The method, p.5
The Method, page 5
He also worried that self-funding would hurt the new theater’s reputation by making it appear to be a vanity project. “Moscow society will neither trust in a private undertaking nor take it seriously,” he wrote. He believed that they should instead appeal to the business community to invest in the new theater. The businessmen of Moscow—a community Stanislavski knew better than Nemirovich did—might “boycott the theatre on principle,” but “on pure principle they will stump up a pile of money to support something they have created.” But Stanislavski’s friends in the business community did not stump up a pile of anything. For the most part, they wanted nothing to do with this new theater, viewing Stanislavski’s move from amateur to professional as an embarrassment. A steady drumbeat of news stories mocking the new company didn’t help matters. Stanislavski contributed ten thousand rubles to get them started. Nemirovich raised small sums from colleagues at the Philharmonic. Finally, the partners landed a pair of whales in Savva and Sergei Morozov, two industrialists who had parlayed a cotton fortune into a portfolio of manufacturing and business interests.
When the ink on the shareholder agreement dried, Nemirovich and Stanislavski had raised twenty-eight thousand rubles. This would have to pay a company, rent rehearsal space and lodging in Pushkino, provide a down payment on their performance space, and subsidize the design process for their first handful of shows. Combined, the four Imperial Theatres enjoyed a budget of two million rubles, owned their performance spaces, and could count on the government to cover their debts. Stanislavski’s company was undercapitalized, their first-choice theater was gone, their grant application to the city of Moscow to subsidize their lower-cost theater tickets appeared to have been misplaced by the authorities, and they had three different groups of actors, none of whom knew one another and all of whom had different working methods. Upon this rock, such as it was, they would build their church.
Stanislavski’s first order of business was the unification of the actors into one cohesive company. It was a problem unique to their undertaking, and it led to one of Stanislavski’s first innovations: a true, permanent ensemble. He had seen what a company working under one vision could do, thanks to the Meiningen group. Now he would take it a step further. Not only would the company share a single vision, they would share common artistic goals that transcended any one production. Together they would put into practice the aphorisms he and Nemirovich had cooked up at the Slavic Bazaar, using them as the basis for a set of shared values and ideas about the purpose of art.
Stanislavski’s views on the subject were becoming increasingly spiritual. He was inspired by Tolstoy’s 1897 essay “What Is Art?,” which defined art as “the manifestation of feelings, conveyed externally.” Tolstoy argued that art is “a means of communion” whose highest goal was to unify humanity through expressing the “loftiest and best feelings people have attained in life.” Tolstoy believed that the artist could infect the spectator, transmitting the former’s feelings to the latter, creating communion. All three of these terms—infect, transmit, communion—would recur throughout Stanislavski’s writing for the rest of his life. In An Actor’s Work on a Role, Stanislavski later wrote that when performing, “the artist … conveys the life of the human spirit itself that flows like an underwater current under the external facts” of a play. This use of spirit likely comes from Stanislavski’s Russian Orthodox faith. In his melding of Tolstoy’s philosophy with his own religious beliefs, art became a “sacred task” whose goal is to reach the human spirit, which means both the ineffable part of a human being and the best part of us, the part that connects us to God. The human spirit is what God breathes into the clay to make Adam; at its best, theater enables a similar spiritual communion.
These ideas went hand in hand with the lessons Stanislavski had absorbed from Vissarion Belinsky about how theater, by creating an empathic connection between spectator and character, could work as an engine of human betterment. If actors were artists, and if artists had a spiritual, perhaps even holy, purpose, then acting required intense attention to ethics and discipline. To come late to rehearsals, or to take extended breaks, or not to know one’s lines, or to be dour, or unwilling to try a new idea, were not merely instances of bad behavior; to Stanislavski, they were crimes against both the company and art itself.
