The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

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 theater] are lies, I know I do not need any of them. But if they were true, then I would do this and this, and I would behave in this manner.”