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

Theatre 45
Neil Patrick Harris played the title character—a transvestite East German rock singer who
alternates between male and female personalities—in the Broadway production of Hedwig and the
Angry Inch, which won the 2014 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. © Joan Marcus
natural, truthful, and emotionally vivid for the performer
and audience alike.
No country—not even Russia—has been as influenced
by Stanislavsky’s teaching as the United States.
His book was the basis of “The Method,” as developed
in The Group Theatre under Lee Strasberg during the
1930s, with Sanford Meisner, Stella Adler, and Elia
Kazan, and then the Actors Studio, which was founded in
1947 and soon thereafter came under Strasberg’s leadership,
which he maintained until his death in 1982. The
Studio dominated the New York acting community until
the end of the twentieth century, and it continues to this
day—now in both New York and Hollywood—under the
leadership, at time of writing, of Ellen Burstyn, Harvey
Keitel, and Al Pacino.
Acting from the Outside
Although Stanislavsky focused on inner life, he also
insisted on actors employing external means to create
their characters. Stanislavsky had begun his own theatrical
career, in fact, as a highly technical performer. Born
into an aristocratic family, he had performed in plays,
operettas, and operas from the age of six, often in large,
fully equipped theatres that his family had built in both
their Moscow home and their country
estate. Eventually, he published
another book (also in English)
entitled Building a Character. Like
Quintilian, he prized true emotion
but also recognized the necessity
for rational control in performance,
and in the second book (both have
subsequently been retranslated and
published as An Actor’s Work) he
mainly writes about external acting
techniques. “Feeling . . . does not
replace an immense amount of work
on the part of our intellects,” he
writes, after which he closely examines
elocution, resonance, and rhetorical
phrasing. “Begin the speech
quietly,” he advises his readers at
one point. “Speak slightly louder
after the first line, the next line
louder still, until you reach forte.
If you increase power step by step,
you will ultimately reach forte-fortissimo.”
Elsewhere he explains that
“upward inflections can be of definite
shapes and heights: in intervals
of a third, a fifth, or an octave.” It is hard to imagine acting
instructions more “technical” than these.
By the middle of his career, Stanislavsky had even discarded
emotion memory from his system, replacing it with
a focus on physical action as the key to truthful acting.
He began to reproach his actors for excessive wallowing
in their own emotion: “What’s false here? You’re playing
feelings, your own suffering, that’s what’s false. I need to
see the event and how you react to that event, how you fight
people—how you react, not suffer. . . . To take that line . . .
is to be passive and sentimental. See everything in terms of
action!”* Even Stanislavsky understood that technical mastery
is at least one critical part of career success in acting.
Actors can feel emotions all they want, but they also must
be heard and understood in the back row. They must also
fulfill the basic expectations of the text—that, for example,
Prometheus be seen as passionate, Juliet as romantic, and
Monsieur Jourdain as comical. Beyond that, a professional
actor should be able, at times, to amuse, electrify, delight,
seduce, and thrill a paying audience—not just be heard and
seen by them. And that requires the level of trained and
perfected skills called “virtuosity.”
* Goldman, Michael, The Actor’s Freedom: Toward a Theory of
Drama, New York: Viking Press, 1975, page 92.