more conscious in your knowing. If you really see the details of that dressing room and select the right ones, they will grow and lead you to the doing.
How do you do that? By cultivating new and better ways of seeing. Start with stream-of-consciousness association. Take an object and see where it leads you. Shop for the image that feeds. Be very personal in your selection: it can be used again—enlarged and changed, according to your needs on stage. When it is alive in you, you can give it out and it will awaken your audience. Get to your image fast and have it fully in you, but don’t do more than it gives you. Take the life from the image to the degree that it truly exists. Don’t force more from the image. Pick up each other’s images and see it for yourself, and see more in it from yourself. There is no inner insecurity when one really sees the image. Put your image in a place. When the next person takes it, he should put it in another place. Make the growth a little bigger each time.
Work on memory enhancement. Get as close as you can to a photographic memory. Pass a shop and see, to the count of ten, everything in the window. Wherever you are, count people, chairs, dogs, trees.… Look at a thing and see it completely, no matter how quickly you look. Count the lights and notice every object in the room you enter. Really see imaginatively: be able to describe the fabulous coat you saw in Saks’ window, down to the tiniest detail. Practice seeing throughout the day until you can do it without its being evident to anyone else.
Find ten different colors of white in ten things. Give the life of each white. The life of what you see is drawn from within the memory sources of your own life. Don’t see things in a lifeless way. Find a dozen red things: see their particular redness. A dozen black things: their particular blackness.
Do something while some prose or poetry is being read in a group visualization-association rhythm. Prepare a story that describes something lyrical-beautiful in nature. Hear yourself talk. Make sense. When many people talk at once, you must adjust to them and use each other. Really listen—become engaged and respond spontaneously. To act is to REACT! But you tend to listen without thought onstage. If you listen and pick up the group rhythm, it will carry you forward and your concentration will not only be intact but stronger than before.
The actor must find a way to be private onstage with his partner, to speak humanly and to be at home in the circumstances. Become deeply attached to your partner. What does he or she need from you? Really watch—find something in your partner that affects you deeply. Stanislavsky told a young actor, “In acting you must give back—if not, your partner is stranded.”
Partners must find the part of their relationship wherein they don’t talk, they do. Find the now, the urgency. Don’t “clarify” the play for your partner. Don’t “tell” or flirt. Real sex never shows itself. But action is reaction, and you can only build your own attitude through your partner’s. You must give each other something.
See if you and your partners can distinguish each other by touching hands with your eyes closed. See if you can distinguish them by touching their hair.
The growth of the relationship and the idea is not only for you and your partner. It is to be given to the audience. That is why the play was written. So is the growth of an action: to win an action, to lose an action, to change an action, requires the actor and his partner to be the growing size of the idea. Which means, never “know” how you’re going to do an action in advance. Just arrange it and then do it.
Anything physical that you do on stage must be second nature. It is simply a matter of physical control. The aim of mastering all physical controls is to theatricalize the actor. You can act a lisp, a limp—anything. You just have to work scientifically on where the control lies, which is what we will do next.
Natasha in Three Sisters can move a lot. In the lower middle class she belongs to, they do that. They move that way. But in the sisters’ class, Chekhov says, beauty is in two movements—not four or five. Their sense of aesthetics is in two movements. You make too many movements on the stage. Because you are comfortable, you make any movements you want. But I am telling you, this class does not. Know that. Don’t do too much. Just do what is needed to give the physical control its truth.
Anything physical must be practiced until it is so second nature that you can forget about it. All movements, gestures, expressions, dialects—every physical control—must be down completely before you can act.
Start with your own face.
Study it. Know its structure and what can be done with it. Memorize its every detail. Your greatest value is in self-realization, not imitation. What are your assets? Your faults? Don’t underestimate the assets.
Then go to movement—falls, wrestling, physical pushings and stumblings. But start with the thing you need and use most on stage: walking. Notice and place the many different walks in life—just their physical controls, without character.
Throw away your own walk and learn three new ones. Find what you need. Choose the most difficult ones. Live with them and make them your own. Walk with them—three different ways—in a room, on the street, and then on a frozen pond. Locate where the ice is solid, where it is thin.
Practice various national salutes and social protocols: Nazi arm raising and heel clicking, Communist proletarian greetings, handshakes with dignitaries, men’s bows and women’s curtsies to royalty, Oriental obeisances.
