“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.
—Hamlet’s advice to the players
Okay, what’s the Method—and why should anybody give a rat’s ass about it?
A fair question. I hope what follows is a fair answer.
First, of course, I admit to a bias that is, I suspect, obvious. I’m a vice president of the Actors Studio, was the founder of the Actors Studio Drama School and served for ten years as its dean, so I would hardly be filling these pages with encomia to Coquelin or Delsarte. Coquelin was a highly regarded figure in nineteenth-century French theater, who, in his book L’ Art et le comédien (“The Art and the Actor”), argued strenuously and influentially for simulated rather than real emotions. I once heard Norman Mailer wryly describe a “Coquelin actor” as having the advantage that he or she could plan a postperformance dinner, down to the wines, dessert and seating plan, while emoting onstage in the third act.
François Delsarte was a nineteenth-century French teacher of acting and singing who published a classic of theatrical flummery in which photographs presented the gestures, like the back of an open hand to one’s forehead, that would precisely illustrate and evoke feeling, each photo meticulously labeled with the emotion it represented. Memorize these gestures, Delsarte promised, and you’re an actor.
Coquelin’s representational approach to acting, with minor variations, was the only formal technique in western theater. There weren’t conflicting views: It was the established church, and for centuries it didn’t occur to anyone to challenge it. One cultivated a stentorian voice, with round vowels and pinprick-sharp consonants, and a fine figure (male or female) that could be adorned like a dressmaker’s mannequin. One posed in front of a mirror, then in front of the audience. One mimicked, one declaimed, one displayed. Above all, one impressed. A theatrical effect, once achieved, was repeated precisely, by rote, to the tiniest gesture, at every performance ad infinitum, with the result that the most successful actors wound up mimicking themselves—to torrents of applause when the familiar, anticipated moments arrived.
In Coquelin’s world, acting had nothing to do with life; it had everything to do with “acting”—an exercise that was altogether self-conscious, self-involved, self-referential and, in the worst cases, self-reverential.
Amour propre was the actor’s stock-in-trade—and the audience accepted it; in fact clamored for it, because, like any audience at any time, including our own, of course, it battened on what it was fed. And, truth be told, some of the proponents of this artificial style did it very skillfully, and could move an audience to tears or laughter as deftly as their modern counterparts.
The problem with that kind of performance was that it could go only so far before it ran into its self-imposed barriers. Simulated tears, complete with formulaic gestures (vide Delsarte), facial expressions and boo-hoo noises were safer than real ones because they didn’t constrict the throat and choke the golden voice or, God forbid, smear the makeup, but the gap between “artifice” and “artificial” was perilously narrow, and often erased.
The schism between the dominant school of acting and its rare antithesis was limned definitively by George Bernard Shaw in a theater review I offer as evidence that, before he was a transcendent playwright writing his first play, Candida, at the age of forty, he was a transcendent critic of music in the Star and the World, under the pen name Corno di Bassetto, and a greatly feared—and respected—theater critic under the blunt byline GBS. On June 15, 1895, Shaw seized the opportunity to compare the two reigning actresses of the time, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse, who, as good fortune would have it, were appearing simultaneously on the London stage, in the same role.
This week began with the relapse of Sarah Bernhardt into her old profession of serious actress. She played Magda in Sudermann’s Heimat, and was promptly challenged by Duse in the same part at Drury Lane on Wednesday. The contrast between the two Magdas is as extreme as any contrast could possibly be between artists who have finished their twenty years’ apprenticeship to the same profession under closely similar conditions…. [Shaw speaks of] the childishly egotistical character of [Bernhardt’s] acting, which is not the art of making you think more highly or feel more deeply, but the art of making you admire her, pity her, champion her, weep with her, laugh at her jokes, follow her fortunes breathlessly, and applaud her—wildly when the curtain falls. It is the art of finding out all your weaknesses and practicing on them—cajoling you, harrowing you, exciting you—on the whole, fooling you. And it is always Sarah Bernhardt in her own capacity who does this to you. The dress, the title of the play, the order of the words may vary; but the woman is always the same. She does not enter into the leading character: she substitutes herself for it.
