The method, p.10
The Method, page 10
Let’s say that your work with the coin and the circles created by your apartment’s lamps was so successful that you have now been cast in the role of Francisco in Hamlet. Your main job is in the play’s first scene. A man approaches the castle and says Who’s there? And you respond, Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself. It’s a small part, but you know what they say—there are no small parts, only small actors—so you decide to really sink your teeth into it, reading and rereading the script. Here’s what you learn: It’s nighttime, it’s “bitter cold,” your king has recently died, leaving the country vulnerable to an invasion from Norway, and there are rumors of a ghost wandering the castle’s battlements. Perhaps that is why you say you are “sick of heart.” All of these factors constitute the given circumstances; they should shape how you walk, how you hold yourself, how you say your handful of lines. Rooting a performance in the given circumstances makes it more specific, eradicating clichés. Stanislavski felt that believing in the given circumstances could also help actors to experience their roles instead of merely performing them.
In early February 1908, Nemirovich sent Stanislavski a letter. We do not know what it contained. We can tell from Stanislavski’s response, however, that it wounded him: “As our ten years of effort have ended with the letter I have just received, any belief in my infinite devotion and love for you, the theatre and our association can only be futile,” he wrote. Therefore, “at the end of the current season, I shall cease to be a shareholder and a member of management.”
Although painful, this spat led to both men getting what they wanted. Nemirovich won greater authority over the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski even agreed to act in his previous roles and remount his repertory shows free of charge. In exchange, Konstantin Sergeievich would get what he had asked for a year before: one show a season that he would have total autonomy to direct as he saw fit. This shift in Stanislavski’s role at the Moscow Art Theatre gave him the means to develop “the system,” and without these changes, it’s unclear what the fate of the “system” would have been. But Stanislavski’s acting theories came at a cost. The two men who had once talked for eighteen hours straight would rarely speak to each other again.
With the knowledge that he could direct his one production as he pleased, Stanislavski attacked Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird, a fairy tale in which a set of twins go in search of a blue feather, aided by their trusty dog and impeded by the family cat, who believes he will die if the feather is found. Together with a fairy, they travel from their home to the Palace of Night, the Palace of Happiness, the Kingdom of the Future, and other dream realms. The play is crammed with spectacle and impossible-seeming stage directions, including an early scene in which all the objects in the children’s home come to life and transform in front of our eyes.
As he began work on The Blue Bird—technically as an adviser, with Suler as the credited director—he began developing a concept that some of his actors found baffling and that would prove controversial for generations of theater makers and critics: affective memory. Stanislavski first discussed this idea in a letter dated May 5, 1908 in which he describes trying to replicate “the rhythm of feelings, the development of affective memory, and the psycho-physiology of the creative process.” Two months later, he happened to meet a man who offhandedly mentioned to him the theories of Théodule-Armand Ribot, one of the founders of French psychology. Ribot’s writings, particularly his books Diseases of Memory and Diseases of the Will, would go on to exert tremendous influence over Stanislavski’s thinking. As far as the “system” is concerned, Ribot’s most important idea was that human beings had an “affective memory,” a capacity for storing and recalling “affective impressions” that works alongside our other forms of memory. These impressions include “smell and taste, our visceral sensations, our pleasant or painful states, our emotions and passions, like the perceptions of sight and hearing,” which in turn “can leave memories behind them.” These memories “may be revived in two ways—by provocation, or spontaneously.” Sometimes a new experience calls up an older one, and the older experience’s emotions rise unbidden. The smell of toasting bread might remind you of your parents’ kitchen, and all of a sudden you feel the pleasant ache of nostalgia.
As far as the “system” is concerned, the term “affective memory” has two distinct but interrelated meanings. In one sense, it is a kind of capacity: Just as you might have a good memory for facts, you could also have a good memory for affective impressions, and just as your memory for facts could be trained, so could your ability to store and call upon emotions. If you trained your affective memory well, you could trust that emotions would often arise of their own volition. Much as a professional tennis player does not think through the mechanics of each stroke during a match, a well-trained, talented actor does not need to think through each emotion while onstage. In another sense, though, “affective memory” refers to highly controversial techniques aimed at the purposeful provocation of emotions through recalling sensory triggers.