Go next from the body to the physical controls of speech. Buy a book or a set of tapes on dialects. Come up with a whole range of accents. Locate the most difficult examples you can find of the French r versus the German r. For dialects and physical disabilities—WATCH, LISTEN, AND OBSERVE. Go to life for the various speech patterns. Only take things that can be controlled. Be able to improvise on a subject or read an essay with a lisp. When you steal accents, steal what you need!
Practice saying the alphabet with a lisp. Choose the most difficult words to practice with a lisp: “necessarily,” “starlight,” “Mississippi,” “sister,” “strange,” “Stella,” “stupendous,” “stupid” … When you add a lisp to a speech or an essay, add it to the idea—don’t feature it. Try out your lisp or dialect when ordering your groceries or going to a bookstore.
Go to the zoo and listen to the animal sounds. Choose certain ones. Find the whole thing about them, but mostly the sound. It’s not enough to be free when you do it—you must be unashamed. Wear tights and bring in the sounds you’ve really heard. Do the animal sound you hear from the animal; don’t imitate yourself.
Realism’s prose style deals with middle-class problems—the toughness of life in unembroidered, realistic circumstances. Artificiality had to be cut out. To put over an idea in realism, speech and place must go together. The place—the room—must be known and used by the actor.
You never act in space. You act in a place. Where are you in your scene? Always know and think of this before stepping on stage. Understand and remember the difference between being in a library, a bedroom, a restaurant, and a garden. What do people do in these different places? You must not be dependent on the director to tell you. You must be intimately in contact. You must live in the room of the play, not play on a set. The use of every section of the stage and set must be clear to you. What you do, you do differently depending on where you are.
Perform the act of washing out a pair of socks in a hotel bathroom and at a pond. Add your imagination and personal life. The life of the object on the stage is put there by you.
Perform the act of washing your hands in ten different places. Let the action filter through your imagination and location. It is more interesting if you make some selections based on that instead of just focusing on the cold fact or act itself.
The fact itself is dead material; finished. The actor must contribute life to it—different kinds of life, depending on the place, the characters, and the objects: a wife waits to have her cigarette lit; a career girl whips out her own matches.
If the room has a table, be completely familiar with that table and every object around that cognac bottle. The actor must live utterly in the room for the style of realism. If there is a window, how does it open and what does it open onto? If there is a cupboard or a bureau, what’s in it?
You must know everything pertaining to a room, even if you do not use it all, during the first stage of rehearsal. Understand and be familiar with every object in the room. The life of the objects around you is half the battle in realism. If you use a prop, you are responsible for having the knowledge of the place in which you use it. The stage will take the life out of the props if they—and the world you are in—are not filtered through your imagination.
“Know your world like you know your underwear,” Stanislavsky said. Live with your props as your wordless partners in the circumstances. If you can’t see the organic circumstances, don’t act. If you can, use them through your imagination to put life into the objects you use.
Bring four or five unusual objects—maybe a sword, a snuff box, a pipe, a cane, a watch, a piece of linoleum, an antique chair—and work on very precise actions with them: fixing the watch, cutting the linoleum, painting the chair.… Each time you do the action, REALLY DO IT. Personalize it. Become intimate with everything needed to bring life to the fact of painting the chair or handling the sword. Think about its complete history. Where does one put a cane when one enters a room? How does one approach a watch that needs to be repaired?
Know the object instead of just handling it. There must be for you the humanity of what you handle. The reality of the props will feed you. Don’t use a folding fan just for “something to do” with your hands. Use it for all its purposes—to shoo mosquitoes away, to put off odors, to cool off. Don’t go to bed in a prop bed. Go to bed in the bed your character actually sleeps in. In realism, you don’t have big orations or poetry. All you have is humanity.
You don’t have to be a genius to see that the same thing applies to costumes. How are you dressed and groomed in your scene? Know this and be this and think of this when you come on.
If an element of your costume is a high hat, know the life and the place of that hat. Know the background of the hat or cane—how that fashion came into being. Play and live with it until the life of the hat or cane sinks into you.
A costume will not help you unless your body fits into it. Know what your body requires for it. EXPERIENCE IT! Select what awakens you! Choose the costume element that gives you what you need. If you cannot handle a certain element, don’t take it. Know when the costume was worn and what it needs from you, the actor, in your body line. Let the costume affect you. Question what it does for you as an actor. Find out how to live with trains, long skirts, lace cuffs, in drinking and dancing for each period. If you’re in Venice, use the Venetian lanterns and streets to help you make use of the costume. Find out how one stands on the Rialto. When the choice of costume and period is made, use the life around the period—the furniture, the jewels. Treat them with the attitude that they need and deserve.
