The method, p.2
The Method, page 2
Over the course of his career, Stanislavski inverted Diderot’s hierarchy of acting. He dismissed the symbolic style as “hackwork,” a series of clichés that one could literally learn from a textbook. The best actors, he argued, were the ones who had the greatest sensibility. Talent, to Stanislavski, was an actor’s capacity to experience. Yet at times his own talent deserted him. He faced the same problem that everyone from Polus onward had: There was no way to summon experiencing on demand. Inspiration might be the key to great acting, but how do you control something as mercurial and ineffable as inspiration?
This book tells the story of how Stanislavski and the artists who followed his teachings solved this problem. Or, depending on whom you ask, failed to solve it. It is also the story of how those teachings evolved into a set of techniques that Stanislavski dubbed “the system,” and how this “system,” in part because of the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war, traveled to the United States, where it transformed into the Method. During the course of that transformation, the Method in turn changed how Americans think about acting—first onstage during the Great Depression, then on film in the postwar era. Along the way, it ushered in a whole series of new ideas about the nature and purpose of art, about acting and writing and directing, that revolutionized American popular culture. From its very beginnings, the “system” was controversial, and was considered quite possibly dangerous. The fights over the “system” and the Method—over what Stanislavski really taught and whether it has any value—have never ended. Perhaps they never will. So this book is also the story of a century of arguments, hashed out in rehearsal halls and gossip columns, on Hollywood sets and in the chambers of Congress, about what it means to be a good actor. By moving the focus of acting away from types of people and toward specific individuals, away from externalities and toward interiority, away from representation and toward ideas of authenticity and personal truth, the Method challenged norms about not only what it meant to be a good actor but what it meant to be a human being.
By the time I encountered the Method in the mid-1990s, it had entered a period of decline from which it has not emerged. I doubt that the people teaching me would even have used the term “the Method” unless they were speaking with disdain. The Method has many definitions, but to instructors of stage acting, it refers very specifically to the techniques and values taught by Lee Strasberg, the most famous and prominent adapter of Stanislavski’s ideas in the English-speaking world. By the 1990s, many of the other Stanislavski-influenced schools thought Strasberg was a dangerous charlatan, so instead, I simply studied Principles of Realism and Character and Emotion as a teenager at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. I started taking classes there because I was a child professional actor. I had been in a couple of local musicals and plays, and Joy Zinoman, the Studio’s indomitable founder, thought I would benefit from adult-level acting instruction. She had been urging me to take acting more seriously ever since my thirteenth birthday, when she gave me a copy of Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons, the first English-language book to explain Stanislavski’s approach in detail.
In Character and Emotion, we had each been tasked with bringing in an object that held a strong emotional attachment for us. We were then to tell the class about our object and why it was important. There were two goals behind this exercise. First, the class would be able to observe how strong emotion actually worked, as opposed to the clichéd ways we indicated emotion onstage. The other purpose was to help us find potential keys to unlock our emotions so we could use them in our work. One man brought in the cane of his recently deceased father. Another, his wedding ring. He was HIV+, and his relationship with another man could not be legally recognized, so in case his health rapidly declined, they wanted to codify what they meant to each other. I brought in the obituary of a friend, a man who had worked at the Studio Theatre and died of AIDS the year before. I was seventeen. While speaking of my friend’s death, I became so overwhelmed that I sobbed, and gasped, and lost all track of how long I had been talking. Nancy, our wonderful teacher, cut the exercise short. “I can see,” she said with warm finality, “that this is a very powerful object for you.”
During the exercise I had re-experienced an extreme emotional state. If I could learn how to control it and funnel it into my work, the thinking went, it could aid me in my own search for perezhivanie. It would help me join the ranks of “good actors” stretching back to Polus and his urn. But it was never to be. A couple of years later, while working on another play in college, I retreated so deep into the recesses of my own personal darkness that I had trouble emerging. After performances, I would stare at a wall in my dorm room for hours trying to come back to normal. It got so bad that a friend of mine told me she was worried about me after watching me perform in the show. I was worried too. I hated the person I became during rehearsal as the nastiness of the character bled into my own personality, and I was not tough enough to manage the emotions my performance dug into. Since this was what I thought “real acting” demanded of me, I quit, and took up directing.
I was not the first person for whom Stanislavski’s techniques had proved dangerous, nor would I be the last. That experience left me with many questions and few answers. Questions like: What did Stanislavski really believe and teach? Did the Method destroy American acting, or usher in its golden age? How does cultural change this massive even happen in the first place?
My attempt to answer these questions led me here, to the book you’re about to read.
When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumblings toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline. Some people even claim that it is dead.
