The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

But an actor could not simply leap to ya yesm. This was Stanislavski’s other major principle. If a role “is impossible to own … at once, then one must put it together bit by bit, using various elements for its construction.” Instead of focusing on playing the entire role of Hamlet, an actor could instead see the role as a series of “bits” and focus on accomplishing each of these bits as truthfully as possible. The creative process could also be broken down into its constituent parts, and then put back together in a way that would give you a reliable path to experiencing.

The first was that the division of the role into bits allows actors to be present in the moment. By focusing everything on the immediate, Stanislavski found that he was “drawing my attention away from what was happening … beyond the black and terrible hole of the proscenium arch.” This led in turn to the interrelated ideas of concentration and attention, which, when developed, would help the actor focus her “entire physical and spiritual nature … on what is going on in the soul” of the character, creating what he would eventually call public solitude, the art of appearing as if you do not realize you are being watched.

Concentration was as much a capacity as it was a state to Stanislavski, and, as Orthodox mystics and yogis agreed, it could be trained through exercises. Take a coin and put it on a table. This is your object of attention. Eventually, these objects will not need to be tangible. Anything you focus on, real or imagined, literal or conceptual, is an object. But back to the coin. Sit, relax, breathe. Explore the coin. What year was it minted? Is there dirt on it? Little imperfections? See where it has been worn smooth, where the green of zinc or oxidized metal becomes visible. Explore the coin so closely that you could describe it down to the tiniest detail from memory. Most of the rest of the world has now fallen away. You have created a circle of attention. The circle is tiny, encompassing but one little coin. Now you can expand it. You could, for example, make it as large as the table on which the coin rests, exploring the table in as much detail as you explored the coin. If you can accomplish this, perhaps you can expand the circle again and, when ready, yet again, always taking into account every new detail there is to notice. Perhaps, like Stanislavski, you could turn on a few lamps in your room and make whatever each lamp illuminates a different circle of attention. Remember: The audience is almost always outside the circle, in the darkness, in the realm of things to be ignored.

But attention was not enough, Stanislavski realized. Actors need imagination as well. They needed to have the capacity to “believe in everything that takes place on the stage.” He would later dub this difficult and beautiful choice that every actor must make the Magic If. The Magic If is a state of radical imaginative empathy in which “the actor passes from the plane of actual reality into the plane of another life, created and imagined by him.” Stanislavski envisioned an actor saying to himself, “I know [the elements of theat...

Stanislavski felt that believing in the given circumstances could also help actors to experience their roles instead of merely performing them.

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.

Hamlet likely marks the first time that Stanislavski put together several key concepts of the “system.” Having already realized that a script could be divided into bits and that characters had a supertask, a sverkhzadacha, he next realized that each character’s bit had its own zadacha: a little step taken, often unsuccessfully, toward the character’s ultimate goal. Zadacha means both “task” and “problem.” It is a thing that a character needs that is important enough to demand actions. Those actions are then generally phrased as infinitive verbs (“I want to _____”). To take a mundane example, if your problem is that you are thirsty, then your action might be to get a glass of water. Zadachi were not psychological to Stanislavski. They were the immediate actions that needed to be accomplished to move the character closer to their goal. Change the interpretation of a bit’s task/problem or its action, and you changed how dialogue was delivered. Try saying a simple line like “that’s quite a dress, where did you get it?” What is the action behind the line? Perhaps you want to flatter the listener, or to degrade them. Perhaps you want to model yourself after them. All of these would flow from different tasks/problems. You’ll know you’ve found the right one when it moves your character closer to their supertask. Correctly defined, the zadacha acted as a lure, coaxing ever reluctant feeling from its hiding place. There were other lures, of course, including affective memory and the...

In order to encourage the imagination, actors would bring in songs, or short stories, or images, and create whole performance pieces out of them, called études. At other times, the actors would work on finding inner truth using improvisation. Suler would make up scenarios and the actors would all have to behave as if that scenario were true without overdoing it, concentrating on the simple tasks that lay before them. They might repeat a scenario many times over the course of days or even weeks, adding new circumstances, or new problems for the actors to solve. These improvisations could grow quite elaborate. In one, the studytsi all played workers in a tailor’s shop, with their specific jobs assigned to them by Suler. At first they focused on accurately portraying their various jobs, but soon little scenes began to grow out of the busy fifteen-person scrum.

“The first thing Mme Ouspensk[aya] asked us was to get up and walk,” he wrote. A student simply walking around the room with no other guidance would become self-conscious, and as they realized they were being observed, this simple act of moving naturally would become impossible. Next, she asked them to walk while thinking about something. Immediately, the class saw the improvement: Having a purpose made natural behavior easier to create, even while you were being watched. “Always have a reason/problem,” Strasberg noted her saying. An actor needed “a cause for appearing on the stage.”

Always show less, and the imagination of the audience will magnify it.”

It is also likely that from his teaching we get “the beat” as a term of art in acting and writing. Stanislavski called a character’s basic unit of action a “bit.” When the task/problem changes, a new bit begins. Line the bits up, and you have the basic shape of your role, what Stanislavski called the throughline of action. When you feel overwhelmed, all you have to do is focus on the bit immediately in front of you. Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya both used this term. Owing to their thick Russian accents, however, “bit” was heard as “beat.”