Learn how to handle different kinds and conditions of SHOES. See and describe those bashmaki—Russian peasant boots the servants wear—and Japanese wedding slippers, men’s and women’s both. Don’t be totally historical. Once you know them, re-create them imaginatively.
Practice “sense memory” with different shoe problems—e.g., shoes with gum or dog excrement on the bottom. Let those sensations stimulate you.
Take out your old family photo albums and closely examine the differences in how people dressed and were photographed in the 1920s versus the 1940s. Let the pictures help you detect the change in morals and manners. Be specific about those changes. Don’t be general. See from the clothes that as the taboos broke down, the attitude between the sexes changed and new conflicts came about: women moved into areas of life that had been closed to them and became a threat to men socially and professionally. Women’s dress went from a more modest to a more naked mode; the old symbols of femininity changed. See that the need was not just to be more comfortable but to observe or to break certain traditions. See that many of those traditions and social habits still remain unsettled, unresolved today. Bring in a couple of such costume elements that make the actor feel tough. Also a couple of elements which make one feel meek. How would you use and interpret them? How would you behave in them?
A crown makes an actor keep his head erect. Keep the experience of that feeling even after the crown is put aside. Sense what the costume does for you and keep the experience. The long skirt helps to discipline the body. One walks, sits, and moves with more grace. The costume must go into the actor.
From the Greeks to Shakespeare to Chekhov’s time, and until very recently, props and costumes were not commercially produced but made by hand with special skill. If your character wears a monocle or pince-nez, it is not “for effect.” Glasses were not supposed to give the external convention. Avoid the result. Use the prop with its nature—find that nature, then motivate. Get the nature of handling one prop or costume element completely, and then you can do it with another. Practice some action in a costume element or with a prop without demonstrating. Get used to USING the prop or costume, not demonstrating it.
This is essential in every play, especially in a realistic play. But nowhere is it more essential than in Chekhov.
When you say “Chekhov,” you know you are in a certain mood of extreme tension and extreme nontension. The abolition of serfdom, the liberation of politics—these are the immediate aims of the time. The more distant aims are happiness, God, life beyond the grave. Realists paint life as it is. That is done particularly well by the Russians, from Tolstoy to Gorky. But when Chekhov comes along, in addition to seeing life as it is, you are captivated with life as it should be.
Chekhov said to his editor, “Tell me in all conscience, which of my contemporaries have given the world a single drop of this flame, this alcohol, which makes you aim high?” He says the playwrights of his day are lemonade, including himself. He says science and technology are developing at a fast pace but the arts are flabby, sour, and dull. The cause of the flabbiness is not to be found in our stupidity or lack of talent or in our silence. He says we are not stupid. He says it’s a disease which, for the artist, is worse than syphilis. We lack something which is true. We have nothing in mind; we are not going anywhere. When we lift the skirt of our muse, we discover there is nothing underneath. We lack inspiration.
This is the main source of the problem with Chekhov’s characters and their interrelationships.
How do you know that a couple in a restaurant are husband and wife? They eat, but they don’t talk to each other. You have to understand that relationships have nothing to do with what people say or don’t say—and, thus, that you must establish the relationship before you attack the words. You must ask: “Who am I in relation to the Doctor? In relation to my younger sister?” Understand that their relationship is complex. Don’t make the relationships simple or empty. Every relationship has everybody else in it.
In Seagull, Stanislavsky gives Arkadina tea and cake. Know what to do with them to help reveal the relationships. Arkadina would certainly give Dr. Dorn the bad part of the cake. If she gave him the best piece by mistake, she would take it back from him and eat it herself. It would tell you something.
Use it for that. Use everything. I would play with the food and be very coquettish. How do Russians drink tea? It is an absolute symphony of noise. You have to make noise because you drink it when it’s boiling hot. The Russians slurp—you are supposed to, and it’s fun. Great during somebody else’s speech. It’s not impolite. Play with it while the other people are talking.