In The Blue Bird, with the help of his new ideas, Stanislavski pushed the actors to create an inner realism that made its childlike point of view and fantastical world believable. The results, after an unprecedented hundred and fifty rehearsals, were a triumph. What had at first seemed ridiculous—Nemirovich crowed over Stanislavski’s forcing the actors to run around the theater making animal noises and improvising—made Maeterlinck’s fairy-tale world come to life. In Russia, The Blue Bird became a legend to match, or even surpass, The Seagull.
The Government Inspector provided another important breakthrough for Stanislavski. For years, he had been exploring motivation, the idea, now taken for granted, that an actor needed to understand why their character did something in order to do it. Gogol’s notes for actors performing The Government Inspector gave Stanislavski a framework for approaching motivation. Writing more than half a century earlier, Gogol stated that “an intelligent actor … should examine the main and primary concern to which each personage dedicates his life, that which constitutes the constant object of his thoughts, the ‘peg’ which is fixed eternally in his head.”
This idea of the “peg” eventually became the sverkhzadacha, or “supertask.” Plays have latent supertasks, made apparent by each production’s specific approach: a version of Hamlet about the nature of justice will be very different from one about the Oedipal complex. But characters also have supertasks, which define and organize their behavior throughout the play. A production of Hamlet centered on justice might feature a leading performance whose sverkhzadacha is “to justly avenge my father,” while one about the Oedipal complex might be driven by the overarching task “to escape my guilt.” The sverkhzadacha demands truth from the actor. To Gogol, “the actor must perform such that the thoughts and aspirations of the character have been assimilated by him.”
With concentration, affective memory, the supertask, and the given circumstances, Stanislavski built upon the foundation that he had laid in Finland. The development of these ideas led directly to The Blue Bird, Stanislavski’s most successful and beloved production to date. By 1909, he knew that he was on the right path, working ever diligently toward his own sverkhzadacha of realizing truth in art. He was ready to put everything he had discovered together and test it all at once. Having used the “system” to bring psychological realism to symbolist works, he wanted to return to naturalism. To do this, Stanislavski decided to direct Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, a play widely believed to be unstageable.
CHAPTER 5
The Stanislavski Sickness
The Blue Bird’s commercial and critical success did little to calm Konstantin Stanislavski. If anything, he became an even more exacting taskmaster, obsessed with the collapsing standards of the Moscow Art Theatre and its potential abandonment by his audience. During the run of The Blue Bird, he wrote an excoriating letter to the cast, distributed by Suler. “The actors of our theatre and Russian actors, in general, will never be satisfied with being just competent stage hacks,” he wrote. “For that you have to be a foreigner.” The cast, in his eyes, had failed acting’s highest calling, which “consists in living a part.”
To Stanislavski, “living a part” meant perezhivanie, which is generally translated as experiencing. Actors must experience their roles, living the imagined reality of the character truthfully. Experiencing was what the individual components of the “system”—the Magic If, the supertask, affective memory, and the rest—should, ideally, help the actor to achieve. It did not require that the actor fully become the character; such a transformation, Stanislavski believed, was impossible, a form of madness. Perezhivanie was a state of fusion between actor and character, a merging of the two selves. By February 1909, he felt he was “ready to teach this art to anyone who will himself show a desire to learn it … For without it the theatre, in my opinion, is superfluous, harmful and stupid.” He promised in the future to “refuse to work in accordance with any other principle,” and he invited anyone who was interested in learning how to live a role onstage to meet with him “every day at one o’clock.”