Stanislavski introduced strict discipline in rehearsals, bringing a logbook to track the attendance and punctuality of all involved. He made it clear that there would be no tolerance of diva behavior. Infighting and insults were strictly prohibited, and on at least one occasion he fired an actor for violating his code of conduct. The company lived communally, bunking together in rented houses. They had no servants or housekeepers, and were collectively responsible for maintaining their homes and the barn that served as their workspace. Stanislavski stayed at Lyubimovka but still took part in the collective tasks, learning, at the age of thirty-five, how to sweep out a stage, how to use a dustpan, and how to make tea. According to My Life in Art, the learning curve was steep. On one occasion, he forgot to put water in the company’s samovar before heating the coals inside it, and it melted.
The company worked, sweating in the metal-roofed barn, all through the blazing summer of 1898. From eleven to five, the company rehearsed one play. After a two-hour break for dinner and recreation, they rehearsed another play from seven to eleven. The likelihood that these rehearsals regularly ended on time is slim. According to Nemirovich, when Stanislavski became hyperfocused on something—which was often—all practical concerns melted away. One rehearsal of Merchant of Venice in Pushkino stretched until dawn because Stanislavski refused to end it until one of the actors could carry a sword properly. Often they rehearsed multiple scenes from the same play simultaneously. Stanislavski would take one group into the barn while Aleksandr Sanin, his associate, would rehearse on the terrace or the field outside. In what little spare time they had, the actors would play practical jokes on one another and memorize lines for multiple plays at once.
Stanislavski introduced the company to the then radical innovation of table work, taking them through the text line by line around a table until a shared understanding of the play evolved. At this point in his career, Stanislavski had little feel for the interior lives of characters. He did not know how to discuss subtext or help an actor use the roiling seas of their unconscious to realize a part. All that inner life stuff was, to him, bewildering, better left to Nemirovich. “I would be very happy if … you would take the individual actors through their roles,” he wrote his partner as they planned the summer. “I don’t like it and can’t do it. But you are a master at it.” Instead, Stanislavski entered rehearsals with the physical life of his plays worked out to the smallest detail in a director’s score. The scores contained everything from large movements of people across the stage to the exact length of pauses. As he put it in My Life in Art, his directorial method had two main components: “I demanded that the actors obey me, and forced them to do so.” In rehearsal, he would have the actors repeat moments over and over again until he got exactly what he wanted. He appointed himself the scourge of hokum, nixing the booming voices and operatic gestures that were currently popular on Russia’s stages.
Mikhail Darski, one of the provincial tragedians, found himself in Stanislavski’s crosshairs early and often. Unlike most of the company, Darski was nearly as famous as Stanislavski or Nemirovich, well known enough that Meyerhold’s wife specifically asked in a letter how he was faring under the company’s revolutionary approach. At first, the answer to her question was poorly. Darski had been hired in part to alternate the performances of Shylock in Merchant of Venice with Stanislavski himself. But Darski failed to impress his boss during the first read-through of the play. The acclaimed actor possessed a “musical voice and personality, but no art,” Stanislavski wrote to Nemirovich. “Pity that he’s bone-idle with limited imagination.” Darski’s first impulse was to pluck the audience’s heartstrings again and again until they quivered. “We have to get him away from this idea, then he will be a splendid actor; if not, it will be rubbish and he won’t come near our tone.”
Stanislavski felt that Darski parroted other actors, lacking both originality and specificity. Only when freed of clichés could he perform Shylock, not as a romantic tragedian “should” but as a real person, with specific mannerisms and, most important to Stanislavski, a “Jewish accent” that highlighted his alienation from society. Stanislavski spent two sleepless nights wrestling with how to fix Darski. He began by doing something most directors consider anathema today: He gave Darski line readings, demonstrating how the role should be performed. Stanislavski went even further, delivering a performance of the part in front of the company to demonstrate the superiority of his approach.
Darski was furious. In rehearsals with Sanin, he refused to take direction, pushing back on all attempts to rein him in to a more naturalistic style. Darski wasn’t alone. The other professionals balked at the restraint the new company’s style required. According to Stanislavski, they believed that “the stage demanded visualized action, a loud voice, a rapid tempo and full-toned acting.” They worried about being so quiet and small that the audience wouldn’t be able to hear them or follow the story.