All this is precisely what does not happen in the case of Duse, whose every part is a separate creation. When she comes on the stage, you are quite welcome to take your opera-glass and count whatever lines time and care have so far traced on her. They are the credentials of her humanity; and she knows better than to obliterate that significant handwriting beneath a layer of peachbloom from the chemist’s…. I grant that Sarah’s elaborate Monna [sic] Lisa smile, with the conscious droop of the eyelashes and the long carmined lips coyly disclosing the brilliant row of teeth, is effective of its kind…. And it lasts quite a minute, sometimes longer. But Duse, with a tremor of the lip which you feel rather than see, and which lasts half an instant, touches you straight on the very heart; and there is not a line in the face, or a cold tone in the grey shadow, that does not give poignancy to that tremor.
…. Obvious as the disparity of the two famous artists has been to many of us since we first saw Duse, I doubt whether any of us realized, after Madame Bernhardt’s very clever performance as Magda on Monday night, that there was room in the nature of things for its annihilation within forty-eight hours by so comparatively quiet a talent as Duse’s. And yet annihilation is the only word for it.
…. Before long, there came a stroke of acting which will probably never be forgotten by those who saw it, and which explained at once why those artifices of the dressing-table which help Madame Bernhardt would hinder Duse almost as much as a screen placed in front of her.
Shaw explains that, after being turned out of her home by her father, Magda has achieved fame as an opera singer, been seduced and abandoned, and returned home, where she discovers that the father of her child, who is a friend of her family, has come to call on her. Shaw continues:
It must be admitted that Sarah Bernhardt played this scene very lightly and pleasantly…. Not so with Duse. The moment she read the card handed her by the servant, you realized what it was to have to face a meeting with the man. It was interesting to watch how she got through it when he came in, and how, on the whole, she got through it pretty well. He paid his compliments and offered his flowers; they sat down, and she evidently felt that she had got it safely over and might allow herself to think at her ease, and to look at him to see how much he had altered. Then a terrible thing happened to her. She began to blush; and in another moment she was conscious of it, and the blush was slowly spreading and deepening until, after a few vain efforts to avert her face or to obstruct his view of it without seeming to do so, she gave up and hid the blush in her hands.
…. After that feat of acting I did not need to be told why Duse does not paint an inch thick. I could detect no trick in it: it seemed to me a perfectly genuine effect of the dramatic imagination.
I shall make no attempt to describe the rest of that unforgettable act…. There was a real play, and an actress who understood the author and was a greater artist than he. And for me, at least, there was a confirmation of my sometimes flagging faith that a dramatic critic is really the servant of a high art, and not a mere advertiser of entertainments of questionable respectability of motive.
Perhaps no critic has ever shown a more profound understanding of the actor’s craft than Shaw did in this piece, in which he captured forever the contrast—and conflict—between the two disparate schools of acting.
While Shaw was learning from Duse, half a continent away, in Russia, a theater director was undergoing the same transformation—inspired by the same isolated group of dissidents.
For Constantin Stanislavski, the revelation was provided by the renowned Italian actor Tommaso Salvini, whom Stanislavski saw in a touring production of Othello in 1882, when Stanislavski was nineteen. As Duse’s uncompromising honesty and authentic emotion would fling a door open for Shaw thirteen years later, Salvini’s ability to fill Shakespeare’s most volcanic moments not with bombast and pretension but with the genuine dynamics of human experience opened the young aspirant’s eyes to possibilities he couldn’t have imagined. When he wrote about it, he described it as “burning lava…. pouring into my heart.”
Both Salvini and Duse were anomalous artists, as rare and incongruous as an orchid in a cabbage patch. Their towering talents broke through the accepted orthodoxy: Bernhardt’s beautifully—fastidiously—crafted artifice and studiously counterfeit emotions were the norm. And it was against that norm that Stanislavski, like Shaw, rebelled. And for precisely the same reason.
On June 22, 1897, Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, a critic and playwright who was, it turned out, as repelled as Stanislavski by the prevailing elocutionary, presentational acting style, met for lunch in a private chamber off the bustling main dining room of the Slavianski Bazar to share what they discovered was a passionate desire for a new kind of theater that would break with the fustian clichés and conventions of the past. Their fervid discussion ended at eight the next morning over breakfast. Out of those eighteen hours emerged the Moscow Art Theatre—and a revolution that would shake the theatrical world, and one day shape the world of film.
