Stanislavsky at 150

Born 150 years ago this month, on January 5, 1863, Konstantin Stanislavsky not only revolutionized Russian theater, but his teachings have had a profound and lasting affect on theater, film and society all over the world.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, caricatures of American actors commonly depicted a histrionic performer with one hand on his breast and the other extended toward the balcony while he declaimed, "To be or not to be." Then, around the 1950s, this cartoon image gave way to another: that of a jittery mumbler in a t-shirt who confided his words to his chest.

The image change – from a lampooned Edwin Booth to a caricatured Marlon Brando – and the snickering that went with it, was a by-product of the arrival of "Method acting" on both the Broadway stage and in Hollywood movies. The Method traces its roots back to the teachings of Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavsky, founder of the Moscow Art Theater. In fact, everything that the Montgomery Clifts, James Deans, and Paul Newmans muttered and scratched at can be traced back to MKhAT.

Well, yes and no. Yes, because decades of acting teachers and theatrical companies in the United States, most conspicuously the Group Theater in the 1930s and the Actors Studio as of 1947, had indeed cited Stanislavsky as an inspiration. No, because there was as much misinterpretation of Stanislavsky's ideas in America as there was ostensible devotion to them. And again no, because some of the strongest critics of that misrepresentation were the same Group Theater and Actors Studio figures held up for mockery by comedians and cartoonists out for an easy laugh.

These criticisms were not always of the polite parlor variety, either. In the name of Stanislavsky, theater colleagues ruptured relationships, exchanged bitterly worded writings, and set up rival schools in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere as the one and only source of theatrical truth. To an outsider, the disagreements might have seemed to be over the most negligible of technical differences, of concern only to the actors and directors most immediately affected by them. But in fact the frictions were instrumental in shaping American mass entertainment expectations and viewing habits over the past half-century. And for added spice, the disputants provided headline names during the ugliness that was McCarthyism: even theater aesthetics took on great significance during the Cold War, since a Russian was implicated.

The usual starting point for measuring Stanislavsky's impact on the performing arts has been the contention that he was the first to replace centuries of flamboyant posturing with modern psychological realism on the stage, trading arch melodrama for naturalism. If that sounds simplistic, it is. Long before Stanislavsky, there had been an impatience with theater that equated drama with transparent artifice, dialogue with serial speech making, and company performance with individual bravura.

Shakespeare's plays had not been costume theatricals for the playwright's contemporaries, nor had the performers in them been marked only for their elocution. In Russia alone in the nineteenth century several directors had insisted on acting that would not be confused with putting on an elaborate medicine show. One was Michael Shchepkin, cited by Stanislavsky as "our great law-giver, our artist." As early as 1848, Shchepkin was warning an actor to "begin with wiping out yourself... and become the character the author intends. You must walk, talk, think, feel, cry, laugh, as the author wants."

Shchepkin' quest for informing stage action with precise psychological cause knew no national borders. When a touring American company headed by the African-American tragedian Ira Aldridge presented Othello in Moscow, Shchepkin could not wait to get backstage after the final curtain to take Aldridge to task for how his Othello treated Desdemona as a delicate flower. "Othello is a Moor and an army commander who has his men's eyes always on him," Shchepkin was heard to reprimand Aldridge through an interpreter. "Where is the aggressiveness he should have on display at all times, especially with a woman?"

Stanislavsky, who had been immersed in the theater since creating amateur shows at home as a teenager, also acknowledged his debt to Alexander Lensky, regarded as the premier actor of the Russian stage in the nineteenth century. "He was the most talented and attractive actor I had ever seen," Stanislavsky once said, "and I imitated him to the point of disgust." Another who made an early impression was the Italian Ernesto Rossi, whose performance as Romeo during a tour of Russia "drew its inner image to perfection."

But as brilliant as he found them, Lensky and Rossi also offered negative models of sorts for Stanislavsky's conviction that the key to dynamic theater was ensemble work, that concentration on a star player often earned applause at the cost of leaving a production at the mercy of that star's whims, health, and ultimatums, not to mention it risked suffocating whatever contextual thematic aims the playwright might have had.