Slowly Stanislavski won them over. In his letters to Nemirovich, he wrote that Darski’s rehearsal room behavior was a brave front hiding a gradual internal capitulation already in progress. After days without properly sleeping or eating, Darski came in and spoke, “one successful line, simply delivered,” after which he was putty in his directors’ hands. Meyerhold’s letters to his wife tell another version of Darski’s conversion. He claimed that Stanislavski’s vision was so brilliant, “so free from cliché, so original,” that Darski had no choice but to relearn the part, abandoning eight years of experience in playing the role in the process. “Darski really deserves our respect,” he wrote, but Stanislavski “plays the part better, of course.” Meyerhold, likely the most naturally talented of all the actors assembled in Pushkino, admired Stanislavski almost without limit. In letter after letter, he pronounces Stanislavski “a teacher of genius,” marveling at his “wealth of erudition! What imagination!” Stanislavski took an immediate liking to the younger man as well. Their friendship, which lasted until Stanislavski’s death, would always be stormy, but its intensity was fueled by mutual admiration and a furious, almost familial, love for each other.
When the actors arrived in Pushkino in June 1898, Stanislavski and Nemirovich had yet to finalize their opening season. Their tastes overlapped without fully aligning, and although Nemirovich had his famous veto over matters of literature, forcing Stanislavski to stage a season of plays to which he felt little connection would be impractical. Stanislavski wanted to stick to the classics, time-tested works that had attained heights of poetic and dramatic brilliance that few new plays could reach. Since the knives of the press were out and already sharpened to cut down their new venture, he felt the company should stage plays everyone already believed were good. Yes, there was some risk of boring the public, but the brilliance of his productions would overcome that.
Nemirovich strongly disagreed. In a letter dated June 19, 1898, he makes a moving case for the timeless value of theater in people’s lives, and for the role of both new plays and classics in theater’s enduring power. He first argues that if a theater focuses on classical repertoire to the exclusion of all else, “then it will be quickly on its way to an academic graveyard. The theater is not an illustrated book which can be taken off the shelf at will.” It is, instead, a form of spiritual caretaking for society. An audience needs many things. One of these is “the opportunity to respond to what we call ‘eternal beauty,’ ” the poetry and contemplation of timeless problems to be found in the classics. However, spectators also “need … answers to their private sufferings.” New plays may not always be as beautifully constructed as classics—which have the benefit of being filtered through multiple generations of tastemakers—but they “attract audiences everywhere because they discover in them new answers to the problems of living.” This conception of theater, now so widespread that it is taken mostly for granted, is what set their new company apart from the Maly and most major theaters of their day. At the same time, there’s little mention in this letter of entertainment, and a pervasive suspicion of joy. Nemirovich disliked comedy. He dismissed plays like Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing as “trivia,” particularly when compared to the best tragedies by living writers such as Henrik Ibsen. The only comedy he could see their theater producing was one of serious purpose, like Tartuffe. (“Tartuffe? I hate this play,” was Stanislavski’s response to that idea.)
Practical realities resolved these disputes in Nemirovich’s favor. Moscow audiences would never take seriously a theater without a robust repertory. Nemirovich and Stanislavski decided that laying the company’s foundation required premiering seventeen different productions. They could not achieve this by producing only classics, and even had to resort to borrowing productions the company’s founders had put up elsewhere. Nemirovich and Stanislavski weren’t entirely sure what order everything would go in, but they knew they wanted to start with Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich. Few other plays could provide the grand opening statement of purpose they needed.
Tsar Fyodor is the second part of a trilogy of blank verse history plays by Count Alexei Tolstoy (supposedly Leo’s second cousin). It tells the story of the brief reign and soufflé-like collapse of its titular ruler, the virtuous but ineffectual Fyodor. The tsar’s failure to broker peace between warring clans of noblemen, and his eventual usurpation by a conniving relative, recall Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, while several characters additionally draw from Richard II. Here the warring factions are the Shuiskys, led by the stalwart and proud Prince Ivan, and the Godunovs, led by Boris, the tsar’s ruthless brother-in-law. The Shuiskys are noble, loyal, and constant, but they’re also backward-looking reactionaries. Godunov is a brilliant statesman who embraces modernity but will always use the ends to justify the means. Over the course of the play, the Shuiskys try and fail to rescue the tsar from Godunov’s influence by having Fyodor’s wife replaced by Prince Ivan’s niece. But Boris outmaneuvers them again and again, breaking a peace agreement between the two families, imprisoning most of the Shuiskys men, and then having them murdered. By the time the Tatars invade Russia at the end of the play, Boris controls all aspects of the Russian state except the military. Fyodor gives him control of this too, and as the play ends, he laments to God that he was ever made a tsar.
Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich was part of a midcentury vogue for works that explored Moscow’s past. In the nineteenth century, as Moscow became Russia’s economic powerhouse and, in Nemirovich’s words, “the nobility was gradually becoming poorer, while the mercantile class … spread its tentacles to embrace the whole of national life,” Russia turned toward its own history. St. Petersburg, having only been founded at the start of the eighteenth century, didn’t have much of a past, but Moscow had it in abundance. Humans had settled there in the Neolithic era, and the city itself was at least eight hundred years older than its swamp-bound rival. Much as in Shakespeare’s time, writers delved into their national past to understand—and comment on—their present-day problems. Tsar Fyodor did this by dramatizing a brief, contested flowering of republican spirit in the form of a contest between two proto-political parties, which is then crushed by Godunov’s autocratic maneuvering. The play’s true tragedy is the murder of the dream of a more democratically constructed Russia.
This tragedy would have felt familiar to Stanislavski’s audience. Tsar Alexander II, the great liberator of the serfs, had taken many steps to democratize Russian society during his reign. He reformed the civil service and military, modernized Russia’s economy, and instituted a system of zemstvos, or councils, that administered local affairs. After his assassination in 1881, he was succeeded by the autocratic anti-Semite Alexander III. This new tsar, who had been nicknamed the Colossus, spent his reign clawing back his father’s reforms. He attempted to destroy the zemstvos, strengthened Russia’s censorship laws, and created the Okhrana, the vicious secret police who, as one station chief put it, pursued both terrorists and the left “not out of obligation but out of conviction … not unlike a hunt, an art, cunning and risky with pleasure derived from success.” Alexander’s successor, Tsar Nicholas II, combined his father’s love of autocracy with indecision, micromanagement, and incompetence. The censors had seen the contemporary resonance of Tsar Fyodor’s portrait of realpolitik defeating republicanism from the start, and they had long forbidden public performances of the play. But thanks to their political connections, Stanislavski and Nemirovich were confident they could get permission to do it.
Stanislavski found Tsar Fyodor almost unbearably moving, and when he sent it to Nemirovich, his partner felt the same way. “My wife and I read ‘Fyodor’ aloud the other day,” Nemirovich wrote to Stanislavski, “and bellowed like a couple of idiots. What a marvelous play. It’s heaven-sent.” Premiering Tsar Fyodor after thirty years of censorship had kept it off Moscow’s stages would be an artistic coup. The play would also provide Stanislavski with the opportunity to prove the superiority of his groundbreaking approach to stage design, one in which elaborate period-specific detail and naturalism reigned supreme.
Although Stanislavski conceived many of the sets, and Nemirovich outlined the interpretations that undergirded their approach, the designs would never have been realized without the company’s secret weapon, a painter named Viktor Simov. He had studied at the Moscow School of Painting, a hothouse of naturalistic art that, with its Slavophilic outlook and openness to students of all backgrounds, stood in opposition to the more Eurocentric Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. Its directors encouraged students to integrate folk themes and images into their work. Simov was also affiliated with the Wanderers, a group of artists whose self-funded touring exhibitions helped bring the Russian realism movement to the provinces. Their work reflected the tastes of their patron, a textile baron who nonetheless preferred his art unembroidered, once telling an interviewer “I want neither abundant nature scenes, elaborate composition, dramatic lighting, nor any kind of wonders. Just give me a muddy pond and make it true to life.” The Wanderers painted naturalistic rural scenes and landscapes, marrying European technique with Slavic subjects and imagery, much as Stanislavski hoped to do with Tsar Fyodor.
