Stanislavsky in America: an actor's workbook

Stanislavsky in America

Stanislavsky in America explores the extraordinary legacy that Konstantin Stanislavsky’s system of actor-training has left on acting in the US. Mel Gordon outlines the journey of Stanislavsky’s theories through twentieth-century American history, from the early US tours of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) to the ongoing impact of “The System” on modern American acting. This fascinating study by a leading theatre critic and practitioner provides hundreds of original acting exercises, used by the pivotal US figures who developed his teachings, such as Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Bobby Lewis. By going back to these primary sources, Gordon cuts through the myths and misapprehensions which have built up over time. Part memoir and part practical guide, Stanislavsky in America is an essential resource for anyone wanting to understand Stanislavsky’s work and his relationship with American theatre. Mel Gordon is Professor of Theater at University of California, Berkeley. His previous books include The Stanislavsky Technique: Russia (1988) and Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Biomechanics: Revolutionary Acting in Soviet Russia (1996) (co-written with Alma H. Law).

Stanislavsky in America An Actor’s Workbook

Mel Gordon

First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2010 Mel Gordon All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gordon, Mel. Stanislavsky in America : a workbook for actors / Mel Gordon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Method (Acting) 2. Theater – United States – History – 20th century. 3. Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 1863–1938–Influence. I. Title. PN2062.G66 2009 792.02’8 – dc22 ISBN 0-203-86877-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-49669-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-49670-5 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-86877-3 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-49669-8 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-49670-4 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-86877-5 (ebk)

To Slava Tskuerman and Nina V. Kerova, my dear friends and great artists. They were the first Russians to inform me that the true work of Stanislavsky could be found only in the studios and stages of New York City and in the backlots of independent Hollywood.

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface

viii ix

1

The Stanislavsky System

1

2

American Laboratory Theatre: Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya

16

3

The Group Theatre

40

4

Russian Émigré Teachers

79

5

The Actors Lab in Hollywood

114

6

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio

125

7

Stella Adler

150

8

Bobby Lewis

165

9

Sandy Meisner

176

Appendix: Studio programs Selected bibliography Index

185 186 189

Acknowledgments

Over the years, undergraduate students from my New York University and University of California, Berkeley courses provided much help in obtaining unpublished documents, classroom descriptions, and personal interviews. Among the most devoted – and valiant – were Isha Beck, Cathy Bergart, Jeannie Collins, Tiffany Fraser, Sheila Marie Gordon, David Jacobson, Lucy Lawrence, Brandon Plush, Elany Portafekas, Kris Ryan, Steve Schub, Ashley Weber, and Barbara Wolkoff. My research was greatly enriched because of their patience and sometimes superhuman efforts. More than anyone, Robert Ellermann guided my attempt to accurately preserve this uncharted and emotionally fraught history. His passionate and practical knowledge of the Stanislavsky Technique always pointed me in the proper directions. What is most valuable in this book should be attributed to him.

Preface

Konstantin Stanislavsky spent most of New Year’s Day 1923 imagining what America must be like. Five days out of Cherbourg, the RMS Majestic carried sixty-two members of Europe’s famed Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) to New York City, the international Jazz-Age metropolis. Stanislavsky wiled away the day, jotting down dreamy prognostications of the futuristic city – it would be filled with towering skyscrapers, surrounded by glass sidewalks. Its New World denizens would be in a permanent hyperactive miasma from morn to dusk. The rest of the cast, regulated to second-class cabins, gossiped about the possibility of aeroplane transport, landing on the rooftops of Manhattan’s high-raise business edifices. The American conclusion of the 1923–24 tour, however, was unlike any previous MAT venture and carried many risks. Its 1906 and 1922 seasons in Central and Western Europe brought the company phenomenal acclaim and financial rewards, but Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Zagreb, and Paris had substantial colonies of Russian-speakers and an art-hungry press. In the United States, there was neither. The Vilna-born impresario Morris Gest assured the MAT Board of Directors and Stanislavsky that America would indeed be a hospitable destination. He included himself and New York’s one million Yiddishspeaking immigrants as true Russians. And the irrepressible American producer reminded the theatre that he had already achieved sensational commercial success with Nikolai Balieff’s Chauvre-Souris, the Russian exile revue troupe, earlier that year. The MAT and its Artistic Director desperately needed hard currency to survive Lenin’s limited free-market New Economic Policy and time to adjust to the changing tastes of the Soviet public. And as soon as the papers were signed in the spring of 1922, Gest promoted the tour in the New York press. He later crowed that the MAT season had attained the largest advance sales in Broadway’s history.

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Despite immense organizational and technical problems, the American tour proved to be one of the landmarks of Stanislavsky’s career. A cultural frenzy accompanied the MAT players in every city – especially in New York, where their engagement had to be extended several times. Yet for all of their oversized expectations, neither the Russian troupe nor its American promoter could guess that the MAT tour would be the font of one of the most significant – if subterranean – cultural transmigrations in world history. Within a generation, it would lead to a novel Russian–American concoction: modern acting on the Broadway stage and a new performance style for its faraway but growing challenger: the Hollywood film.

First impressions From January 1923 until April 1924, the MAT performed 380 performances of thirteen plays in twelve American cities. Theatre critics did not just love the MAT productions, they fawned over them. Some knew about the artistic sensation from the scholarly and journalistic writings of Hiram Motherwell, Huntley Carter, and Oliver Saylor but the enthusiastic descriptions and shiny color plates in their books seemed overblown. Russia, for most Americans, was a place of gloom, chaotic violence, revolution, counter-revolution, and famine. The MAT performances, discounting Gest’s manic boosterism, however, jolted the play reviewers into a stratosphere of wonderment. Alexander Woollcott, the witty and cynical arbitrator of Broadway taste, wrote in Vanity Fair (March 1923): “Never before had I seen whole performances so good, whole plays made to come true on the stage by a group of actors who not only play well but who play well together.” In The New York Tribune (February 27, 1924), Heywood Braun declared that Woollcott’s musical colleague at the New York World should have appraised Vassily Kachalov’s enunciation and delivery as songs spoken in a “universal tongue.” The pristine intelligibility of his Russian-language acting had “the house running with laughter and in a continuous state of amusement.” Even L.W., the anonymous reporter for the conservative New York Herald (November 23, 1923), confessed: “As one who had never attended the performances out of sheer patriotism and disgust at bellicose Russian artism, we hereby eat dirt. For us, at any rate a new standard of acting for those fed upon the American stage, to understand what heights this art can reach. It is impossible to convey, in a meager and hurried description of this sort the juicy, full ripe nature of the interpretive ability of these players.” And so it went for sixteen months.

Preface xi

Afterthoughts Commercial deals of all sorts were peddled before Stanislavsky. The MAT’s Czar Fyodor Ivanovich sparked an interest among some New York movie moguls but the Russian director demurred after a few meetings. The producers required an additional backstory of young lovers for their script. A group from Actors’ Equity proposed a series of public lectures given by the master himself. In Boston, Stanislavsky agreed to write his autobiography for Little, Brown and Company. The result was the 1926 best seller My Life in Art, a chronology of personal anecdotes that glossed over the actual meaning and concrete explication of Stanislavsky’s System. Vanity Fair and Theatre Magazine separately recommended the creation of an “American Art Theatre.” After all, there was equal histrionic talent on Broadway to match the MAT’s and now proven audiences for cultivated theatre art. The New York critic Ludwig Lewisohn proclaimed: “It would not be difficult for us to establish half-a-dozen theatre ensembles each of which could rival the famous Russian one.” All that was missing was the will and a patient director. But his assertion went unheeded for some time.

The MAT audiences The overall American reception stunned Stanislavsky. He was even invited to President Calvin Coolidge’s White House before the MAT finished its final Washington performance. In European capitals, the Art Theatre had easily won over the local critics and intellectuals. But in New York, it also attracted a boundless stream of curious or enchanted spectators. What’s more, the vast majority of them could not comprehend a single Russian word – other than the lyrics from the cabaret hit Ochi Chornyie (“Dark Eyes”). Of course, there was Manhattan’s theatregoing sophisticates. Yet how many of them could fill the show-after-show evenings? The MAT’s repertoire must have had another appeal to other audiences. Some of Gest’s promises were on target. One could hear ripples of excited whispers in the upper balconies of the Al Jolson Theatre and Imperial Theatre during the company’s two runs. But these were more likely to be in Yiddish than in Russian or English. The MAT was drawing huge crowds of immigrant Jews from their enclave in the Lower East Side. True, the politics of these big-city onlookers swerved sharply to the left and Russia, “One-Sixth of the Earth,” was acknowledged as the “workers’

xii Preface motherland.” But the MAT plays themselves were pre-revolutionary with barely an incipient Bolshevik phrase or theme. Other aspects of the MAT – its detailed realism, serious dramatics, costumed historicism – may have fascinated these subscribers to like-minded Yiddish theatre ensembles and amateur clubs. Yet assimilated Jews, such as the director David Belasco and financier Otto Kahn, also whole-heartedly welcomed and supported the Russian enterprise. (Box office receipts could not have been foremost in their minds. Gest’s quixotic endeavor incurred sizeable monetary loses.) Maybe, peculiar, rarely articulated factors animated the Jewish-American fervor.