Stanislavski’s letter provoked a mix of anger and confusion from many of the veterans of the Moscow Art Theatre, but a young actor and aspiring director named Richard Valentinovich Boleslavsky heard the call, and answered it. By his death in 1937, Boleslavsky would be one of the most important ambassadors for Stanislavski’s techniques and teachings in the world, and the author of the first book in English about the “system.” In 1909, however, the man they all called Boley was a young apprentice at the MAT, known for his gregarious charm in the rehearsal room and his mysteriousness outside it. Richard Boleslavsky was not even his real name. Like Stanislavski, he had adopted a pseudonym to protect his family’s reputation as he became more successful as an actor and director. His original name was a Polish one, Boleslaw Ryszard Srednicki, but in his youth, Poland was a country that existed only in its people’s dreams. Its culture outlawed, its children clandestinely educated in their language and customs, Poland could be born only through overthrowing the German, Austrian, and Russian empires that each claimed a piece of it. Boleslavsky believed in a romantic Poland, a lost republic with an elected monarch that never knew tyranny, guarded and served by its famous cavalry, the Polish Lancers. He yearned one day to help restore it. This was as close to a life’s dream as he possessed, yet even his lovers didn’t know he spoke Polish.
Boleslavsky spent his adolescence in Odessa, joining a Polish theater company there called the Polish Hearth (Ognisko Polski) in either 1903 or 1904, when he was either fourteen or fifteen years old. During the 1905 revolution that sent the Moscow Art Theatre on tour, he was a witness to the infamous “Odessa Steps” incident depicted in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and he bought bread for the prisoners being shipped off in its aftermath. Conservative by temperament, Boleslavsky refused throughout his life to discuss the events of 1905. He also refused to confirm or deny the rumors that flew around the Moscow Art Theatre that while part of the Polish Hearth, he had married and fathered a child.
He was too busy acting to get involved in politics anyway. In 1905, as the leading actor and director of the Polish Hearth, he appeared in plays by Hauptmann, Ibsen, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, and Frank Wedekind. In early 1906, during Stanislavski’s post-tour travels with his wife, he saw Boleslavsky perform in Crimea and persuaded him to audition for the Moscow Art Theatre’s actor training program. Hundreds auditioned annually for a handful of slots. Despite giving what he thought was a disastrous audition, Boleslavsky was accepted, on the condition that he take voice lessons to eliminate his Polish accent and learn to speak like a Muscovite.
In 1927, Boleslavsky summed up his education like this: “All my teachers taught me in a very simple way … They all told me that I was the greatest dumbbell in the world.” Students at the Moscow Art Theatre spent three years receiving instruction in voice, movement, fencing, scene study, and other acting essentials. They dressed in dark colors, living a life Boleslavsky described as “almost monastic,” behaving “inconspicuously and with courtesy and elegance.” They attended all rehearsals and public meetings at the MAT, soaking up as much as they could about the theater’s day-to-day life. The program was sink or swim. The company taught you, but expected you to make yourself useful enough to earn your slot. Tuition was free, covered by the labor you provided. Third-year apprentices appeared in supernumerary roles and took an examination, after which they would be considered for a place in the company.
Despite his supposed stupidity, Boleslavsky joined the company officially in 1908; within two years, he would be one of its stars. In 1909, Stanislavski cast him as Belyaev in Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. The production would be a test of both men. Boley would have his first shot at a leading role, and Stanislavski would get a chance to mount the first major trial run of his “system.”
Although he was a beloved novelist, Ivan Turgenev was never considered much of a playwright, and A Month in the Country did little to change that reputation during his lifetime. It is the play on which Chekhov based The Seagull, but it has even less of a plot. Most of it concerns people sitting around, talking, and falling in love with the wrong person. There’s a great drama to be made of its materials, but A Month in the Country suffered the same fate as many other plays calling for a realist psychology prior to the invention of the “system.” In 1850, when Turgenev wrote it, there was neither a codified idea of subtext nor the expectation that a performance would shine a light into a role’s hidden depths. Much of A Month in the Country is thus spent with the characters explaining themselves to the audience and to one another at great length, grinding the play’s action to a near halt. In the early days of the Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavski—who found the play boring—would have solved this problem with wildly inventive, hyperdetailed sets and breathtaking coups de théâtre. But now, with the “system” in hand, he wanted to walk a different path, one that journeyed toward interior truth. To help him get there, he radically redefined both his visual sensibility and his rehearsal process.