Arkadina gets up, brushes off the crumbs, waltzes in a big circle to show off her figure in front of Masha. Dorn watches her and knows she shouldn’t do this in front of somebody who is devastated. Dorn sees this as she dances—this fight for life, this splendid vulgarity, and can’t help loving her for it. Arkadina takes an apple, throws it to Dorn—it is not what you think. What is it?
All this is better and more useful than just waiting for your turn to talk. You have to make it interesting.
Russians have the ability to gather into a community of family which is compatible with one another. In the large sense of this, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Gorky were friends. They traveled together. They had a need to relate and identify with people like themselves. Tolstoy went to Gorky and Gorky went to Chekhov and Chekhov went to Tolstoy. They were a family of trying to understand each other. Small units of people find and gravitate to each other. I say to a poet, “Would you like to come over and bring somebody?” He brings four poets. In The Seagull, everybody exists in community terms of the theater. The three sisters exist in terms of mutual spiritual necessity. They are together looking for a way to live their lives in their isolation.
You find in each Chekhov play a community that is isolated from the larger community, which intensifies a need in the Russian soul to express itself within the family life. They all complement each other in some way.
I read that there are one hundred Russian immigrants arriving in the United States daily now, and that they can’t understand the unfriendliness of the Americans. They are so used to being part of a group. They know how to live together. They say, “I want to love you.” It is all love. The men in Russia hold each other and kiss each other. That “Shake hands like a man!” business doesn’t exist for them. You express yourself soulfully by giving yourself away. It’s so alien to us, unfortunately, except in the theater. Theater people are the most demonstrative here—all my students kiss me and hold each other. Once in a while we get somebody from Bryn Mawr, and it takes her about six months longer than anybody else. She gets there very slowly, but she gets there. But outside of artists, that thing doesn’t really exist in the American soul.
The Russian soul is different. The Russians don’t attach great importance to success or professions or institutions. They get bored very quickly with all that. They understand that those things don’t give your soul or inner needs any answers. Science and philosophy don’t give you the answers because they all have a method that goes from A to B to C and they think that makes it right. If you go to law school, they tell you one answer; if you study architecture, they tell you another. Chekhov realized that each human soul, each person inside, wanted an answer of his own that he couldn’t be “told.”
Where are you going to find it?
Nobody in Chekhov speaks of religion; that solace is not there. Nobody in the plays says, “I’m a nihilist,” or “Nietzsche has the answer.” If you do that, people leave the room. What they don’t leave is the lonely desperation of someone saying, “What happened to me? I wanted to go to Moscow.” You remain with your own loneliness, trying to express what is godly in you and in what we call civilization.
The elegance of the Russian spirit is without a sense of money and possessions. Money is rarely talked about. There is no conversation in America which doesn’t end with “How much is it?” Chekhov’s characters are not blessed with the ability of tying up the economic or practical loose ends. What they want is not tangible, and neither is God. They go to their particular spiritual source. In every play, their individual soul leads them somewhere.
Masha’s last speech in Three Sisters, when she knows there is no answer, is that she sees the cranes flying to freedom. This need to free the soul is in the Russian spirit. They all have it—Tolstoy has it, Turgenev has it. Nobody else has it like the Russians. Nobody else writes about the desperation of living but with the hope of the soul giving birth or rebirth to itself in some higher form. Chekhov says these are limited people who find one another and express man’s universal need when God deserts him and he is left to solve his own problems.
In every character, the personal truth that comes through is different. Each person is not a stage character who promotes action. He simply needs to live truthfully.
Chekhov deals with the souls of the people in the play. He dealt with his own soul as a doctor, too. He served medicine without love, and he understood what that did to him: it killed his feeling for everything. To do without love is to kill yourself. But, knowing that, he still says it is better to knock your head against the wall than to say, “Science has the answer,” or “Just take six lessons with Madame Lasagna and she’ll give you exactly what you need.” When the answers aren’t there that way, the other way of doing it is to submit. That is what his doctors do in each play. They submit, even when they are screaming at you. It’s tribal, isn’t it? Chekhov says it is so big, so atavistic for man to scream out, and he has always done so. Man still has in him this sense of “Leave me out of it—I must go someplace which will be there throughout the ages.”
Andrei protests and then he says, “You know, I’m dead. This is the truth of my life.” It is good for you to learn to give away the inside. It’s hard to give that away, but don’t, for God’s sake, hold on to it or think it’s not “masculine” or any other stupid thing. Don’t do that. Big actors understand that maybe you have to practice it in life a little bit before you can do it. At the moment, I’m working with an actor—an angel of a man, but when he goes on stage, he doesn’t know how to confess. He doesn’t know how to say, “Look at me, I’m naked.” Do it. It is possible for you to achieve this openness.