“The Russian soul” The Stanislavsky System of acting was uniquely Russian – even in ways that its founders did not intend. Stanislavsky had foraged through Western European sources for the biographical and scientific keys that would unlock the mysteries of great acting. Leopold Sulerzhitsky, his First Studio partner, borrowed psychophysical exercises from the ancient Indian practice of yoga. Yet all their theatrical discoveries and innovations were designed to school Russian actors to perform before Russian audiences. Czarist and Soviet censors strictly delimited what could be spoken on Russian stages but they could not control or prevent the internal workings of the performers. The clandestine thoughts and feelings of Russians, or Inner Monologue, were normally expressed in other nonverbal ways – in smirks, darting stares, headshakes, sustained pauses, and sighs. Stanislavsky’s Chekhovian productions and Suler’s First Studio performances presented this Inner Monologue as an authentic means of scenic communication. Behind the texts of the MAT productions was another, more truthful human world: expressions of the hidden “Russian soul.” All cultures have established an ingrained mechanism to tamp down prohibited emotional reactions or ideas but in Russia, Inner Monologue was a paramount feature of socialization. A person could only “bare his soul” under certain recognized conditions, such as during a vodkafuelled tête-à-tête. Otherwise, good Russians had to suppress their everyday private thinking, beliefs, and impulses. Exposure of them, however, took place in the vocal cords and in minute muscular displays on the face and body. Stanislavsky labeled this a manifestation of Subtext and used it as a Russian acting device. In the United States, ordinary men and women who constantly concealed their inner thoughts or desires were considered unnatural or

Preface

xiii

even psychologically impaired. There was rarely a need or purpose to restrict one’s opinions or mask one’s private self – with the exception of two classes of people: Jews and homosexuals. Cloaking their true identities from strangers was a learned or self-taught course in physical or vocational protection. On the outside, they looked like everyone else; internally their minds flooded with covert Inner Monologues. America’s Jews and homosexuals naturally behaved like MAT characters. They were crypto-Russians. This may account for New York’s secondary responses to the MAT tour. Long after the troupe returned to Europe and Stanislavsky continued to be deferentially referenced, there were also practical attempts to duplicate his work in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. Nowhere outside of Russia did this occur. Richard Boleslavsky’s American Laboratory Theatre attracted a wide variety of acting students. But Jews and homosexuals formed a special corps in the school. Their personal devotion to the Stanislavsky System would take shape as future teachers and robust advocates of it. Although teaching had always been accorded a high professional status among traditional Jews, in no other art form can one find such an overwhelming preponderance of foreign-born Jews or JewishAmerican educators. Among the seventy-five most prominent instructors of the Stanislavsky Technique in America, forty-three were ethnically Jewish; eleven Russian non-Jews (two of whom, because of fluency in Yiddish or an altered genealogy, were rumored to have vestal Jewish backgrounds); and twenty-one Gentile Americans. Gay men and lesbians, although often closeted, unaffectedly emerged in all three national categories of Stanislavsky teachers.

Across America Few American spectators of the MAT or students from the American Lab planned to become trainers of the System. Many did so in order to create MAT-like ensembles or because their acting careers had come to a halt. (The fact that they did not want to be known solely as acting teachers probably enhanced the efficacy of their work.) Through the twenties and thirties, interest in the Stanislavsky System among young American actors rapidly grew. One year after the master’s death in 1938, eleven of the twenty-five New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles acting studios advertising in Theatre Arts Monthly were Stanislavsky-based – and eight of them were headed by Russians or publicized their East European roots. These were Andrius Jilinsky’s Actors Workshop, the Bulgakov School of Theatre

xiv Preface Art, Lasar Galpern’s Chamber Art Studio, Chekhov Theatre Studio, Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop (with Stella Adler as the principal acting teacher, and Raikin Ben-Ari and Edith Chile as guest instructors), the Goodman School of Drama (led by Maurice Gnesin and David Itkin), The Group Theatre Studio, the Maria Ouspenskaya School of Dramatic Arts, The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre (acting program led by Sandy Meisner), New Theatre School (under the direction of Michael Gordon “of the Group Theatre” and Brett Warren), and the Tamara Daykarhanova School for the Stage. In 1939, there was even three anti-Stanislavsky Russian workshops promoting their philosophies in New York City: Anatol Bendukov’s Drama Circle, the Kommisarjevsky School of Acting, and Boris Marshalov’s Studio of the Theatre. What was largely an indigenous correlative for specific Russian problems in theatre and stage production fermented into a Russian–American brew. Exactly how this came about has been the focus of dozens of scholarly books and doctoral dissertations. In them, Stanislavsky’s influence on American stage practice has been usually attributed to the New World’s weak acting traditions or the death of its stock companies. Some of these studies have concerned themselves with the theatrical similarities between Russia and America that led to their mutual acceptance of the Stanislavsky System. The historical truth is quite otherwise and exceedingly more complicated. Artistic chance, the persuasive power of individual personalities, social climate, and even technological advances must be factored into the reasons why Russian breakthroughs in actor-training successfully migrated westward, leaping over Central and Western Europe. The Stanislavsky System was not dialectically determined to be the basis of modern American acting. But somehow it did happen.

1

The Stanislavsky System

I have lived a variegated life, during the course of which I have been forced more than once to change my most fundamental ideas. Konstantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art, 1926

The “Photographic” revolution in theatre The invention of the photograph produced an enormous shock in the thinking of nineteenth-century intellectuals and artists. From the development of the camera in 1839 to the end of that century, it was becoming clearer that there was another way of viewing the world. “Reality” could be captured on a chemically treated pane of glass or sheet of paper. In painting and literature, a new and more objective treatment of human behavior soon became the vogue for Europe’s middle-class patrons. In addition, the failed social revolutions of the industrial giants France and Germany further diluted the artistic balms of Romanticism and the melodrama. By the 1870s, scientific methodology and political unrest were leading the arts into a “photographic,” or Naturalist phase. In the performing arts, as always, external transformations occurred more slowly. Although Émile Zola, the leader of the literary Naturalists, declared in 1874 that the French theatre would become Naturalist or cease to exist, few directors or dramatists paid the radical novelist and journalist much heed. After all, it was widely assumed that the very function of ballet, opera, and theatre was to provide fantasy solutions – within accepted entertainment formats – for the average spectator living in a formless and disordered universe. But growing social expectations among the intelligentsia and the subliminal popularity of the photograph changed that. Already in 1861, Georg II, the German Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, attempted to create an ensemble of serf-actors, who were made to wear

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Stanislavsky in America

actual or extremely realistic replicas of historical dress. Artifacts from previous epochs, like twenty-pound swords and shields, replaced lightweight hand props. Piles of dirt, tree trunks, stuffed carcasses of animals, and other natural obstacles on the stage floor made normal scenic negotiation difficult for the terrified performers but fascinating to watch. Saxe-Meiningen’s amateur actors moved and often sounded like soldiers and noblemen from antiquity and other eras. Like a photograph, little had to be faked or imagined by the performers or spectators. The play became an excuse to view human behavior of the past. Georg II had created theatre’s first time-machine. And within fifteen years, the Meiningen Players became the talk of Central and Western Europe. In Paris, André Antoine, a twenty-nine-year-old clerk with thoughts of a professional acting career, founded the Naturalist Théâtre Libre fourteen years after Zola issued his manifesto. As young playwrights began to produce Naturalist texts for the 373-seat theatre, so too did Antoine’s trademarked innovations began to appear. Live chickens, hanging slabs of beef (which invariably attracted real flies), stained sofas, and functioning bistros within the proscenium arch startled audiences accustomed to two-dimensional representations. More novel still were Antoine’s ideas on mise en scène. Performers were instructed to stand and speak anywhere on stage as if the audience ceased to exist. (A contemporary circus parody of the Théâtre Libre revealed a clown-Antoine standing with his back to the house. Suddenly the clown-Antoine turned to confront the spectators only to show another hairy, faceless image. The back of Antoine’s head was painted on both sides of the clown’s papier-mâché head mask.) While Antoine’s initial success and later notoriety helped launch similar-minded chamber theatres throughout Europe in the late 1880s and 1890s, a less offensive, stylistic offspring of Naturalism, realism, reigned in Scandinavia and the English-speaking world. In Great Britain and North America, mechanical improvements, especially in electric lighting, allowed audience members at huge playhouses to see detailed bodily expression in their leading actors as well as view the most minuscule objects in the super-realistic decor. Program notes often testified to the historical authenticity of the sets and furniture. Suddenly, the fact that the performer playing Marie Antoinette was actually wearing a corset from the eighteen-century queen’s boudoir took on a special theatrical interest. The entire stage now radiated with fascinating detail. The incandescent, carbon-filament lamp, perfected by Thomas Edison, made realism possible in the legitimate theatre. Technically more important, perhaps, was a perceptual (and unconscious) shift that was brought about through a competing medium – that of

The Stanislavsky System 3 the early cinema. When motion pictures became commercially viable in 1895 and 1896, theatregoers quickly learned to watch the enlarged facial images of the performers with greater care. Working without recorded sound in bright, natural lighting and necessarily separated from their intended audiences, film actors had to be judged according to a new means: facial expressiveness and the corporal ability to communicate emotional states.

Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko The son of a Russian industrialist, Konstantin Stanislavsky was certainly aware of the technological revolution emanating from the capitals of Western and Central Europe. Yet its effects, perceptual or otherwise, on the Moscow stage and acting were much less pronounced than in the democratic or semi-autocratic nations. Completely different factors were at play in the Russian-speaking world at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1897 when Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko founded the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) at the Slavansky Bazaar restaurant in the shadow of the Kremlin, the ever-present contradictions in Russian society had greatly intensified. Repressive edicts from the Czar’s advisors followed liberalizing legislation; measures to ease social tension went hand-in-hand with brutal (and sometimes disguised) oppression against moderate and radical bourgeois parties as well as minority groups – especially Jews, Poles, and Finns. The still-expanding Russian Empire, dubbed aboard “the prison house of nations,” was ready to fall. Any Russian theatre that went beyond simple divertissement and entertainment had to be political. Censorship then – and in the Soviet period – penetrated all levels of Russian culture and thinking. Seemingly innocent personal or historical remarks in a Russian play were assumed by audiences and censors alike to be references to the current regime. Stage productions of Shakespearean or classical drama that varied from the accepted canon could easily be interpreted as attacks on contemporary Russian society. A Romeo, for instance, who insanely attempts to climb Juliet’s tower only to begin his monologue with tears and shaking frustration meant something quite different to a Russian spectator than one from Paris, Buenos Aires, or Chicago. Nineteenth-century Russian actors – like their fellow novelists, painters, and philosophers – were frequently called “Lords of Thought,” because their stage activities and character interpretations communicated another, more powerful, social message to their disenfranchised or politically restrained audiences. A playwright and dramaturge, Nemirovich-Danchenko saw in Stanislavsky a talented and innovative young director; a more-or-less

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professional actor (having played some seventy-five parts) with strong journalistic appeal; and, perhaps most significantly, a rich source of funding for his “People’s” art theatre. For Stanislavsky, NemirovichDanchenko’s up-to-date literary background and refined production skills were something of a God-send. While these two disparate personalities succeeded in forming the Moscow Art Theatre (the People’s Art Theatre sounded too radical) during their Slavansky Bazaar rendezvous, each disappointed the other within the very first seasons of their unpleasant forty-year partnership. For one, Stanislavsky decided from the beginning that his family wealth would never be used to support their joint project. In addition, Stanislavsky’s restless – some said childish – artistic passion ran roughly against the polished grain of Nemirovich-Danchenko’s conservative, staid tastes. The major and ongoing quarrel between Stanislavsky and NemirovichDanchenko in fact revolved around their respective backgrounds and uncertain positions of authority within the MAT. As Stanislavsky freely admitted, he was always a poor student, having great difficulties concentrating and carrying through routine tasks. Only subjects that applied to Stanislavsky’s immediate goals stimulated his interests and boundless curiosity. His abstract knowledge of the world was chaotically formed. It was little wonder that Stanislavsky’s writings would later create confusion and misunderstanding. On the stage and in the classroom he proved to be a dynamic teacher. Yet facing a blank page, Stanislavsky felt stymied and blocked. Nemirovich-Danchenko, on the other hand, placed himself in the circle of Russia’s fin de siècle intelligentsia. Friendly with the major writers and dramatists of his day, Nemirovich-Danchenko was considered a protector of the playwright and his words. Stanislavsky’s theatrical concerns lay elsewhere. Stanislavsky the performer modeled his work on Tomasso Salvini, the emotionally provocative actor who embodied all the achievements – as well as excesses – of late Romanticism in the Italian theatre. According to Stanislavsky, Salvini “lived,” or experienced, the feelings of his characters. His movements and vocal responses always appeared fresh and unplanned. Even into old age, Salvini possessed a special power and full emotional range to engage his audiences magically and forcefully. The young Stanislavsky rejected the common notion that Salvini’s talent sprung from some divinely bestowed, innate gift. A step-by-step method that duplicated Salvini’s acting secrets had to exist. Stanislavsky’s notebooks were filled with such speculation. For his directing, Stanislavsky found an exemplar that was easier to imitate – Ludwig Chronegk, from Saxe-Meiningen’s company. In fact, Stanislavsky’s amateur theatricals at the Society of Art and Literature in

The Stanislavsky System 5 the 1880s and early 1890s outdid the most grandiose of the German’s extravaganzas. Stanislavsky’s basic formula was rather simple but eminently playable: treat all classic and epic spectacles in the detailed Naturalistic mode. Realistic-looking set pieces took their shape from the careful blending of historical artifacts and constructed facsimiles. Stage lighting convincingly resembled the natural and artificial illumination of the street and castle. In the rowdy crowd scenes of Othello and The Merchant of Venice, each figure of the Society’s walk-ons was given a specific character and action à la Saxe-Meiningen. This novel attention to the supernumeraries never failed to please Moscow’s audiences (although years later Nemirovich-Danchenko found such compelling direction more akin to circus antics and satirically labeled them a product of a disease called “Stanislavskitis”). Stanislavsky himself differed from Western European Naturalists only in the treatment of the principle roles, among which he invariably cast himself. Here Stanislavsky pushed far beyond the traditional stage clichés of the competing Maly Theatre and the foreign touring companies that annually played Moscow during the Lenten season. The Society’s characters were frequently based on living models. This kind of verisimilitude meant implanting external expressive gestures of real people into Stanislavsky’s stage creations. For example, Stanislavsky composed (or “hung”) his character of Othello on a princely-appearing Arab that he observed in a French cafe; his seventeenth-century Uriel Acosta was patterned after Rembrandt’s sketches of scholarly types seen in the Amsterdam ghetto as well as Jews in Czarist Odessa.

The Moscow Art Theatre In a sense, the MAT that Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko established in 1897 was the amateur theatre ideal. The four- or fiveweek rehearsal rush of the commercial stage was practically unknown in the MAT. Stanislavsky’s productions could be safely planned and rehearsed nine or ten months in advance. Sometimes whole years were taken up with preparations. Entire shows, occasionally, never opened or were performed in limited previews and then quickly dropped. In addition, like Saxe-Meiningen’s enlightened amateurs, the MAT was organized on the principles of a perfect ensemble – that is, company performers were cast according to a revolving plan. In the MAT’s dayto-day reality, however, the same set of starring actors played most of the leading parts. One unique aspect of the MAT was its artistic and financial structure. Borrowing from the chamber art theatre tradition of the Théâtre Libre,

6 Stanislavsky in America it produced modern and serious-minded plays that quickly attracted a feverishly loyal audience from Moscow’s intelligentsia and upper classes. (This, despite Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s intention to seek out middle and working-class spectators.) As a commercial venture, the MAT, more of less, triumphed. Although it reportedly sold every seat for every performance on a subscription basis, the MAT constantly required new funding and especially understanding – that is, generous – patrons, but so did the ballet and opera companies of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Moreover, few profit-making theatrical institutions survived the 1918 Revolution. Only those that depended on outside patronage fit into the Soviet models of public art. The success of the MAT in both its Czarist and Soviet periods was not unrelated to the cultural and psychological needs of its audiences. To a certain extent, the MAT was seen as an outré theatre despite its semi-official status. Stanislavsky’s first production in 1898, Czar Fyodor Ivanovich, elicited pre-production excitement because of the imminent censorship issue. Written in 1875 by Alexei Tolstoy, Czarist censors immediately read a present-day critique in the treatment of Russia’s sixteenth-century court. Only through Nemirovich-Danchenko’s able negotiation was the play released for the stage. Later the texts of Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky, as well as Nikolai Erdman and Mikhail Bulgakov in the 1920s and 30s, all suffered some form of mutilation from government bans. Censorship, of course, cannot stifle thoughts and feeling; in many cases, it sharpens them. Government suppression of speech only imposes a dichotomy between the spoken word and the internal ruminations of the speaker. Stanislavsky’s theatrical emphasis on his characters’ Subtext, or unspoken thoughts, was linked to this Inner Monologue. The touching realism of Chekhov’s plays, which Nemirovich-Danchenko and the playwright himself believed to be implicit in the scripted text, eerily worked with more conviction still on stage through Stanislavsky’s exploration of the characters’ hidden impulses and thoughts. Chekhov often disagreed with Stanislavsky’s approach, where moods and feelings were created through frequent and intense pauses – Stanislavsky added some one hundred of these in The Cherry Orchard alone. But the dramatist admitted belatedly that the MAT’s Naturalistic means of expression and moody rhythms produced a powerfully communicated stage presentation, even if the simple language of his plays was overlooked. It could be said that Stanislavsky’s second theatrical innovation, after his detail-filled direction, was in the application of the Inner Monologue to realistic playscripts. Curiously, spectators intuited political sentiments in the Subtext of the MAT’s productions even when Stanislavsky did not want them to.