Production by production, rehearsal by rehearsal, virtually hour by hour, Stanislavski worked with his company to find empirical (one of his favorite words was logical) answers to the questions that were (literally) tormenting him—and the company. At a rehearsal of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, Stanislavski’s attempts to apply his evolving techniques so unsettled Olga Knipper, one of the Art Theatre’s leading actresses, that she burst into tears and fled the theater. The next day, Stanislavski sent her flowers and a letter that is quoted in Jean Benedetti’s invaluable biography of Stanislavski: “At every point in the role, look for some desire which concerns you and you alone and banish all other vulgar desires concerning the audience. You will quickly find this inward work will carry you away. Once that has happened you will turn from something which is unworthy of true artists, the desire to serve and ingratiate oneself with the audience. In the same measure that you are not logical in that instance, you will become logical by being carried away by genuine feelings.”
Clearly, a system was beginning to take shape. The “desire” Stanislavski commends to Knipper is unmistakably the Objective: what the character wants, translated to an Action, “which concerns you and you alone.” But just as clearly, to Stanislavski, the resistance of the company’s more established, and more inflexible, actors would impede its development, so he gathered about him the younger members of the company who were more open to experimentation and new ideas, and created what he described as not a school but a studio—which would become known as the First Studio of the Art Theatre—devoted to experimentation and research in the actor’s craft, separated from it geographically but not ideologically. (Prophetically, the studio occupied a few rooms over a movie theater—in 1912!) The fifty members of the young company—they included Richard Boleslavsky, Evgeny Vakhtangov and Michael Chekhov, who would become major theatrical forces—were working members of the Art Theatre at night, but in the daytime they belonged to Stanislavski, and it was on this canvas that he painted his System.
Stanislavski spoke repeatedly of his ambition to create a “grammar of acting,” an idea seized upon and celebrated by Stella Adler half a century later when she said to her students, of whom I was one, “What happens when a housewife in Brooklyn goes to the butcher shop? She tells the butcher she wants sirloin, and he gives her sirloin. Not tenderloin, not filet mignon. Sirloin. And if she wants lamb chops—she gets lamb chops. Not pork chops, not veal chops. Lamb chops. Why? Because she and the butcher speak a common language!” She would pause for effect—Stella often paused for effect—then demand, “Why should you and I—and every other actor—not be able to communicate with each other at least as clearly, simply and specifically as the lady and her butcher?” And every one of us asked himself—and I still do—why not?
Stella Adler was a dedicated advocate of Stanislavski’s concept of Given Circumstances. In our classroom, Stella was insistent: “Darlings [another Stella-ism], what happens when a bad actor is in trouble onstage? Nothing feels right. He knows he’s losing his grip on the part. All he can hear is every cough and murmur in the audience. What does he do? He reaches for the biggest thing he can think of! He tries to gobble the whole part in one big desperate bite, hoping that will put him back on track. It won’t! Listen to me, darlings, if you’re in trouble, concentrate—concentrate on the smallest thing you can focus on. That vase on the table—is that a crack? Your partner’s necktie—is that a spot? Something that you know is true. And real. It’s yours, and once you own it, you can go on to the next small, manageable truth, and the next. The whole role is nothing but a chain of tiny truths that you can believe in, one after another. In the end, they’ll lead you to a bigger truth, the truth of your character, of the play, of the playwright—the reason he wrote the play in the first place. You’re his truth teller. And because you believe, one tiny truth at a time, the audience will believe.”
But simply saying “truth” doesn’t answer inevitable questions: It asks them. Whose truth—and to what end? Truth, on its surface so simple and straightforward, is, in fact, one of the most slippery (and precious) words in our vocabulary. When someone says to me, “One thing I am is truthful,” I suspect instantly that “truthful” may be the one thing that person is definitely not. Under truth’s banner (since no one ever marches into battle under a banner emblazoned “Lie!”), some of history’s most monstrous crimes have been committed—and, of course, it has been the emblem of some of history’s most glorious moments and creative expressions.
So, when someone unfurls the banner of truth, as Stanislavski did, we have a right to ask for a definition. And the definition Stanislavski gives is specific and verifiable. Occam would approve of the economy of “The truth in art is the truth of your circumstances.”
Mike Nichols, who had studied with Lee Strasberg, emphasized this point on Inside the Actors Studio: “Look, there’s only one question. It’s differently answered in plays and movies but the question is ‘What is this really like?’ Never mind the conventions and the decisions we’ve all made together—and never mind, in fact, the script. What is it really like when this happens, when somebody seduces someone, when somebody kills someone, when somebody loses someone? What is it really like? And the only difference is that in the movie, the answers are less literal. Because ‘What is it really like?’ includes the unconscious, and includes our dreams. So, part of the answer in a movie can be from one unconscious to all the other unconsciouses.”