It is only Chekhov who allows the situation not to progress. Everybody talks and nothing happens. Another playwright says, this happens, and then after that somebody comes in and something else happens, and then.… But Chekhov wants nothing to happen. If you understand that lack of logic, it will save you on the stage. It will give you an inner life that is not dependent on the text. Most playwrights after Chekhov don’t want you to depend on the text. If you just talk Chekhov—if you take the line without adding what’s underneath—it is terrible.
Harold Clurman said that when people drink, they have no nationality—they’re all the same. You can see by the way Masha pours drinks in The Seagull that she is an expert at it. She drinks like a real man. It’s like Sorin’s assumed gaiety in the same scene—people in deep tragedy. I say, you have to be born with a broken heart for the theater—you can’t get it, it has to be there. If suicide is there, they can take a drink and laugh.
The scene is complicated. The lack of logic. In life, you can be sitting with somebody in the drugstore having a Coke and you say, “Listen, I tried to kill myself this morning,” and the other guy is having a double pistachio ice cream and says, “Yeah, can I give you a cigarette?” You don’t have to connect, you can swim over it. The need to talk comes from a depth which says, “I have to express this.” It doesn’t have to make sense. Play the scene without the lines.
Chekhov created a form of play which is minimal in statement and which, for the first time in history, really belongs to the actor. If you are playing Masha—in Seagull or Three Sisters—you are not just “doing a role,” you are drawing a portrait.
The drawing of portraits is a Russian characteristic. When you go to Russian literature—to Anna Karenina and Dead Souls—people like Tolstoy and Gogol and Chekhov don’t write “stories,” they paint portraits. Every portrait became a name. A century later we say, “She’s a Masha,” or “He’s an Oblomov.” Read the plays and look for the portraits—don’t look for the dialogue.
Think of Maria Callas, for example, in our own time. When you saw or heard her in the beginning she was fat and married and wanted to be a singer. Then she didn’t want that man and became a great singer. Then you see her further and she is great, but she is losing her voice and losing the man she loves. Then you see her teaching, very quiet, and then you see her in her hotel room, sick and dying.* Chekhov lets you see characters like this in all stages. There is no finality. You go from one stage to the other. In understanding the three sisters, you must realize that four years go by. They change and go on. At the end, there are definite changes but no conclusion.
It is the technique of this particular author not to settle his characters with the kind of conviction that other authors have. Ibsen has a type of conviction. Strindberg has a conviction about man, woman, and fate. But not Chekhov.
Chekhov says each man evolves in his own way. His characters are part of a big thing—the evolution is seen through his tiny microscopic characters. They are little people, but that is what gives their story its greatness.
Masha says, “I can’t remember what my mother looked like. Isn’t that funny, I really can’t. I suppose when I die, people won’t remember me, either.…” That is the beginning of evolution. I went to school and, my God, I got a bad mark and it was just terrible, but when you think about it you realize it was terrible then but now it isn’t important at all. Think about your own past in that sense of traveling time. It’s good to understand not only the play but ourselves. We see that what was serious one year is not serious the next. That is our evolution.
The difference between Ibsen and Chekhov is that Ibsen’s doctor in Enemy of the People says, “I practice medicine and I know what I’m doing,” whereas Chekhov’s doctor in Three Sisters does not. Chekhov’s doctors understand what is wrong but never do anything. Chekhov’s sense of social responsibility is not doable, it is only talkable. Dr. Dorn in The Seagull is always singing. What is it that makes him sing? It is his secret. You don’t have a career unless you have a secret on the stage. There must be a lot of secrets. I don’t want to tell you why Dr. Dorn sings, because I have to keep it for me. Get it for yourself.
Vershinin says, “Don’t look for happiness for yourself. You won’t find it.” Tuzenbakh says, “I’m happy.” Vershinin says, “No, you’re not.” He says this in front of Masha, whom he loves deeply. Masha laughs. Why? You will never know. That is her secret. You will never know what she hears in this that makes her laugh. That gets the audience interested. He asks, “Why are you laughing?” She says, “I don’t know, I’ve been laughing all day.” It’s Masha’s secret and the secret of the actress who plays her. For me to tell it to you would be almost sacrilege.