The Stanislavsky System 7 During a 1904 production of Enemy of the People, for instance, revolutionary students interrupted Dr. Stockmann’s monologue on the immorality of majority or mob rule with applause and cheers. Feeling that they deliberately misinterpreted the speech’s meaning, Stanislavsky wanted to stop the production. (Similar problems arose in the Soviet era.) Ironic smiles, thought-filled silences, hesitant gestures, and downward glances – all the trademarks of the MAT’s style of acting – revealed a serious and often spiritual means of theatrical communication, but being nonverbal it risked sweeping misinterpretation.

The creation of the System During the initial heyday of the MAT, approximately 1899 to 1905, Stanislavsky taught no method of acting. It could be said that he hardly taught acting at all, except to tell inexperienced performers to concentrate on the designs on the side curtains rather than to gaze into the audience’s faces. By all accounts, there was no need for an intense regimen of actor-training, other than schooling in voice and movement. Stanislavsky’s performers, among the best in Russia, trusted his direction and did what the master requested of them. In the timehonored technique of Russian regisseurs, he instructed them on each gesture and movement. Problems of stage fright and growing stale with the constant repetition of performances were handled in hazardous ways. For example, the nervous excitement that overcame the MAT players at the opening of Chekhov’s The Seagull in 1898 was assuaged by the indigestion of valerian drops and frantic devotional prayers. Stanislavsky used no methodological approach to acting or directing before 1905. The acting System of Stanislavsky was created long after the MAT’s association with Chekhov’s realist plays. In fact, it was when Stanislavsky began to direct experimental and Symbolist dramas in 1906 and 1907, several years following Chekhov’s death, that he felt an overpowering need to invent a special training program for actors. This historical fact is one of the most crucial – and misunderstood – aspects of Western criticism regarding Stanislavsky’s System in Russia and America. Personally, at least since the days of studying Salvini’s Othello, Stanislavsky became obsessed with fashioning an empirical grid of acting rules. But in the early years of the MAT, his first consideration, naturally, was directorial. Yet, little by little, Stanislavsky the actor found himself plagued with unpredictable bouts of rigidity, inattention, and failing energies. The MAT’s celebrated European tour in 1906 brought about a complete crisis for the master. While his directing and acting

8

Stanislavsky in America

were highly praised by the foreign critics, the forty-three-year-old Stanislavsky felt frustrated and at a numbing loss. His thoughts wandered as he stood on stage; his characterizations, no matter how physically precise, grew weak. The fact that others in the MAT saw Stanislavsky’s predicament as a temporary, and even trivial, phenomenon made matters worse for him. It was during this time that Stanislavsky ascertained the special problems of the actor: inspiration and expression. Artists – whether playwrights, novelists, painters, architects, designers, or even stage directors – normally create just at those times they feel truly inspired. Only the performing artist must create on demand, on someone else’s time – for instance, six nights a week at 8:10 exactly. In addition, the actor alone does not see his labor at the moment he creates it. The performer’s expressive means – his body – is inseparable from his critical faculties. Therefore, unlike most other artists, the actor is dependent on others to direct him. Starting in the summer of 1906, Stanislavsky devoted the final part of his life to formulating solutions for the innate problems of inspiration and expression. Basically he believed that the proper stimulation of the actor’s mind would lead to a more truthful and deep style of onstage expression. Vacationing in Finland, he discovered that children playing on the beach, artists in the throes of intense activity, and lovers following their hearts’ inclinations – like writing love letters – all exhibited a similar, and peculiar, relaxed and purposeful quality that totally shut out the outer world. In this exalted frame of mind, enormous feats of the imagination were possible. Stanislavsky remembered that during his courtship days, when he was madly in love, everything about his acting markedly improved, especially his at times clumsy demeanor and inability to learn lines. He even gave off a certain “glow” like Salvini. Unfortunately, Stanislavsky’s “love-sickness” could not be faked or easily called up at will. Like a child’s inventive moods or a painter’s episodes of rapture, bolts of artistic inspiration for the actor abided no logical plan or timing. Stanislavsky called this special condition the Creative State of Mind. It would be his most significant finding and the core of his future System of acting. Reporting these revelations to his MAT colleagues and listening to their responses during the ensuing months proved baffling for Stanislavsky. He maintained that acting exercises could be found to unlock the psychophysical Creative State of Mind. Only the MAT’s handyman, Leopold Sulerzhitsky (nicknamed Suler) shared his excitement. The others, including Nemirovich-Danchenko, thought Stanislavsky

The Stanislavsky System 9 was reverting to an adolescent phase. After all, the MAT had become internationally known without such theories. Why make their theatre the subject of such potentially hared-brained ideas? Nonetheless, Stanislavsky persisted. A jack-of-all-trades and Tolstoyan, Suler taught Stanislavsky a number basic yogic exercises in relaxation and spiritual mediation that he learned on a Dukhabor commune in Canada. According to Hindu philosophy, a major influence on Tolstoy’s thinking, prana, the essential life force, manifests itself most strongly in the hands, eyes, and breathe of humans. Stanislavsky saw prana and the Creative State of Mind as interlinked concepts. Together, Suler and Stanislavsky experimented with psychophysical exercises and études that were based on the Dukhabor’s practices. To the relief of the MAT regulars, Suler and Stanislavsky’s first test of their unorthodox rehearsal techniques resulted in failure. The Symbolist drama Drama of Life by the Norwegian Knut Hamsen was staged at the MAT in 1907 and very badly received. The play, which clearly called for a spiritual approach, seemed nearly unintelligible on the MAT stage. Under the direction of Stanislavsky and Suler, the actors concentrated solely on their hands and faces as they attempted to create various inner states. The result was a static, leaden, and physically awkward production. Their next presentations, Leonid Andreyev’s proto-expressionist The Life of Man and Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Bluebird fared much better as black or fantastical costuming allowed the performers to move freely while naturally emphasizing their manual and facial expressions. Finally in 1909, Stanislavsky declared that he was about to produce a play in a way that no play had ever been directed. He chose Ivan Turgenev’s realistic and somewhat turgid A Month in the Country. By chance, Stanislavsky had discovered two volumes in Russian translation of Théodule-Armand Ribot’s psychological treatise on Affective Memory. According to the turn-of-the-century French psychologist, emotional memories of past experiences often remain imprinted in the brain – but in a suppressed or acutely buried state – and can be stimulated only through a sensory recall of the event. That is, like the Creative State of Mind, these feelings cannot be summoned through a direct or intellectual demand; instead the five senses must be engaged to reawaken them. Stanislavsky and Suler felt that practice in Sense Memory could lead the actor to create real emotional states based on his personal memories. This controversial finding with their other successful acting discoveries slowly fell into an ordered primordial System. Experienced and first-time MAT actors who were cast in A Month in the Country became schooled in the newly defined techniques of Relaxation,

10 Stanislavsky in America Concentration, Nativity, Soul Radiation, and Affective Memory. The pauses and penetrating glances of the old MAT were to be filled now with a new and special personal intensity. All this was brought about through a lively means of character identification and improvisation in rehearsal. Stanislavsky cleared the proscenium of unessential furniture and objects to place a greater emphasis on the pure emotional web of the character’s spoken and silent feelings. Although Nemirovich-Danchenko feared for the worst, A Month in the Country unfolded seamlessly and to much acclaim. Once labeled the “House of Chekhov,” a theatre of moods and microscopic visual and auditory detail mirroring the actual life of its audiences, the MAT would soon be noted for Stanislavsky’s “psychological realism,” a spiritual and humane behaviorism that penetrated beneath the surface of most avant-garde or banal of play texts. Attempting to consciously parallel the experiences and feelings of the characters with their own, Stanislavsky’s System-trained performers appeared to “live” on stage. Their interactions and responses seemed fresh and startling, not elaborately pre-planned or carefully plotted. The actors’ feelings and thoughts arose sequentially moment by moment, rather than in conscious dramatic flares, followed by long “dead” spots in the action. And because of their inner preparations, finer and more detailed emotions registered on the faces of Stanislavsky’s performers. This allowed the MAT spectators to “read” their faces, despite the distance between them, more like motion-picture players in close-up than stage performers. Stanislavsky and Suler’s actors seemed “truthful.” In spite of Stanislavsky’s achievements in developing an acting technique, there was considerable resistance and even hostility among the MAT elite to his newfangled experiments. For one, many MAT actors, especially the older ones, found the training tedious and often mystifying. Stanislavsky’s current attitude toward the System sessions, which bordered on mania, was not helped by his maddening propensity to constantly forget the previous day’s lessons and assignments. Nemirovich-Danchenko, who made no secret of his professional mistrust of Stanislavsky’s inseparable companion, Suler, insured MAT members that classes in the System would be no more than “voluntary.” He was worried that both workshops and productions directed by Stanislavsky would quickly bog down in scientific or religious-like rhetoric and senseless game play. In addition, many feared that the System impeded the MAT’s primary goal: the seasonal presentation of plays within an uncertain financial and political climate. The survival of a permanent two hundred-person repertory company was always at stake. At the beginning of 1912, Stanislavsky formed a separate studio from the MAT to further his System investigations. Supported by