Meyerhold’s methods, based entirely on the actor’s body and separated from any notions of psychological realism, reached a kind of pure, physical theatricality.

And what training! “I’ve never seen anything like it: three or four forms of acting work, dancing, acrobatics, plastique, gymnastics … Their voice work is marvelous, really related to the theatre. I’ve never seen it done before.” She sat in on classes in Meyerhold’s biomechanics technique and “saw feats of diction performed by boys and girls eighteen and twenty, such as no actor I’ve heard can do … They juggle with sounds.” She was also impressed that they trained their actors to be citizens of the world, studying “Marxism, dialectic materialism, social problems, all those things.” When they visited the theaters themselves and saw their elevator stages and densely packed costume closets, “Lee Strasberg and I nearly died.”

Stanislavski spoke to her about the value of imagination, how it allowed the actor to live within the given circumstances, which in turn gave you the where, the how, and the what that allowed you to shape the character. He began to test her imagination. “Just do a few things and put a plot around it,” he instructed her. Adler contrived a quick scene. She looked out the window, saw something of deep emotional significance, went to a desk to sign a letter, then got her hat and coat to leave. Three simple actions, connected by a sketched-in given circumstance, leading to an emotional reality. Action and imagination could bring you to emotion, she realized. You didn’t need to take an exercise to do it.

The job of the actor became clearer: All you had to do was move from action to action within the given circumstances. Your scene partner did the same. Conflict arose when characters’ task/problems were mutually exclusive.

The actors created études in which they had to take three sounds or words and link them in a scene. They spoke in gibberish and created whole scenes out of found images. Kazan also focused relentlessly on action. Lou Gilbert, a member in those early years, recalled Kazan giving an actor the line “How are you? Imagine finding you here.” As the actor repeated the line again and again, Kazan fed him new actions—to belittle, to frustrate, to sympathize—demonstrating, as Stella had, how changing the action could shift what a line meant.

Its characters aren’t always sure how—or whether—to express themselves. Instead they falter, they pause, they stammer and trail off, they allow their use of props to convey their hidden feelings and desires.

In one class in the 1970s, a student who needed to see a lake in Switzerland for an exercise mentioned that she had in fact been to Switzerland and seen the nation’s lakes. “Then put your lake in Morocco,” Adler replied. “You must get away from the real thing, because the real thing will limit your acting and cripple you.”

We don’t pre-plan moments. We have them. We don’t play emotions. We have them.”

The idea that individuals are free only insofar as they are enmeshed in a network of obligations mirrors the place of an actor in the rehearsal process. Actors are individuals, but their job exists only in relationship to other artists within the larger apparatus of a production. If they focus solely on themselves and their individual needs, the whole machine could easily break down. To the Method’s critics its approach fomented insurrection against a production’s proper social order. An actor who won’t commit to a choice is neither particularly professional nor a good collaborator. Actors who need to “really feel” what they are doing before they can do it could hold up a production for endless amounts of time.

As Tennessee Williams told Elia Kazan when they worked on A Streetcar Named Desire, not all art exists to make a point. Sometimes, art’s job is to poetically dramatize a truth about the human condition.

Looking at this new world, it can seem that the Method is dead, or perhaps a permanent invalid, wasting away. But as in ancient Greek myths, it has instead turned into a constellation in our night sky, always watching over us, its ideas of truth and art too powerful to shake. Go to many rehearsal halls in America and you’ll see a process divided in equal fourths into work around a table, staging, refining, and tech. The director and actors will talk about beats and structure a scene by its actions, will try to create staging that is informed by the characters and their needs. Visit a scene study class in America and you’ll likely hear the teacher ask the student some variation of “What does your character want? What is in their way? What are you doing to get it?” You’ll see them try to activate the mind, will, and feelings of the actor. You’ll hear them say the words “given circumstances.” You’ll hear actors alternate between the third person and first when discussing their characters. If their bag is open to view, you might see a copy of Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting there, or Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares. You’ll hear them talking about being present in the moment, or really listening to their scene partner, or the steps they’re taking to stop indicating so damn much. Open a newspaper—if there are still newspapers where you live—and read the reviews of films. See how they judge a performance by whether it feels true, like a reflection of our lives and souls. You can ...

So what is going on for actors during a performance? Konijn’s study argues that they experience “task emotions,” or the feelings associated with and provoked by doing their job. They have emotional responses to being onstage, to being connected to their scene partner, or to getting the right response from the audience, rather than the feeling of being in Denmark in winter, worried about a ghost in a full suit of armor wandering the castle’s battlements.

Perhaps something else is also going on in the moments we associate with perezhivanie. Perhaps actors experience what jazz musicians feel during a great solo, or what writers feel when the words seem to really flow out of them. Perhaps what they are experiencing is what Stanislavski was originally trying to find: inspiration. The feeling of being inspired is difficult to quantify, and isn’t limited to the arts. Athletes talk about being in the zone, or really seeing the ball, those moments when the world drops away and they reach some previously undiscovered level of their abilities.