There are certain things you never tell. Stella’s Rules: Never tell anyone how you feel. Never tell anyone about your health. Never tell anybody how you got here. Never tell anybody how enthusiastic you are about something you saw that they didn’t see. It is the height of vulgarity and stupidity.
In Chekhov, you cannot act as you have ever acted before. You are in a very special moment in theater where a man named Chekhov and a man named Stanislavsky got together to create an absolutely new way of acting the truth in the individual.
Stanislavsky was the genius who made it possible to perform the plays of another genius who didn’t write anything except what the actor had to bring out. If you don’t have an actor in Chekhov, you have nothing. Everybody can do Shaw. Shaw’s ideas are answerable. Chekhov’s are not. That is why they required a new kind of acting.
The Chekhov idea comes from a character who says, “I am lost. How did it happen? What is the answer?” In the Russian culture, this dilemma produced a number of writers and a style deeply involved in the need to express the human problem. Somebody says, “Study Indian philosophy, that will give you an answer,” or “The Bible has the answer.” Everybody is ready to fill the gap. But Chekhov makes it quite clear that the people who have answers are not right—they are just spouting general concepts and formulas. Everybody in The Seagull needs to answer something in their lives, but there is no formula. The one person who has a formula—Trigorin—is the most miserable person there.
Chekhov knows science and concepts and formulas, but he says, “They don’t help me, I’m lost. Who am I going to ask for an answer to my soul?” There is no one. That is why, in Chekhov, the experiential need comes first. That is why you have, for the first time in theater history, the inner technique—which corresponds to the need to understand.
The Russian writers were intellectuals and they understood the scientific age. But they gave it up. The Russians were the only ones who weren’t so intrigued by it. Americans are so intrigued with it—with the formulas, the patterns. The Russians said, “I know what it is—you can have it.” Chekhov understood; he was a doctor. He was interested in science but he said it had worn him out and created a morgue in him. It did not in any way save him. He is the only playwright who has no voice in his own plays. He is just a listener.
You rarely hear in a Chekhov play any reference to the outside world. They don’t need the outside. Like I don’t need The New York Times, thank God. It was a prayer answered from heaven when I gave up The New York Times. It was just reading in a void, not getting to know anything. God looked down and said, “Stella—” sometimes he calls me Stella—“get rid of it!” It is not writing that can really be read. It is good for people who have no inner need for Dostoyevsky or Mozart or for coming to this class. But who wants to read The New York Times if you can read Chekhov or come here?
Chekhov is able in one sentence to convey the most shattering experience—the suffering of having lost yourself without it being your fault. He can do it sometimes in four words—“Help me, save me!” Tennessee learned that from him. What does Blanche DuBois say in the last act? She says, “Fire, fire!” She is reaching out in a very Chekhovian way—“Save me!” Do you see that if you understand Chekhov, you’ll understand Blanche and Tennessee Williams, too?
In movies and television when you are jumping on a horse or into a spaceship to kill fourteen people, it’s exciting, but it means you don’t have to solve the problem of how to live. All you have to solve is how to kill the enemy.
The tendency in most people is to locate the enemy. Take Mrs. Jean Harris, again. Dr. Tarnower abandoned her and left her alone with no way of recovering her charm, her youth. Her sense of loving, her sense of being—it was all over. He didn’t love her. Happens all the time. Nobody loves anybody in Chekhov. So Mrs. Harris reached out for some equivalent of the scream. She said, “He’s the guilty one!” and got a gun. If life doesn’t give you what you want, you can shoot the guy, but it’s useless. It doesn’t resolve her problem. Actually, I think she should have shot him. It’s all right. But she still has to face what she is.
In Chekhov, they either shoot themselves or—like Uncle Vanya—when they locate the enemy, they shoot twice but miss him. All of us would like to shoot the person who is guilty. It is Chekhov’s way of saying, “He’s not guilty—life is guilty.”
Chekhov says, finally you must accept your loneliness.
Stanislavsky says, “It is not what is transmitted by the words but what is underneath them.” It can’t be done in TV because there’s nothing underneath and nothing to transmit. The nature of TV is action, period.
The nature of theater is a mixture of action and nonaction. In The Glass Menagerie, there is a girl who has no action in the whole play. Laura sits; she is lame. She is like a character from Chekhov. What dominates is her passivity. You get in her passive state of living that it is not life, it is just passing through. In Strindberg the father says “I want the child!” and there is a big fight and the mother wins and the father dies. You don’t get that kind of playwriting from Chekhov.