The Stanislavsky System 11 Stanislavsky out of his private earnings and headed by Suler, the First Studio, as it was later known, set out to uncover the enigma of compelling acting that perplexed Stanislavsky for over thirty years. Only young students were accepted into the Studio, and many of these were soon to become among the most important innovators of their revolutionary generation. These included Evgeni Vakhtangov, Alexander Dikki, Valentin Smishlayev, Vera Soloviova, Andrius Jilinsky, Michael Chekhov (the nephew of Anton Chekhov), Richard Boleslavsky, and Maria Ouspenskaya. What transpired in the First Studio classes was shielded from public view. Stanislavsky dreaded any kind of outside criticism and forbade the dozen or so Studio members from discussing his System with outsiders. Over the next few years, however, we know that the psychophysical work at the First Studio fell into distinct categories: Relaxation, Concentration, Creative Circle, Naïveté, Imagination, Affective Memory, Communication, and Rhythm. (A description of the First Studio training program, including sixty exercises, appears in my book The Stanislavsky Technique: Russia (New York: Applause, 1987).) How dominant any one aspect of the System was is difficult to assess. Each actor was encouraged to test his or her personal ideas with the others. And, as befitting a laboratory situation, emphasis on any single feature must have changed almost weekly. It was not until years later that violent disagreements over technique and theory, especially regarding the value of Affective Memory, split the Studio. Unlike Stanislavsky, most First Studio actors grew tired of the purely theoretical and investigative aspects of the System. They had joined the MAT or Suler’s group in order to become professional actors, not guinea pigs for some artistic research, however honored they must have felt at the time of their selection. Led by the energetic Boleslavsky and Vakhtangov, Studio members prepared a series of laboratory productions in 1912 and 1913. Replacing the MAT’s technical verisimilitude and frequent moody pauses with youthful sincerity and a simple rhythmic unfolding of scene and plot, the First Studio established its own style and fan base. Nemirovich-Danchenko and the MAT Board of Directors were so infatuated with Boleslavsky’s production of The Wreck of the Ship “Hope” that the entire First Studio was formally invited to rejoin its parent institution as an independent troupe. In 1914, Sushkevich and Suler created the First Studio’s milestone production, Cricket on the Hearth, an adaptation of the Charles Dickens’ story. This time, the Studio ensemble developed their dramatic characters with such strong personal identification and authenticity that Russian newspaper critics began to compare their work favorably with

12 Stanislavsky in America the mature MAT company. Many spectators, who purchased whole sets of First Studio photographic cards sold during the short intermissions, moreover, found them a great deal more appealing and emotionally truthful than the sixteen year-old MAT. The golden age of the First Studio and Stanislavsky’s experiment ended in 1916 with the tragic death of Suler. Other artistic directors, including Vakhtangov, followed in Suler’s lead but none satisfied Stanislavsky’s need for an uncritical collaborator. The development of his System was to fall completely in Stanislavsky’s hands.

The early Soviet period The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 divided the generally liberalminded MAT into various political factions. Some like Boleslavsky, Jilinsky, and Maria Germanova expressed their fierce anti-Soviet beliefs through immigration that ultimately carried Stanislavsky’s discoveries into exile. Others like Vakhtangov and Smishlayev openly welcomed the social upheaval and joined proletarian theatre schools to spread their versions of the System. Most of the MAT, including Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, developed a more cautious attitude, hoping to accommodate their lives and professions with the new government. As it turned out, the Moscow Soviet welcomed the MAT’s quiet, understated approach. The leaders of the Revolution hoped to gain international approval by demonstrating their tolerance toward the apolitical or “fellow traveling” cultural establishment of Old Russia. Also, turn-of-century bourgeois art, as exemplified by the MAT’s stage productions, held special personal appeal to many in the Soviet ruling class. Between 1918 and 1921, Stanislavsky publicly articulated the basis of his acting System. As a teacher in the Opera Section of the Bolshoi Theatre and in the journal-anthology Teatralnaya Kultura, the master finally outlined his philosophy and pioneering technique. Here, Stanislavsky preached that only the “emotional identification” with the character produced a powerful and “truthful” form of acting. The performer accomplished this by imagining the array of biographical details (including those not given in the text) necessary for a lifelike presentation of the character; emotionally experiencing the feelings of his character as they occur during the play through parallel Affective Memories; and embodying the physical and psychological adjustments called for by the director. According to Stanislavsky, this last category of adjustments became essential because the actor’s stirring of his Imagination and Emotional Memories often sparked believable characterizations but failed to satisfy the needs of the total production.

The Stanislavsky System 13 In the fall of 1921, Lenin declared a New Economic Policy (NEP). To counter the growing financial malaise and marketplace collapse brought about by the Russian Civil War and the collectivization doctrines of “War Communism,” limited forms of Capitalism returned to the infant workers’ republic. Although NEP solved the immediate problems of inflation and food scarcity, it also meant that the major theatres in Moscow were once again competing for box-office receipts to assure their day-to-day survival. During the winter months of 1921, the MAT opened its doors to a money-paying public of NEPmen and old intelligentsia. Since the Revolution, the previous MAT spectators, chiefly newly enfranchised proletariats, had received tickets paid for by the Soviet government and various trade unions. They irritated Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, however, with their utter lack of refinement, especially when they insisted on wearing their fur hats and overcoats in the MAT’s unheated house. Now experiencing poverty and hunger himself, Stanislavsky was forced to come back to the stage as a performer. And once again, the MAT reverted to its standard pre-Revolutionary repertoire. It reminded its apolitical and leisure-seeking audiences of a simpler time.

Did Stanislavsky really change his mind? During the four decades Stanislavsky led the MAT, he appeared to radically redirect the focus of his work with actors. Exactly what these renovations accomplished, why he created them, even what the means of the changes were became the central (and continuing) controversy for teachers of the Stanislavsky System. The fact that Stanislavsky did not – or could not – adequately explain the core reasons for the System’s modifications in his lifetime confused theatre practitioners in Russia and elsewhere. To a large degree, Stanislavsky’s alterations reflected the impulsive nature of his personality, his transformed role within the MAT, critical responses to his training techniques, and the political environment after the Revolution. Like a child, Stanislavsky found only enthusiasm or boredom in any given project. He abhorred stasis. Clearly, the energy supplied by his restive disposition, not artistic failures or scenic obstacles, mandated certain reformations in the MAT’s actor-training and theatrical experiments. Before the System emerged in 1909, Stanislavsky the actor created ninety-three parts on Moscow’s stages. For the most part, he built his characters through a “masking” process. That is, he began with physical appearance, gesture, and costuming. As a performer and director,

14 Stanislavsky in America Stanislavsky principally cared how the actor looked. These exteriors could rouse the mental essence of the character. By the turn of the century, Stanislavsky discovered that the plays of Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Chekhov called for a more internalized approach. The “secret music” of characters had to be laid bare. Still Stanislavsky’s most notable characters relied on physical traits. While developing an ugly or monstrous-looking persona, for instance, he slowly assimilated the hideous corporal features into the psychology of the part. Between 1910 and 1922, when the System was in its infancy, Stanislavsky added teaching to his directorial calling. He investigated the production of authentic emotion in acting. His concern centered on what the individual actor felt while he played a character. Stanislavsky dealt with one overriding issue: since the actor can only feel his own emotions, why should he pretend that they are someone else’s? When the MAT returned from America, Stanislavsky began his Table Period. From 1925 to 1928, he assumed the role of theoretician and enlightened regisseur. Sitting around a table, Stanislavsky treated his actors in a more cerebral fashion. Scripts could be excavated according to the characters’ intention. The MAT actors had to determine what their characters wanted and how they could overcome the obstacles to their yearnings. From 1931 to 1936, as Artistic Director and writer, Stanislavsky grew tired of the endless rehearsals and normally fruitless discussions with his performers. Essentially, he returned to his no-nonsense directorial roots. Plays had to erupt in Action. Stanislavsky wanted to know what the actor did on stage. Finally, in the last two years before his death in 1938, Stanislavsky took the role of a more imposing Artistic Director. He experimented with his Method of Physical Actions, which pushed the actor to discover how to do what the director needs. It paralleled Stalin’s position as a master bureaucrat and was in league with the Stakhonovite movement in Soviet industry. Once the System began, however, it is important to note that Stanislavsky never abandoned any of his technical discoveries although he often shifted the primacy of any one element. Relaxation, Concentration, Naïveté, Imagination, Affective Memory, Communication, Rhythm, Action, Script and Character Analysis, Given Circumstances, Sense of Truth, “Magic If,” Tempo-Rhythms, and Physical Actions were elements of the System that more or less co-existed with one another. Yet like a bank of electric light bulbs, any one – or line of lights – could be charged with a higher or lower intensity.