At the age of 34, Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev (as he was born) found a like-minded thinker in the playwright Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, five years his senior. In what became the most legendary lunch in theater history, the two men took a table at the Slavyansky Bazar restaurant at two o'clock on the afternoon of June 22, 1897, and did not part until after breakfast the next morning at Stanislavsky's home, by which time they had outlined the goals and structure of what developed into the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT) the following year. The original division of labor called for Nemirovich-Danchenko to take on literary matters and company administration and for Stanislavsky to tend to productions.

The initiative got off to a slow start, with stagings of Ibsen and Shakespeare thrilling no one. But around the same time (fortuitously for Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko), playwright and short story master Anton Chekhov was doing a lot of grumbling about his own theater problems. Two years earlier, Chekhov had entrusted his play The Seagull to the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg and had come away devastated by the mechanical rendering it had received. "Never will I write another play or attempt to have one produced if I live to be 700 years old," he told those who tried to cheer him up.

Whatever Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko said to Chekhov, however, persuaded him to let them make another pass at The Seagull at MKhAT. "Chekhov cannot be presented, he can only be experienced," Stanislavsky intoned. As precious as that might have sounded, it was a recognition of the fact that the playwright's dramas were very much ensemble pieces grounded in psychological nuance – chamber music more than symphony. And it was also a claim that MKhAT was the only appropriate venue for them.

During rehearsals, every member of the company was drilled in what was termed "the law of inner justification" – probing the deepest feelings of the actors in conjunction with the play's specific dramatic moments, the inward search for the outward form. Stanislavsky did not spare himself and his prominent character of Trigorin during the exercises, and would write frequently in the years to come about his own failures during this or that production to learn from what he was teaching others.

When The Seagull proved a success, the epitome of the "spiritual realism accessible to all" the producers had made their objective, Chekhov committed to more collaborations, leading to presentations of Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard at MKhAT. For their part, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko felt so indebted to the writer that they hurriedly made him the theater's playwright in residence and adopted the seagull as the company's logo.

But they did not take their triumph for granted. On the contrary, they were wary that the very praise for "the law of inner justification" approach in The Seagull would overwhelm the longer-range aspirations they had for MKhAT. Stanislavsky could get especially testy about being lumped together with critics who shared his dramatic values but who also appeared content to leave it at that. As he put it: "All that has been written about the theater is only philosophizing, very interesting, very deep, it is true, that speaks beautifully of the results desirable to reach in art, or criticism of the success or failure of results already reached. All these works are valuable and necessary, but not for the actual practical work in the theater, for they are silent on how to reach certain results, on what is necessary to do firstly, secondly, thirdly, and so forth, with a beginner, or what is to be done with an experienced and spoiled actor."

Stanislavsky's answer to his own question was an articulated system of training the actor for greater control of his physical and sensory faculties, simultaneously urging constant intellectual inquiry into character motives. To intensify a feeling of ensemble discovery, he brought in only actors willing to live communally for the duration of rehearsals and performances, this sometimes running well into a year and even more than that for plays that went into repertory rotation. At the heart of his method (and the source of generations of dispute) were affective memory exercises, in which the actor summoned up personal experiences of pain, joy, or another emotion, to be bonded with parallel character feelings as called for by the play.

For Stanislavsky at the time, affective memory was the sine qua non for incarnating a role, the only truthful access to the stage's fancied if,the essential premise for "the imagined truth which the actor can believe as sincerely and with greater enthusiasm than he believes practical truth." The techniques for crossing from the intimately personal to the theatrically scripted could involve anything from focusing on some prop to humming a familiar tune. Whatever the vehicle, the actor was encouraged to believe in his own freedom for recall in what was actually a very guided situation, a condition not unlike that experienced at the time by Europeans beginning to explore psychotherapy.

Ultimately, Stanislavsky conducted his system of rehearsals for some 50 plays, on and off into the late 1930s. At one time or another, his company included the Russian acting elite – his own wife Maria Petrovna Lilina, Chekhov's wife Olga Knipper-Chekhova, the playwright's nephew Michael Chekhov, Ivan Moskvin, Vasily Kachalov, Alla Tarasova, and Vasily Luzhsky, to name a few. Later Hollywood names, such as Alla Nazimova and Akim Tamiroff also appeared. When they were not doing original works by Chekhov or Maxim Gorky, they were winning MKhAT an international reputation for vibrant adaptations of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Goldoni, and other foreign dramatists. It didn't take long for the company to generate pounds of press coverage from critics and other writers visiting Moscow. For many years, however, even fellow professionals were more interested in the finished plays they saw than in the Stanislavsky process that had produced them.