“There will be no mise-en-scènes,” Stanislavski promised his journal. “No sound effects, no details, no incidentals.” To accomplish this, he turned to the painter Mstislav Dobuzhinsky to create sets that were comparatively minimal and suggestive. Dobuzhinsky was associated with the World of Art (Mir iskusstva), a symbolist magazine and artistic movement led by, among others, the critic and impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who would eventually found the Ballets Russes. It was the World of Art that published “Unnecessary Truth,” Valeri Bruisov’s jeremiad against the Moscow Art Theatre. The magazine stood against the Wanderers and their brand of naturalism. World of Art painters looked both backward to traditional Russian crafts and forward to art nouveau and expressionism. Whereas Simov’s sets for The Seagull and Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich eschewed symmetry, Dobuzhinsky’s sets for A Month in the Country embraced it. And, with Stanislavski’s blessing, Dobuzhinsky simplified the production’s look, focusing on a few major gestures instead of a thousand little details.
By today’s standards, these sets look overly ornate, but for the audience of the Moscow Art Theatre, they read as evocative and symbolic. They also heralded a new approach from the director, one that discarded his usual recipes and necessitated a new way of conducting rehearsals. For the first time in Moscow Art Theatre history, Stanislavski moved rehearsals from the theater into a rehearsal studio and closed the sessions to people not affiliated with the production. He made a précis of Ribot’s theories on affective memory and distributed it to the actors. Stanislavski abandoned his heavily detailed production scores and focused on dividing the text into bits. Instead of Meiningen-style drilling, Stanislavski led his actors on a quest for the truth of each bit using improvisation and affective memory as their guide. He even wrote a psychological outline for each character, mapping out their interior arc.
One of Dobuzhinsky’s paintings of a set from A Month in the Country and a photograph of the realized set in production.
Rehearsals for A Month in the Country took four months, beginning in August 1909. Until late October, rehearsals focused almost entirely on exercises and analysis. Stanislavski cut the laborious monologues and forced the actors to communicate the text as “radiating” their thoughts out wordlessly, while their fellow actors attempted to “receive the arrows” of these thoughts. At times, they’d be restricted to solely using their eyes, furiously thinking at a mystified scene partner seated across the table. For the lines that remained, Stanislavski forced the actors to speak sotto voce, driving their passions under the text itself.
In cutting the text and focusing so heavily on the actor as an individual creative artist, Stanislavski took the first steps away from his theater’s founding principles. Over the hours they spent at the Slavic Bazaar in 1898 hashing out their future company, Stanislavski and Nemirovich had agreed that making the actor the central artist of the Russian theater had come at the cost of great art. In Pushkino, they had forced actors to serve literature and the production. Now Stanislavski demanded actors serve the truth. But this truth was neither philosophical nor overtly political; it was internal, the verisimilitude of feelings that Pushkin had demanded.
Stanislavski knew the goal, but he still struggled to help his actors reach it. He relied on a dense, idiosyncratic jargon filled with terms like “ray emission” and “ray absorption.” He pronounced such gnomic guidance as “It is not possible to compare each component part of the whole with the whole itself composed of them.” He had the actors annotate their scripts with an invented hieroglyphic notation mapping out the character’s emotional states. An ear meant “listen,” an ear in brackets meant “listen quietly.” An arrow going up meant “the transition from apathy to the creative state,” while an arrow ending in a hook meant “spiritual cunning and conviction,” and so on. Alisa Koonen, a young actor in the cast, wrote that “this painstaking analysis led me somewhere away from the role and scared me … Trying honestly to master the line of the role of Verochka, indicated by circles, arrows, and sticks, I often came to tears.”