The Stanislavsky System 15 Stanislavsky the seeker appeared to always tinker with the arrangements or foundations of his System. But no aspect of it was ever jettisoned. His System and stage practice at the MAT progressed in accumulated layers. Had Stanislavsky lived beyond his seventy-five years, it is likely that he would have altered his thinking on acting yet again.

2

American Laboratory Theatre Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya

Be a tree, be a sled, Be a purple stool of thread, Be a storm, a piece of lace, A subway train, an empty space. “Stanislavsky,” a Danny Kaye Patter Song, performed at Le Martinique Nightclub, 1940 It was through the American Laboratory Theatre that the Stanislavsky System, both its theoretical foundations and practical exercises, finally came to the New World. Chiefly because of Stanislavsky’s celebrity status and the unanticipated success of the Moscow Art Theatre’s American tour, the Lab Theatre generated much newspaper publicity in New York during its seven-year struggle from 1924 to 1930. The major theatre reviewers, however, found the Lab’s productions uneven, sometimes brilliant, more often disappointing. The press questioned why the Lab could not achieve on the Broadway stage what the Russian professionals – with their assured continuity of acting skill and theatricality – had already displayed in 1923 and 1924. If anything, the most regrettable feature of the American Laboratory Theatre was in its mainstream American notions of financing, subject to the whims of impatient financiers and the fluctuations of marketplace aesthetics. The Lab also suffered from its dual function as a theatre school and producing outfit. Yet few critics placed the blame on the prodigious efforts or talents of its Russian founders, the cosmopolitan bon vivant Richard Boleslavsky or the diminutive and idiosyncratic Maria Ouspenskaya.

Boley Born Boleslaw Ryszard Srzednicki in 1889 in Plock, a former Polish capital city then under Czarist rule, Richard Boleslavsky spent much of

American Laboratory Theatre 17 his early career concealing his ethnic origins and anti-Soviet beliefs. He was intensely secretive about his Polish background and political aspirations, even concealing them from his Russian wife, Natasha, before the Civil War. She was shocked to learn that Polish was Boley’s native language – a fact she only discovered in 1920 when they crossed the Russo-Polish border to freedom. Most of Boley’s early life had prudently been hidden from his most intimate friends and associates. Before the Revolution, Srzednicki had already adopted a more Russiansounding pseudonym and abandoned performing on the Polish-language stage in Odessa. In the fall of 1906, he auditioned for and was accepted into the MAT. Stanislavsky gave him one year to rid himself of his “Odessa accent.” The debonair Boley rehearsed the part of Laertes for the groundbreaking Gordon Craig/Stanislavsky Hamlet in 1909 and volunteered to act in the experimental A Month in the Country. It was there that Boley underwent his initial training in the rudiments of the Stanislavsky System. His acting was praised for both its simplicity of style and psychological commitment. Sulerzhitsky enlisted the twenty-oneyear-old actor into the original class of the First Studio. There, Boley rivaled Vakhtangov as the Studio’s most dedicated initiate. He co-directed the stunning production of The Wreck of the Ship “Hope” in 1913 and performed in Vakhtangov’s Festive of Peace and Suler’s The Cricket on the Hearth. After his mentor’s death, Boley mounted a series of plays and films within and outside the Studio. In 1916, he was chosen to jointly lead the nascent First Studio with Vakhtangov. Unlike the vast majority of MAT members, who shunned such patriotic activity, Boley enlisted in the Imperial Army, one year after the Great War dragged Russia into the continental conflagration. By the summer of 1916, the director-actor was appointed Cornet in the Russian Sixth Cavalry, an all-Polish unit. The Peace Treaty of BrestLitovsk brought Boley back to Moscow and, in the Year One of the Revolution, he directed two pro-Bolshevik agitprop films. In December 1918, Boley reopened the First Studio with a madcap interpretation of Twelfth Night. That production with Michael Chekhov as the sex-addled Malvolio was well received despite the hectic atmosphere in post-revolutionary Moscow. Boley continued to direct at the Studio for more than one year but eventually his relationship with Stanislavsky soured. In a daring escape in April 1920, Boley took his new bride and smuggled a group across the border into the newly established Polish state. At the Teatr Polski in Warsaw, Boley mounted two fantastic spectacles and directed an anti-Red propaganda movie for the Ministry

18 Stanislavsky in America of War. Although Boley considered the Teatr Polski productions his most accomplished works to date, he began to understand the primordial curse of the Russian artist-in-exile: the dictates of the commercial world in the West and the lack of educated audiences militated against any long-term success or financial rewards. In Prague, a troupe of MAT performers had assembled to continue their work in Russian. Almost half of the MAT who had been performing in Kharkov during the Civil War migrated westward into the indifferent arms of the new Europe. Like hundreds of thousands of Russian émigrés gathered in Central and West Europe’s urban centers, they waited impatiently for the imminent collapse of the Bolshevik regime. Headed by one of Stanislavsky’s best-known actors, Vassily Kachalov, the Moscow Art Theatre of Prague (or the Kachalov Group) invited Boley in August 1920 to direct them in a radically reconceived production of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. The Prague Group’s repertoire had consisted of reduced versions of the MAT’s tried-and-true hits and already toured Czechoslovakia, Vienna, and Berlin. Boley loosened up his old comrades’ brooding style, adding majesty and color to the static 1911 original. This was a Hamlet that radiated youthfulness and energy. Critics in Vienna and Berlin heralded the frisky “Russian spirit” of the piece but the Group soon split into three factions: after much diplomatic negotiation, Kachalov and several senior members of the company willingly returned home to Moscow and Stanislavsky; Maria Germanova and a thin majority of the First Studio players (like Vera Soloviova and her husband Andrius Jilinsky) decided to maintain their status as an independent unit outside the Soviet Union and trekked back to their castle in Prague; and finally, Boley with a band of other ex-MATniks opted to remain in Berlin as free theatrical agents. In postwar Paris and Berlin – and later even in distant New York – there seemed to be few venues for serious Russian art. Instead strains of pre-revolutionary Muscovite and pseudo-Cossack culture surfaced in the foreign metropolises through the introduction of Russian restaurants and nightclubs. Here, waiters in high-collared kosovorotka shirts and balalaika orchestras animated the time-traveling illusion. Remarkably, the MAT’s own Chauve-Souris pioneered the colorful presentation of itinerant cabaret in the happy-go-lucky Russian mode. At one of the many lucrative Chauve-Souris knockoffs, Boley performed the role as conférencier and sometime director. In the Parisian Revue Russe, he staged a splashy event that consisted of a hauntingly grotesque Leon Bakst pantomime, followed by a series of comic scenes and

American Laboratory Theatre 19 dances. Back in Berlin at the cabaret Blaue Vogel, Boley attempted to strike a more satisfying balance between his current position and former, more dignified occupation; he would present one act of stylized musical sketches in the Cubist Russian manner and then The Cricket on the Hearth in the second part of the evening. His direction of the old Studio standby, however, confused the German merry-makers, who desired a night of unadulterated risqué divertissements. The Great Inflation that had enveloped Central Europe not only devastated the predictable worth of the box office take in the legitimate theatre; it also devalued the allure of the productions themselves. The most savvy German, Austrian, and French producers had already sought out hard currency venues in America. Boley himself followed their lead. He always claimed that his final destination would be in the New World. And in September 1922, he readily accepted the invitation to MC performances at the Revue Russe in Manhattan and Philadelphia. There, Boley might find employment opportunities in more creative outlets. Maybe he could break into the burgeoning American film industry.

On American shores Although the Revue Russe failed to attract sufficient American patronage, Boleslavsky’s timing was fortuitous. The Boston impresario Morris Gest had invited the Moscow Art Theatre to the United States. Stanislavsky was hesitant; American audiences and critics were thought to be insular and unsophisticated. The foreign companies that drew the largest masses in Manhattan tended to mount outsized spectacles or sexy farces – presentations that the MAT could hardly provide. Gest insisted that there was an indigenous public who could either understand Russian or appreciate high theatrical craftsmanship. In Stanislavsky’s thinking, Boley’s presence in New York might be advantageous. His mastery of English and expertise in New World surroundings might offset probable misunderstandings between the MAT regulars and the unfamiliar environment. Boley could publicize and possibly explain their fastidious ensemble approach to the Russian classics. American spectators, famed for their cultural naïvety yet unrivaled in their thirst for novelty, might fall under Boley’s seductive spell. Additionally, the talented émigré had the uncanny ability to choreograph achingly complicated crowd scenes and understudy for any number of the traditional MAT parts. It was time for a peaceful resolution and reunion between the venerated artistic director and his peripatetic former pupil.