The biographical approach also created a structure through which the arc of the Method’s century-long development, emergence, and explosion to widespread prominence could be brought together in one narrative. There are many books dedicated to explaining the various post-Stanislavski methods or litigating the doctrinal schisms between various teachers. There are individual biographies of people important to the Method’s history. Many of these books are wonderful, and, as the bibliography in the back of this one makes clear, The Method would not have been possible without them. But they do not make the Method the protagonist in its own story. I wondered what would emerge if you did, particularly if you placed the Method in its broader cultural context in order to see the remarkable, transformative, chaotic, and controversial life it led. What new ways of seeing the Method and its era might emerge?
One thing that became clear was that the Method and especially Stanislavski’s “system” were perfect models for the delicate dance between individuals and their contexts that creates cultural change. Particular artists and their work move our culture forward, but they arise only because of and within a given environment, one they both respond to and transform with their art. Previous generations looked at the story of the Method as one of dueling larger-than-life geniuses. There are plenty of those in this story, and their peculiarities absolutely shaped the Method’s conception and development. But the Method’s story is also the story of its era. Acting evolves in response to technological change, and political currents, and the needs of audiences to see certain kinds of people.
Stanislavski liked to claim that he was merely observing great actors and codifying their habits into a series of exercises. Stanislavski doth protest too much, methinks. It is unlikely that the “system” or the Method would exist without him. But this is not only because he was a great artist, and a serious thinker, and a lay scholar of the actor’s art. It is also because he was independently wealthy, and because Russia in the twilight of the Romanovs hungered for a kind of truth that the State refused to provide. Stanislavski likely would never have seen the necessity of the “system” if Russia hadn’t had a far longer and more robust tradition of realist art than other nations, or if censorship hadn’t severely limited which plays could be performed, or if theaters weren’t getting smaller and more brightly lit. His vision of acting was heavily shaped by other artists of his time, and also by his Russian Orthodox faith. His way of writing about acting, and even the drive to systematize it, arose in part because he lived in an era of great scientific development. Lee Strasberg’s adaptations of those theories were in turn shaped not only by his encyclopedic knowledge of the theater but also by his difficulty relating to other people, by his being a Jewish immigrant to the United States, by the business realities of Broadway, by shifts in American art during the Great Depression, and by the emerging popularity of psychology and psychoanalytic theory.
We tend to think about the Method as some goofy hocus-pocus that actors, particularly the more self-important ones, get up to in order to do their job. Or, as someone seated across from me at a wedding once explained to his husband after he heard what my forthcoming book was about, it’s “remembering the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to you in order to make yourself cry.” But the Method is much, much more. To theorize about acting is to theorize about what a human being is and how a human being works. It is to theorize about what good art is and how good art is made. Denis Diderot, as a soldier of the Enlightenment, needed a rational model of acting to reflect his rational model of human nature. In America in the 1950s, a time of great pressure to conform, the Method showed that we were not rational, but repressed. Its model of the human was one in which roiling seas of emotion and discontent lay beneath all of our frozen, placid surfaces.
The Method is not merely an acting theory, or a reliable way to cry on cue. It is a transformative, revolutionary, modernist art movement, one of the Big Ideas of the twentieth century. Like atonality in music, or modernism in architecture, or abstraction in art, the “system” and the Method brought forth a new way of conceiving of human experience, one that changed how we look at the world, and at ourselves. We live today in the world—and with the aesthetic taste—that the Method helped usher in.
Like many of the twentieth century’s Big Ideas, there was something romantic, beautiful, compelling about the “system” and its disciples. They had cracked some code, some way of creating art that was more alive and spoke to the human condition in a more direct and urgent way. In the beginning, it was hopeful, generative, inspiring. But both the “system” and the Method could create as many problems as they solved, particularly when wielded by dogmatists who thought that there was only one right way to get to the truth.
When ideals intersect with reality, disappointment and heartache will always result. Stanislavski knew this, which is why he loved art so much, with its ability to take real-life experience and purify it, turning it into something more beautiful and more meaningful. But it is also why he could never be content with the art he made, or the theories he devised, or the way they were implemented. The Method ultimately created standards that no one could live up to, and for some of the people who believed in it, the unrelenting pressure of these standards proved impossible to bear.
But before all of that could happen, a number of unlikely events had to occur. Two men who barely knew each other had to meet and decide to create a theater together. They had to raise the money for it, and enlist actors who would be open to their approach. They had to pry scripts out of the tight grip of the tsar’s censors, and they had to produce box office hits. One of them had to weather a crisis of confidence in his own work. A revolution had to occur in politics that would drive their revolution in art across the Atlantic to the United States. All of these events, and all the ones that followed, were contingent. In many ways, the odds were against the Method’s developing at all.
So to see what the Method is, we have to go back to that beginning. We have to go to a study in the Ekaterinoslav steppes where a playwright and teacher named Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, having reached a turning point in his career, decided to write a letter, one that would divert the stream of culture in a new direction, changing the course of art in the Western world.
