Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

44 Chapter 3 The Actor
Acting from The Inside:
The Stanislavsky Legacy
The American public first encountered Stanislavsky’s
acting philosophy through his 1936 book An Actor
Prepares, which declares that “Our prime task is . . . to
create the inner life of the character.” We can do this,
Stanislavsky says, by “bringing our own individual feelings
to it, endowing it with all the features of our own
personality.”
By “inner life” Stanislavsky meant all the messy,
unruly aspects of our personalities that we typically
hide—or try to hide—from our outward appearances:
anger, love, fear, confusion. But how can actors show
these internal parts of themselves on stage? If they
overdo it, the performance can seem fake. If they hide
their emotions away, they can seem robotic and uninteresting.
Stanislavsky’s ingenious solution was to
suggest that the actor must base his or her performance
on the pursuit of the character’s task (in Russian,
zadacha, which can also be translated as “problem”
or “objective”). The character’s task is quite different
from the actor’s. The actor who plays Juliet may
be hoping for a standing ovation from the audience,
but her character’s goal is to win Romeo’s love—and,
at other times, to win her father’s respect, her friar’s
blessing, and her nurse’s assistance. By concentrating
on winning her character’s tasks instead of simply
being seen as a great actress, Stanislavsky discovered,
the actress can lose her stage fright, throw herself into
her character, and convincingly represent Juliet as a
real and whole person rather than simply presenting
her as a fictional—though admirable—Renaissance
teenager. And all those messy emotions became disciplined
without disappearing: they emerged in the sincere
efforts of the actor and character, and thus became
more natural and authentic.
Stanislavsky was not the first person to propose this
strategy, but he was the first to turn it into an organized
system. By focusing on motivations, he found a way to
lend dignity and purpose to staged action: “Everything
that happens onstage must occur for some reason or
other. When you sit there, you must also sit for a reason,
not merely to show yourself off to the audience,”
he declared.
Stanislavsky provided many directives within this
basic belief. He asked actors to enter a “circle of solitude”
to avoid shamelessly playing to the audience, and
urged them to maintain a deep concentration on the other
actors onstage: “[Your] tasks are . . . directed toward the
other actors, not to the audience,” he proposed. He established
the concept that the play’s text was accompanied
by a profound “subtext” of meanings hidden beneath its
lines, which would be revealed unconsciously by actors
when they concentrated on their tasks and the characters
around them. He despised mere theatricality, in which
actors would show off their theatrical gimmicks to seek
audience approval. Today, we still talk of actors “showing
off” or “chewing the scenery.” In these moments we
are agreeing with Stanislavsky: we prefer truth over virtuosity
for its own sake.
Stanislavsky was deeply, almost obsessively, concerned
with the actors’ emotions. From the writings
of nineteenth-century French psychologist Théodule
Armand Ribot, he had learned that “all memories of past
experiences are recorded by the nervous system and . . .
may be evoked by an appropriate stimulus.” So in his
early years he experimented with recalling his own past
emotional states and developed an acting technique now
called emotion memory (or “emotional recall” or “affective
memory”) in which mentally substituting remembered
situations from his own life would allow him to
reach the emotional levels the play required. By this
method, Stanislavsky sought to make his own acting
Konstantin Stanislavsky in the role of Vershinin in his 1901 production of
Chekhov’s The Three Sisters at the Moscow Art Theatre. © RIA Novosti/Alamy