MKhAT's achievements were all the more remarkable for operating amid incessant turmoil, both organizational and political. One blow came with Chekhov's death in 1904. When Gorky wasn't named his successor as chief dramatist, the embittered author of The Lower Depths not only walked, but took the theater's major financial backer with him. It was only thanks to an acclaimed tour of Germany and Austria in 1906 that the company managed to survive.

But internal problems persisted. Stanislavsky had a falling out with Nemirovich-Danchenko over management issues, prompting him to abandon his board role and introducing unwanted tensions around productions. Within this climate, some members of the company began protesting the theater's emphasis on naturalistic works. The most vociferous rebels were Yevgeny Vakhtangov and Vsevelod Meyerhold, the former plumping for more spectacular avant-garde productions and the latter for borrowing stylistic approaches from (among others) Japanese theater and the commedia dell'arte. When their demands fell on deaf ears, they split off to set up their own companies.

The 1917 Revolution brought cries that MKhAT be closed as an ornament of the tsarist age. Yet the new Soviet regime not only spurned those calls but funneled government subsidies into the company, at least partly to offset foreign propaganda that the Bolsheviks were an uncultured rabble. By the early 1920s, however, a national economic crisis had dried up those funds, leaving MKhAT back to fending for itself.

On stage, Stanislavsky became skeptical of continuing to produce the sophisticated anguishes of Chekhov's characters amid the grim daily realities of the Soviet Union and gave more stress to productions that would be typified as socialist realism. That didn't sit well with some company veterans, who fled abroad. One of them, Richard Boleslavsky, a Pole who had worked with Stanislavsky for more than 13 years, established the American Laboratory Theatre in New York in 1922, setting the foundations for affective memory's second great arena. The school generated buzz among actors and directors for its novel teachings, but still had only modest success until the following January, when MKhAT visited the city for performances of The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters, The Lower Depths, and an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. Not only did Boleslavsky's school profit from the company's critical triumph, but he also talked one of the troupe's leading players, Maria Ouspenskaya, into remaining in the United States as one of his teachers.

One of those captivated by the Art Theatre's performances in New York was Lee Strasberg, then a would-be actor who would become a central player in the on-stage and off-stage dramas that would grip the Group Theater and the Actors Studio for the next 60 years. He became even more of a believer after attending classes with Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya and getting a first-hand education in the method about to gain a capital M. And he wasn't the only one. Also taken with the Stanislavsky approach as taught by Boleslavsky was Harold Clurman, another fledgling actor who, like the future director and teacher Strasberg, would find a much more expansive role for himself in the theater, first as a producer and director, then as a critic and historian.

For years, in a protracted version of the 1897 Slavyansky Bazar lunch, Strasberg and Clurman met regularly to discuss the possibilities for setting up an Art Theatre of their own. Eventually, after a couple of false starts and many recruitment evenings, in which Clurman held forth to living rooms and lofts filled with the curious, the conversations spawned the Group Theater. With Cheryl Crawford along as an occasional director and business reality monitor, the company showed its wares for the first time at the Martin Beck Theater on September 29, 1931, with a production of Paul Green's The House of Connolly. Co-directed by Strasberg and Crawford, it was the first of 24 plays that would be offered over the next decade. The cast featured future Hollywood leading man Franchot Tone, as well as Stella Adler and Morris Carnovsky. Others who came to be identified with the Group were Stella's brother Luther, Phoebe Brand, Ruth Nelson, Frances Farmer, Sanford Meisner, Jules (John) Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, J. Edward Bromberg, Art Smith, Roman Bohnen, Harry Morgan, Karl Malden, Leif Erickson, and four future film directors: Elia Kazan, Martin Ritt, Michael Gordon, and Sidney Lumet.