20 Stanislavsky in America Stanislavsky’s hunch was accurate. Boley was among the throng that greeted the Russians when they disembarked from the RMS Majestic on January 3, 1923. He quickly assembled a local team of supporting actors and walk-ons for atmospheric background in the MAT’s main productions and later, when the tour was extended into April, substituted for a weary Stanislavsky in The Lower Depths. More historically significant, ten days after the MAT’s startled the critics with their flawless performances, Gest arranged for Boley to deliver a series of lectures on the artistic theories of the Art Theatre, its expressive features, and Stanislavsky’s contribution to modern acting. At the Princess Theatre, Boley even hinted that he would train and direct ten seasoned Broadway actors, under Stanislavsky’s tutelage, in a Russian classic play. This would prove that the MAT’s acting techniques were not merely a provincial enterprise but had universal application. Curiously, nothing concrete or immediate resulted from Boley’s audacious proclamation. One of the spectators at the Princess, however, was galvanized by Boley’s address. This was Miriam Kimball Stockton, the wife of Herbert Stockton, a well-known New York lawyer. For Miriam, Boley represented the new spirit of Europe’s avant-garde that recognized the singularity of American culture. The MAT was essentially the product of a feudal country that had transformed itself under fractious circumstances; America’s artistic development was still undefined, flexible, and compliant to uncharted trends. Boley looked and sounded like the prophet of an emergent religion. The prestigious journal Theatre Magazine helped promote both the Chauve Souris and MAT 1923 seasons with lavish pictorial spreads, flattering reviews, biographical fait divers, amusing cartoon citations, and editorial praise that appeared month after month from January to June. In their April 1923 issue, they printed Boleslavsky’s earliest American account of the Stanislavsky System. It was given the enticing title “Stanislavsky – The Man and His Methods: A Glimpse of the Head of the Moscow Art Theatre and the Secret of His Success.” The piece was wildly expansive and misleading; it jumbled the intimate workings of the First Studio with the monumental rehearsal process of the MAT productions. Boley briefly described the personalized training and self-effacing devotion of his Studio teachers; then he listed the MAT’s hardened principles, which led inextricably to their world renown. For Stanislavsky, everything that related to his art practice was surrounded by an aura of the sacred; even his constant fidgeting had a thoughtful and

American Laboratory Theatre 21 near-religious component. No matter where his revolutionary and sciencebased investigations took him, the old master revered the exalted traditions and history of the theatre. He was an alchemist, blending the best of the old with Europe’s latest visionary discoveries. Real, authentic, truthful emotion always remained at the core of the MAT’s experiments. Actors were trained to stay “inside the circle of their characters,” and not create charades of physical affectations or imitations of conventional enactments. To realize this, Stanislavsky emphasized the inner spirit, or “soul concentration,” of each role. Performers had to directly relate to their environment, to their fellow performers, as well as to their internal sense of character; the audience was secondary. Each tiny detail had to be carefully synthesized in order to attain a wider, perfect scenic whole. Although the MAT’s preparations that Boley proclaimed were typically time-and-money consuming, the productions themselves were highly profitable. According to Boley, they consistently made money for their backers. Before the Revolution, he claimed, the MAT paid more than 200 percent dividends to its shareholders. (“The Heard on Broadway” columnist from Theatre Magazine confirmingly quipped that Arthur Hopkins’ 1922 Lower Depths, produced in a language which everyone could understand, drew only $200 in nightly revenues; the MAT’s Russian interpretation sold – and sometimes oversold – every seat at the Al Jolson Theatre, exacting more than $50,000 in weekly ticket sales.) Boley’s enchanting words proved to be intellectual catnip to American journalists and starry-eyed producers alike.

The Laboratory Theatre begins On June 29, 1923, just one week after the MAT had departed from New York, Miriam Stockton formally drew up papers to legally establish the Laboratory Theatre as a Business Trust. Boley, one of five trustees, of course took the position as Artistic Director. He started to recruit students from the Neighborhood Playhouse, one of four or five independent studios in New York’s “Little Theatre” movement. Alice Lewisohn Crowley, the Neighborhood’s founder, enthusiastically supported Boley’s mission and signed on as a Lab partner. Stockton had the unenviable task of forming a board of directors, finding studio space and, most problematically, raising funds for the fall season and an endowment sufficient to afford the company a permanent home. Despite Boley’s vague promises of financial remuneration, few far-sighted investors materialized.

22 Stanislavsky in America In the July issue of Theatre Arts Monthly, Boley described the meaning of “Laboratory Theatre” in a densely theoretical and futuristic treatise. Artistic laboratories were institutions that required unbridled dedication, collective will, the ability to discard old forms, patience, the acceptance of a single creative leader, and quiet isolation. Few of these vital and abstract requisites appealed to theatre magnates or even to aspiring performers. Exactly what Boley meant to accomplish with this appeal was manifestly unclear. To be sure, the current star-struck Broadway world did not have any laboratory models of production. The varieties of creative theatre that Boley exalted only existed on the other side of the Atlantic and their means of government sustenance were structurally foreign to American show business. (Not for nothing was it known as “show business,” instead of “show art.”) During July and August, Boley and Alexander Koriansky, a former MAT scenic designer and harried ghostwriter of Stanislavsky’s muddled autobiography My Life in Art, set up shop in Pleasantville, a Westchester suburb north of New York City. With them came sixteen acting students from Crowley’s Playhouse. They were to receive the first training in the Stanislavsky System in America. Subsided by Dorothy Straight, the Pleasantville students spent the summer and early fall attending classes in the fundamentals of acting, stylized movement, vocal production, and costume and set design. Boley also rehearsed them in two one-act plays: The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, George Bernard Shaw’s naughty morality farce set in the Wild West; and William Butler Yeats’ weird mythic allegory, The Player Queen. Koriansky, in a wink to First Studio ethics, had the embryonic company build the costumes and simple set pieces. When the Shaw–Yeats evening opened at the Grand Theatre Street on October 16, 1923, the critical reception was decidedly mixed. Most reviewers liked the Shaw comedy but found the Yeats, fantasia unintelligible and pretentious. What Boley labeled the Outward Means of Expression was apparent in the company’s dance-like movement and unified ensemble displays. Absent were the striking characterizations and emotional intensity that the MAT players naturally radiated. The Laboratory Theatre did not formally open its doors until November 14. Two troubling signs marked the beginning of the venture. None of the Pleasantville actors elected to remain with the Lab, and Boley himself took on several directorial assignments to work in out-of-town and Broadway professional productions in 1923 and 1924. This was a career conflict that would naggingly shake the stability of the Lab until its ultimate collapse. The original Lab workshop space was relatively small and had difficulty in accommodating the slew of courses in Basic Acting, Scene Study,

American Laboratory Theatre 23 Voice, Diction, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics, Stage Architecture, and Fencing. Prominent theatre practitioners and art historians delivered Monday evening lectures. The young students were wildly enthusiastic about the regimen and divided themselves into acolytes (or sheep), and volunteer mentors (or shepherds). The entire student body of two dozen helped maintain the fragile premises. The fledging institution started to resemble Suler’s First Studio. After a vigorous session of Eurhythmics caused plaster chunks from a downstairs ceiling to fall into the first-floor restaurant below, the Lab moved to a condemned mansion on Manhattan’s East Side. The old five-story building proved to be heaven-sent. The Lab could now conduct multiple classes, rehearse plays, and place their staff in more spacious quarters. There was also another First Studio addition to the trusteeship: Maria Ouspenskaya, known simply as Madame.

Madame The reputation of the Lab Theatre and its legendary contribution to New York theatre is still synonymous with the charming and romantic personality of Richard Boleslavsky. But it was Maria Ouspenskaya who actually appended Stanislavsky’s practical innovations into America’s performing arts and established the Lab’s long-term presence as a beacon of modern actor training. Boley lectured and wrote about the art of the future with all its emotive and transformative implications; Madame, in her decades of unparalleled teaching, single-handedly created it. Today, Ouspenskaya is mostly remembered for her distinctive screen personas, especially for her supporting roles in Hollywood horror and romantic epics. Twice (in 1936 and 1939) she was nominated for Academy Awards for her brief appearances in Dodsworth and Love Affair. Her indelible images of strangely accented, wizened matriarchs – in Austrian, German, Russian, Polish, Gypsy, French, and even African varieties – produced a novel Hollywood stereotype. Altogether, she appeared in twenty American films and eight stage plays. In 1944, a screen-fan tabloid pronounced her Hollywood’s “Pinup Grandma.” Yet Madame’s most enduring bequest to the transatlantic transmission of Russian culture was in her teaching. More than 1500 pupils underwent training in Ouspenskaya’s several workshops and schools. Among them were the greatest performers and future instructors of the Stanislavsky technique. More than anyone, Madame brought the “Russian manner” of acting into the New World. Like Boley, Ouspenskaya was viewed as a minor talent in Moscow who quickly found her way into Suler’s First Studio. She was born in