Very early in his development of the System, Stanislavski postulated his theory of Action—what the actor is doing to accomplish an Objective—which is what the character wants at any given moment. That word want occurs often in Stanislavski’s lexicon, and it lies at the heart of his concept of Action and Objective. Mark Rydell, codirector with Martin Landau of Actors Studio West in Los Angeles, and director of such films as On Golden Pond and The Rose, was a student of Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse, who was one of the most articulate and influential proponents of the concept of Action. On Inside the Actors Studio, this is how Rydell described it: “Meisner was very clear about what he used to call action problems. He knew about acting having to do with doing things. That is to say, you can always tell when an actor is really doing something or is imitating doing something. And if he’s really doing it, everything comes with it. All you have to do to prove it is put someone in a closet and lock the door and tell them to get out. Well, if they really try to get out, in a minute they’ll be flooded with emotion—because of the doing, and their inability to achieve their objective. You open the door and they’re shaking, or in tears.”
Rydell’s illustration demonstrated Meisner’s—and Stella Adler’s and Robert Lewis’s—contention that an emotion isn’t an Action, it’s the result of an Action. Here, emotion is reached not through an Emotional Memory exercise, discrete from text, rehearsal or performance, but entirely within the context of text, rehearsal or performance: Try to accomplish your action, Meisner would say, and the emotion will come; you never have to think about it.
From Objective, Stanislavski moved to the Super-Objective, the character’s overall objective from the first to last moment of the play (or film). In this interpretation of the System, each of the Objectives, or Beats, along the way must be a link in the unbroken chain of the Super-Objective (that causal chain again), leading logically and inexorably to the Super-Objective’s final destination, the character’s final destination in the play. If not, this construct argues, it doesn’t belong there: Either the playwright or the actor has erred, and the chain must be reconstructed.
Stella Adler used to illustrate this point with a metaphor: “You’re on an ocean liner on the high seas.” Stella enjoyed upper-class allusions and, some would say, illusions. “Bad weather is threatening, and the crew rushes to string a sturdy rope on the deck, the length of the ship. When the storm arrives and you’re losing your footing, what do you do? You reach for that rope! That’s what the Super-Objective is. In good weather, maybe you can proceed without it for a while, but the second you’re in trouble, that’s what you reach for. It’ll get you where you have to go.”
In the teens of the twentieth century, Stanislavski’s vision gradually evolved into two components, work on the self, and work on the part, which formed the basis of his first two books. In time, it became so detailed that it could be depicted by Stella Adler in 1934, after her meetings with Stanislavski, in an elaborate chart that resembled a pipe organ. Robert Lewis was so impressed with the chart that he included his hand-drawn copy of it in a foldout in his book Method or Madness. Each of the forty pipes of the “organ” bore a word or phrase: “11—Action itself; 12—Magic ‘If’; 13—Given Circumstances; 14—Beats.” At the base of the ziggurat were the words “Work on One’s Self” and, at its pinnacle, two stirring words: “The Part.”
As the Moscow Art Theatre’s fame spread, it began to tour, acquiring adherents wherever it brought its eye-opening offerings. The nearly universal absorption of the Art Theatre’s theatrical behavior and ideology in the past three quarters of a century makes it hard for us to understand how shocking those first international appearances were. The traditional, presentational theater was still firmly in place everywhere—until the Art Theatre showed up. When they packed their tents and moved on, the old ways looked, to some of the audience at least, quaint, artificial—and unacceptable.
The Moscow Art Theatre arrived in New York on January 2, 1923. Their opening night, with Tsar Fiodor at the Jolson Theatre, was described by Stanislavski, in a letter to his wife, Lilina, as the greatest success in the company’s history.
When the Art Theatre sailed from New York on May 17, it left behind the seeds of its revolution in two teachers, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, who founded the American Laboratory Theatre, where the very young, impressionable and gifted Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman and Stella Adler were imbued with a philosophy—and a passion—that would fuel the next advance in this march when they and producer Cheryl Crawford founded the Group Theatre in 1931.
The Group Theatre has been richly, sufficiently chronicled. Suffice to say here that twenty-eight actors united their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in a venture that lasted ten years and altered the American theatrical landscape forever. Many of the actors and directors who emerged from the Group have already appeared in these pages—and will reappear at upcoming milestones in this journey.