The actors drawn to the Group shared the view of their Moscow counterparts that there should be more to their art than the random hits and misses of the commercial theater. Coming together in the politically volatile and economically depressed 1930s, they embraced a social outlook that championed the working man against business and governmental exploitation, and they sought to express that attitude in both the texts of the plays they performed and in their collective organization as such. No surprise, they were all pretty much on the left side of the political spectrum at a time when the theater ("thea-tuh") still had connotations of top hats and tails. While some members were little more than liberal Democrats or socialists, others were moved to join the (still legal) American Communist Party.

Despite Strasberg's own infatuation with the avant-garde leanings of Vakhtangov, the trying times and political engagement of members made naturalism the preferred dramatic form. Not only were other styles generally eschewed, but every one of the company's 24 productions was an original work, more often than not with a strong twentieth-century urban texture. The most prolific of the troupe's playwrights was Clifford Odets (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, Golden Boy). In the particular case of Waiting for Lefty, the realism so overwhelmed the audience in the play's climactic call for the cab driver characters to declare a strike that the carried away spectators also rose to demand a walkout.

Some of the Group's organization problems were idiosyncratic, others reminiscent of those that had plagued Stanislavsky in Moscow. Throughout its decade of existence it was constantly in a snit about members (most prominently, Franchot Tone) who "betrayed" it by running off to Hollywood (even though Tone's improved earnings permitted him to finance later productions). Strasberg raised hackles by tinkering with the principle of affective memory in favor of what he called emotional memory. According to the company's resident teacher, some members weren't capable of plumbing deep emotional experiences, so they were better off just trying to recreate the physical sensations around those experiences. For some, the variation decreed by the habitually imperious Strasberg undermined the Group by dividing it into Class A and Class B talents (a no-no for an enterprise that boasted of democratic equality among actors, directors, stagehands, and administrative personnel), for others it reeked of condescension. It usually fell to Clurman to quell tempests with reminders of Strasberg's unquestioned teaching skills. But where divisions and condescensions were concerned, nothing shook the company more than a meeting between Stella Adler and Stanislavsky.

Along with Clurman and Strasberg, Adler visited Moscow in 1934 to see the latest productions at MKhAT, then fully engulfed by the socialist realism demanded by Stalin's regime. Clurman and Strasberg came away convinced they were doing more serious work than their organizational mentor, but that didn't satisfy Adler. When she heard that Stanislavsky, who had been suffering from heart problems, was in Paris recovering from his latest illness, she put off her return to the United States and spent a month with the director, going over a performance she had recently given and asking for his critique. The gist of the Russian's response was that she had fallen too much under the spell of affective memory exercises, which he himself had developed more moderate thoughts about, because they often paralyzed actors in completing on-stage action. He also acknowledged that Meyerhold and Vakhtanov hadn't been completely wrong in calling for more than naturalism, noting that MKhAT had produced numerous plays over the years in other styles. (In 1938, weeks before his death, Stanislavsky turned the reins of MKhAT over to Meyerhold, calling him its "sole heir.")

When Adler returned to America and conveyed Stanislavsky's observations, Strasberg blew up, going so far as to declare himself a superior director to the Russian and his system more revolutionary than the one devised in Moscow. From that point on, the Group fell into two camps, with Adler's brother Luther, Carnovsky, and Kazan among those subscribing to her calls for change. Strasberg mainly sulked, continuing to teach but gradually withdrawing from directing. Ironically, his last directorial effort for the company was the 1936 production of Johnny Johnson, an anti-war play written by Paul Green but conceived after Adler had gone to composer Kurt Weill to ask him to compose music for a non-naturalistic Group undertaking. The work ran for only 68 performances, but its odd mix of anti-militarist speeches, spoken songs, and satirical comedy was as close as Strasberg came to the adventurous style he had claimed to admire in Vakhtangov.

The Group, once described by member Lee Cobb as "a band of geniuses and misfits," disbanded after a minor Irwin Shaw play in December 1940. By that time many members had joined Tone in Hollywood, providing supporting character heft to films of all genres. There were in fact so many Group alums resettled in Los Angeles that Bohnen and Carnovsky had no trouble putting together another company called The Actors Laboratory – echoing the name of Boleslavsky's school in New York. Its activities encompassed acting classes, theatrical seminars, staged readings, and modest productions of Shakespeare and Chekhov. As part of the World War II effort, the Lab also sponsored fundraisers for groups later denounced by state and Congressional witch-hunters as fronts for the Communist Party.