All three of the sisters lose. They lose the hope of achieving their deepest desires. But in exchange they have gained real insight into the human condition. Insight is not granted to happy people. Through suffering, the sisters learn that work—not happiness—is the human destiny. They are stranded. The people are stranded in Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull, too. Chekhov characters are not happy at the beginning or at the end.
Chekhov shows you that it is not important to be happy but to understand. Through the futile quest for happiness you gain insight into how to live. It is not gained by being happy. You don’t need so much happiness. What you need is the penetration that gives you a sense of truth to endure the blows. Was it worth it? Yes. I understand life better, and I am stronger now.
Three Sisters is Chekhov’s masterpiece because it best reveals the shifting nature of life. Our lives are transitory. That transitory quality, when you catch it, is tremendously moving—people caught in the sadness and beauty of the passing moment. What Chekhov caught was the poetry of life, constantly changing like a summer cloud—now this shape, now another one. It is poetic realism. After Chekhov, you could have Yeats and de Maupassant and eventually Pinter—a whole new literature. We like Pinter because he’s so abstract. When he says nothing, I know exactly what it means because he doesn’t tell me what it means. He is a child of Chekhov.
Stanislavsky thought he understood literature, but he didn’t understand Chekhov at first. Chekhov presented him with a problem of creation in the void. It was a terrible problem for modern theater. Stanislavsky had to create a way of acting for a man to say, “I’ve been here for thirty-five years and I don’t understand what happened to me. What happened? Why did it all happen?”
Creation in the void is all man has left, nothing else. Time goes on, and the only thing left of Athens is the idea of beauty and ruins of the Parthenon. Finally, that’s about all that remains of every culture—all that man can rescue from the void. Understand that it is there to keep you from dying out. Most people do die out. One senses in Chekhov one’s personal death—the dying out in oneself of that thing in a human being which needs to be in itself a god. This sense of death is in his characters. The three sisters’ struggle against it is a cry in the night. Chekhov is not the poet of hope, really. He is really the poet of death.
Only your own deep need to salvage something from the void—to act or to write or to create, not to have a “profession”—can keep you from the commonplace and from dying out. But you must have a deep recognition of your solitude to live the way you should live, not the way it is agreed upon, and not to fall for this big thing around you.
Being in the theater means learning about yourself. You have to dump the insignificant and enrich yourself with its truths. When Vershinin goes off with the army, he’ll be lonely but he’ll have his work. He has a real dedication to those boys. But Masha goes off with Kuligin into nothingness, into an endless compromise without poetry. You must understand the difference between the suffering of this man and this woman. Her talent is killed because she has no courage and sees no way out.
Be careful what happens to your talent. Sometimes a student of mine goes away and gets married, lives in Scarsdale, has the kids—one day comes back and says, “Hello, Stella,” with that sad, dead look in her eyes. I wait … try to think of something to say.…
Listen to that voice inside that helps you. Be very careful. Don’t let the source get dried up. It happens all the time in Hollywood, because the source of talent is not nourished by the way the product is made—it dries up the ability to run the character through in your mind. I did a film once with Sam Wanamaker, and he was absolutely lost about where to go or how to come into the scene. It is hard to start a scene when you are dead and you don’t know how you died.
It wears out that creative talent. Do it, but be careful that you don’t take their way but you put in your way of working. That means a great deal of discipline. Like Marlon—“You want me? I’ll do what I want.” That is agreed from the beginning.
I have a recording of Orson Welles doing a commercial. This brilliant man—doing a commercial—says, “in the planes …” Two producers say, “No, it’s ‘IN the planes.’ ” Orson says, “There isn’t a sentence in the English language that can start with the stress on ‘IN the planes.’ ” He tries to explain this to them. They say, “But, Mr. Welles, you’ve done such great things, couldn’t you just do it our way?” Finally he says, “Tell me, in the depths of your ignorance, what do you want?” He was worn out. If you have talent, this wearing-down by life gets to you and hurts you.
Guard against it. Fight it your whole life.
I’ll tell you something else: you can’t give anybody anything that is not already in them. All you can do is awaken it.
*Adler’s passage on Callas here anticipates and predates Terrence McNally’s Master Class by twenty years.