What is of consequence here is the rupture that developed in 1934 after Stella Adler’s encounter with Stanislavski in Paris. When Boleslavski inaugurated the American Laboratory Theatre in 1924, his emphasis was on the various techniques of Emotional Memory. In the next decade, Stanislavski would begin shifting to what he called Physical Action, at the expense of, and some would come to say in opposition to, Emotional Memory. But Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya taught the System the way it had been taught to them.
In Stella’s accounts, the first years of the Group Theatre were difficult for her because Lee Strasberg, who was the company’s principal teacher, was thoroughly committed to Emotional Memory, a technique she found hobbling, stopping rather than starting her process. Seeking relief, she elected to spend the summer of 1934 in Paris with Harold Clurman, who was now her husband. Discovering that Stanislavski had arrived in Paris for a seven-week stay, she flung herself on him, demanding to know, as she related it to our class in her customary understatement, “why you ruined my life!”
Stanislavski’s account describes a woman in panic, pleading for help. Stella, as anyone who ever knew her would attest, could be persuasive. In this instance, Stanislavski spent every afternoon for the next five weeks coaching her in a scene from Gentlewoman, the play directed by Lee Strasberg that had sent her, howling for rest and rehabilitation, to Paris.
It was there, during those five weeks, that Stella discovered, as she described it on her return to the United States, that Stanislavski had “abandoned” Emotional Memory, the technique that nearly deprived her of her sanity, in favor of his principles of Physical Action and Objective, which, if pursued correctly, according to Stanislavski as conveyed by Stella, would evoke (as Rydell’s actor-in-the-closet was meant to demonstrate) whatever emotions were appropriate and necessary, without resort to a direct appeal to feelings through Emotional Memory.
It is not the province of this book to try to settle this controversy, which exists, with much less heat and perhaps a bit more light, to this day. What is of interest here is the array of consequences that flowed from the disagreement.
From the moment of Stella’s return, the System raced along on two sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent tracks, one spearheaded, brilliantly and effectively, by Strasberg, the other led, with equal skill and fervor, by Adler, Meisner, Clurman, Lewis and Elia Kazan, who, more than the others, kept a foot in both camps, and today the Actors Studio and its drama school comprise a broad stream into which all the tributaries of the Stanislavski System flow freely and harmoniously.
A final question that may be hovering on the lips of the reader of these pages is “Why such a fuss? Look at all the great actors who just stood up and did it. Honestly, why study at all?”
A perfectly sensible question. One of the world’s greatest actors, Laurence Olivier, went to his grave insisting that he had no need for the Method—or any other “system.” What Lord Olivier didn’t know was that Constantin Stanislavski would have agreed with him, since he never denied the role of genius, which, by definition, intuits what the rest of us must, often laboriously, unearth. In the introduction to An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski’s American translator Elizabeth Hapgood notes that Stanislavski “is most ready to point out that a genius like Salvini or Duse [or Olivier] may use without theory the right emotions and expressions that to the less inspired but intelligent student need to be taught.”
In Building a Character, Stanislavski expanded that statement with “A true creative state while on the stage, and all the elements that go to compose it, were the natural endowment of Schepkin, Ermolova, Duse, Salvini. Nevertheless they worked unremittingly on their technique…. Inspiration came to them by natural means almost every time they repeated a role, yet all their lives they sought an approach to it. There is all the more reason why we, of more meager endowments, should seek it.”
Later in Building a Character, Stanislavski speaks of actors who “do not admit that laws, technique, theories, much less a system, have any part in their work…. The majority of them believe that any conscious factor in creativeness is only a nuisance. They find it easier to be an actor by the grace of God. I shall not deny that there are times when, for unknown reasons, they are able to have an intuitive emotional hold on their parts and they play reasonably well in a scene or even a whole performance…. But there are other occasions when for the same inexplicable and capricious reasons ‘inspiration’ does not turn up. Then the actor, who is left on the stage without any technique, without any means of drawing out his own feelings, without any knowledge of his own nature, plays not by the grace of God well, but by the grace of God poorly. And he has absolutely no way of getting back onto the right path.”
Whether the course this chapter has followed is the right one, I can’t warrant. But it is a path that has led an impassioned army of creative and performing artists to celebrated heights, some of them blessed with innate genius, some of “more meager endowments,” but all fired by a determination no less tenacious than a surgeon’s, a prima ballerina’s or a plumber’s to acquire at all costs the tools of their trades.