Well through the 1950s, in fact, membership in the Group Theater or Actors Lab was all but a guarantee of a subpoena from either the Tenney Committee of California or the Congressional House Un-american Activities Committee (HUAC) for testimony on past communist affiliations. Many (Carnovsky, Brand, Nelson, Smith) were blacklisted, while others (Kazan, Cobb, Odets) turned informer under pressures to name names, even though Communist Party membership had been perfectly legal and the wartime front groups had existed when the United States and Soviet Union had been allies. Those who testified (to avoid the blacklist) no longer walked down the same side of the street as those who had defied both the government committees, and the blackballing and resentments lingered for years. Worst of all were the plights of Garfield and Bromberg, both of whom died of heart attacks at the height of HUAC pressures on them.

In 1947, Kazan, Crawford, and Bobby Lewis, another Group alumnus, established the Actors Studio in New York as a retreat for actors seeking to hone their craft. In original intention, the Studio differed from the Group in two basic ways: it would only be a school, with no productions open to the public, and Stanislavsky's principles would be passed along without Strasberg's stresses. A third distinction emerged fairly quickly from the actors attracted to the classes: If Tone and Garfield were the only "stars" to have come out of the Group, the Studio was an incubator for droves of leading men and women who would determine box office tastes for most of the rest of the twentieth century. Either briefly or for years of study, its Who's Who would count Brando, Clift, Dean, Newman, Joanne Woodward, Lee Remick, Julie Harris, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Anthony Franciosa, Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, and Robert De Niro.* If the Group had had the image of a pugnacious rebel, the Studio's membership – in spite of the balky personalities projected by some individually – produced a show business Establishment.

The popularity of so many Studio players, especially after Brando's appearances in A Streetcar Named Desire and The Wild One and Dean's in Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, facilitated the Method caricatures of simmering introversion and inarticulateness. Coincidentally or not, this followed the return of Strasberg to the scene. Although initially not part of the Studio, he found himself as its effective director after Lewis resigned following a squabble with Kazan, who begged off a daily supervisory role because of his film commitments.

Now more than ever, Strasberg pushed the emotional memory button, but this time practically inverting what its original purpose had been. Studio-trained actors were regularly accused of having their stage and screen characters submit to their personal emotions rather than vice versa, making for the paralyzed actions Stanislavsky had warned Adler about. In the course of fixating on those inward moments, many performers felt insecure physically and, with their imaginations frozen from recalling what had often been traumatic events, resorted to the gratuitous scratching, muttering, or wincing that struck them belatedly as necessary movement.

In such an egocentric state, Stanislavsky's exhortation that actors question the motivation of their characters' actions could lend itself to the ridiculous. One of the legendary incidents occurred during the shooting of the film The Marathon Man, when Hoffman protested to director John Schlesinger that he had no motivation for a simple piece of action. Co-star Laurence Olivier blurted out: "Act, Dusty. Just act."

It was with such episodes in mind that Lewis, whose antagonism toward Strasberg was reflected in the title of one of his books, Method – or Madness?, quoted approvingly from Vera Solovyova, an early MKhAT player, then a teacher of Stanislavsky's system: "Stanislavsky practiced psychology," he cited Solovyova as having said, "Strasberg practices psychiatry. Stanislavsky's emotion came from the heart, Strasberg's comes from the kishkas [intestines]."

Adler, Meisner, and others who set up their own schools put it more politely, but their various teaching emphases (imagination, physical movement, or voice and body training) kept their distance from the excesses they saw in Strasberg's adaptation of Stanislavsky and from the derisive meanings the Method had taken on. Which was not to say they threw out the Moscow blueprint with the self-indulgence. In Clurman's opinion, they couldn't have if they wanted to. Writing 20 years after the fact in the New York Times Magazine, the co-founder of the Group observed that "by the year 1937 the ‘battle' of the Method had been won. By that time many theater schools had been set up... The Method was no longer a peculiarity of a few off-beat or off-Broadway actors." Another half-century later, 116 years after the lunch at the Slavyansky Bazar and despite one change of cooks after another, it remains the basic fare on the acting menu. RL

* Brando and De Niro were both Stella Adler students often associated with the Studio because of a few classes they audited there.