ACT ONE
The Kingdom of Dreams
The behind-the-scenes existence of actors is always tremulous, always tense, and everything comes together—the joy, and the tears, and the exasperation.
The kingdom of dreams. The power over the crowd.
—Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, My Life in the Russian Theatre
CHAPTER 1
The Only Way to Save Art
The revolution began quietly, with an awkward note sent between near strangers on June 7, 1897. Are you in Moscow? … I drafted a huge, great letter to you but as I shall be in Moscow I shan’t send it … If this letter finds you out of Moscow then I’ll send the long one I wrote earlier. But where to? The sender was a man named Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Behind his scrim of jovial self-deprecation, Nemirovich had something urgent on his mind, something so important it had to be described in person. He wanted nothing less than total transformation—of his job, his future, and the nature of Russian theater. But he knew he couldn’t do it alone.
Over the past few years, Nemirovich had become dissatisfied with his life. By any outward measure, it was a good one. He was one of the most respected and popular theater professionals in the country, a leading light among the intelligentsia, Russia’s caste-transcending group of learned individuals who shaped its culture. He had steady employment teaching aspiring actors at the Philharmonic School, and his plays were staples of the Maly Theatre, the most prestigious of the state-run imperial stages. He had won prizes, the praise of his colleagues, and the friendship of many of the greatest writers and artists of his day.
Yet, if he was honest with himself, he knew that he risked settling into the comfortable life accorded to mediocrities. No one read more plays than Nemirovich, no one had more knowledge of how a play worked, but all he saw around him were plays not working. Everything was conventional—a weary, stale, flat, and artistically unprofitable recitation of familiar gestures in front of familiar sets. Some of his acting students were brilliant, but many came to class only to pick up girls. His prizewinning, technically exquisite plays lacked the spark of life, that certain something, almost impossible to describe, that separated a dance of automatons from real drama.
If you couldn’t find life in the theater, what was the use in making it? Even the Maly, which had been his theatrical home, had sunk beneath the rising tide of cliché engulfing Russia’s stages. Actors mostly declaimed their lines, trying to impress the audience with oratorical displays instead of playing their parts. When trying to be naturalistic, they imitated better actors from the previous generation. Theatrical convention had so taken root that even outstanding artists suffered when they tried to resist it. No one had been a greater victim of this cultural stagnation than Nemirovich’s close friend Anton Chekhov, whom Vladimir revered above all other writers. Chekhov had written a play a few years prior that was so poorly received, he swore never to write for the stage again even if he lived to be seven hundred years old. Chekhov thought the problem was his own ineptitude, but Nemirovich knew the fault lay with the Russian stage. Only great reforms, he felt, would lead to the kind of theater that was worthy of a writer of Chekhov’s genius.
The problems were vast, but the paths forward were clear: Either he could reform the Maly—if they’d agree to let him—or he could start his own company dedicated to burning away the old with the sunlight of the new. Neither path was easy, however. The Maly was unlikely to be receptive to a jeremiad about its declining standards, and there was no way he could start a company by himself. Nemirovich knew how to run a theatrical administration, and he had vast practical and theoretical knowledge of playwriting, but he had little directing experience. The management of spectacle, the transformation of the inner life of a play into design and performance—these aspects of the art did not come easily to him.
But he knew of one man to whom they came readily: Konstantin Sergeievich Alekseiev, the addressee of his letter. Alekseiev was younger, and an amateur, but he was no dilettante. He had proved himself the peer of any professional with several productions mounted by the Society of Art and Literature, a company he had founded in Moscow. Although they had never worked together, Alekseiev had staged one of Nemirovich’s plays in a production that blended professional actors with his regular troupe of amateurs. Nemirovich respected Alekseiev as both an actor and a director, and he recognized that the man’s heart beat with the pulse of a true artist.
Nemirovich was not alone. The press openly speculated about Alekseiev’s future. He was too talented, too dedicated, to remain outside the industry with his intrepid gang of nonprofessionals forever. Although he was only thirty-four, Alekseiev was already something of a serial impresario, founding organizations left and right. Just a few months earlier, the newspaper Russkaia misl (Russian Thought) had reported on a conversation between Alekseiev and Chekhov about creating a new theater. Perhaps, Nemirovich thought, Alekseiev was the partner he was looking for. And perhaps, given his extraordinary wealth, Alekseiev could underwrite their venture himself.
Ten days passed. Nemirovich heard nothing. He sent a visiting card with a second invitation to meet scrawled on the back. Finally Nemirovich received a telegram. Yes, they could meet. A date was set: June 22, 1897. They would dine at the Slavic Bazaar.
Now all that remained was to wait for his meeting with Konstantin Sergeievich Alekseiev, better known by his stage name, Konstantin Stanislavski.