24 Stanislavsky in America Tula in 1876. (Her Hollywood publicists issued bios that altered her birth year to 1887; since, from her earliest stage incarnations, Madame played cane-wielding, baronesses and retainers, it was virtually impossible to ascertain her true age.) After traditional training and stock work in Warsaw and Moscow, Ouspenskaya auditioned for the MAT in 1911. She had already studied the System with Sulerzhitsky at the Adashev Studio. The tiny actress, who never weighed more than 90 pounds, was accepted into Stanislavsky’s producing organization, enacting more than one hundred parts over a thirteen-year period. Madame was also invited into the First Studio in 1912, the only applicant chosen from a pool of fourteen. A difficult personality and chronic alcoholic, Ouspenskaya knew that she could never attain star status at the MAT – or their self-abnegating version of one. She claimed that she severely damaged her vocal chords during the Great War, while singing to Russian army recruits. After the Revolution, Madame started to teach acting to young students. As an experienced MAT performer, she toured with the company in its European and American tours in 1922 and 1923. In Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, she notably played the shotgun-totting Charlotta Ivanovna, “a German governess, adept at card tricks, ventriloquism, and legerdemain.” When the ensemble returned to New York in November 1923 for its second season, Madame re-engaged with Boley and became a guest instructor at the Lab. Long before the MAT finished its extended America tour in May 1924, Ouspenskaya decided to stay at the Lab. Various reasons were given for Madame’s defection: nervous exhaustion, depression, alcoholism, strife with her MAT colleagues, career advancement. Probably all of the explanations contained a bit of truth. And she was not the only MAT player to desert the ensemble; Akim Tamiroff, as well as Leo and Barbara Bulgakov, also decided to remount their careers in the Capitalist West. With no stated regrets, Madame abandoned Mother Russia, never to return, and soon replaced Boley as the most energetic agent and communicator of the Stanislavsky System in New York. For the Lab’s pupils, Madame’s classes were legendary and provoked a memorable folklore. The immaculately decked-out woman, always with a white poodle in her lap, was direct and unforgiving. When student assignments faltered, Ouspenskaya coughed spasmodically; this signaled her assistant to administer tablespoons of “medicine” from her bottle of bathtub gin. The dainty actress chain-smoked tiny black cigars during the Symbol exercises and prepared scenes. Madame’s heavily accented English and otherworldly gaze often caused misunderstanding and dread among her young charges. For

American Laboratory Theatre 25 instance, when she explained the process of breaking scenes into playable “bits,” or actions, all the novices thought they heard the word “beats,” a term that unintentionally entered into the vocabulary of American actor training and remained. Ouspenskaya’s savage criticism of student work, consciously or unwittingly, imbued the next generation of Stanislavsky gurus with a thoroughly toxic attitude toward the untested or inexpert performer. In fact, one would be hard pressed to watch Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Bobby Lewis, or Sandy Meisner in the classroom without noticing the contentious aspects of Madame’s scathing wit or iconic status. With the introduction of the Stanislavsky System in America came the figure of the exacting, if merciless, instructor. A typical class might begin with Madame’s assistant arranging a group improvisation, like the panoramic climax from The Wreck of the Ship “Hope.” Each student was told to invent a character from a fishing village, like a housewife or fishmonger. Five minutes or so into the improv, the assistant would announce that the main boat, which contained the town’s fishermen, had capsized. The actors would proceed to cry, curse the elements, attempt to comfort each other, and normally run out of things to do after a few long minutes. But the improvised scenario was not stopped. The students, naturally, repeated their set actions and lamentations. The scene continued for twenty, even thirty minutes, until the actors had played out all of their stereotypical responses. Most ceased performing and sat passively on the floor; some even started to cry in frustration. Finally, the aide pointed to Ouspenskaya, who was lying supine, holding a flower over her chest with her eyes closed. “You were so boring that you killed Madame,” the class was told. The assistant informed them that human beings do not run out of things to do; they do not stop behaving. Equally, real characters “live” in their world; they do not “show” feelings and “perform” a series of invented activities. Good acting means to experience scenic circumstances truthfully, to find the inner core of their characters and behave. Then the neophytes were sent home. Their second lesson in acting fundamentals would begin the following week. Most sessions started with Madame’s practiced entrance. Students might rise in unison as she mystically stated, “Make for me a warm atmosphere” or “Think of the calmest, most beautiful body of water.” After a few minutes of meditative silence, she would lead them in exercises that sharpened the pupils’ sense of Concentration and Observation or Affective Memory. She would have them carry real chairs across the room and then do the same for imaginary ones; mime

26 Stanislavsky in America threading a needle or lifting invisible sacks of rocks. After opening a window, she would direct the class to silently count the number of different sounds from the street. They were told to do this while sitting in a tense pose; then a second time, in a more tranquil position. Relaxation, they were supposed to discover, would naturally increase their awareness to sensory stimuli. Advanced classes involved the individual creation of Symbols, or the enactment of simple objects undergoing transformation, like a ripe apple falling from a tree during a storm. Madame would decide which Symbols to perform without any preplanning. Sometimes an entire session would be devoted to these exercises. Each student would have to fill ten minutes. Anne Baxter remembered having to perform a beautiful and priceless black pearl trying to escape from an oyster shell at the bottom of the ocean. Following her fastidiously thought out improvisation, Baxter heard Madame’s succinct critique: “I sad black pearl!” Baxter tried something quite different. This time Ouspenskaya approved, “Bitter!” The class applauded. Acting for Madame, indeed, required special psychophysical agility. Another student, A. Hyatt Mayor, recalled a One-Minute Play exercise that tested the students’ internal believability and instantaneous formation of character. These improvisations had to be performed with a concentration on internal feeling, not action. “Madame came in and said, ‘Now this is the bank. It’s nine o’clock. You are the vicepresident. You are the president; you are the vice-president’s secretary; you are the president’s secretary. You have overheard a telephone conversation that indicates the president and his secretary are getting married. Now you do so and so. You do so and so. Now it’s nine o’clock. Start!’” Ouspenskaya never published her classroom instructions, although her linguistic skills greatly improved after studying English at Columbia University. Her students in New York and Hollywood begged her to publish a textbook but Madame ignored their pleas: “No book could be valid. Now is all.” Actor training required a live relationship. Boley, however, continued to give examples of his and Madame’s exercises in Lab lectures and in articles he prepared for Theatre Arts Monthly, starting in February 1927. His short – and, even then, irritatingly sexist – dialogues formed chapters for Acting: The First Six Lessons (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1933). The book went through dozens of printings. Nowhere was Ouspenskaya’s name mentioned. Sophie Rosenstein, one of Madame’s students, later taught at the University of Washington. With two other theatre academics, she

American Laboratory Theatre 27 published a pamphlet-length description of the Lab exercises, Modern Acting: A Manual (New York: Samuel French, 1936). This book became so well received and widely circulated that Rosenstein went on to head Warner Brothers’ Hollywood Acting Division. She also failed to credit Ouspenskaya, or even Stanislavsky, in her writing or in her actor coaching. Only through word-of-mouth exchange, studio citation, biographic anecdotes in the tabloids, and posthumous writings were Ouspenskaya’s charismatic classes sparsely documented. In the late 1930s, her renown took a new path. Madame’s cinematic persona as an unremitting femme de théâtre entered into the Hollywood pantheon; her real-life role as a master teacher faded.

The Lab’s period of maturation By 1924, Boleslavsky had already achieved a respectable prominence outside the Lab. He again performed with the MAT and assisted Max Reinhardt in his New York staging of The Miracle, Karl Vollmoeller’s spectacular mime display. Norman Bel Geddes transformed the Century Theatre into a gaudy medieval cathedral and Boley organized the “elaborate groupings” under Reinhardt’s leisurely direction. The Lab Artistic Director continued to work Off-Broadway and publish in small art journals, such as the Yiddish-language theatrical trade Tealit. For the most part, there was little correlation between Boley’s professional directing, which ran the gamut from posh Broadway musicals to serious plays on the Little Theatre stage, and his analytical decrees that condemned the sub-standard training and vapid repertoire that characterized much of the contemporary New York theatre. He once derided the entire class of Broadway producers, labeling them “glorified janitors.” Meanwhile the Lab itself continued its vagabond existence, setting up shop in Greenwich Village in September 1924 and then relocating to the Upper West Side ten months later, only to return to the East Side in June 1926, where it switched residences once more. And, with its constant migrations, the internal workings of the Lab seemed to change as well. The staff grew; the students, who sometimes attended for short periods and now included experienced actors, were increasingly more resolute and proficient. The modest ten-dollars-per-week tuition fee paid for courses in The Technique of Acting, Plastique and Mimodrama, Ballet, Dalcroze Eurhythmics, Fencing, Drawing, The Spoken Word, Diction, Voice Production, The Art of Acting, and a two-hour address by Boley. Besides the classroom tumult, the Lab’s involvement in experimental

28 Stanislavsky in America performances generated much anticipation and constant activity among its pupils. Rehearsals and scene preparation took place around the clock. Lee Strasberg, who attended classes in January 1925, kept a diary of his impressions. He recounted Boleslavsky’s introductory sessions, which defined three kinds of theatre and acting: (1) “Commercial Productions” that sought to please audiences by casting actors according to their appearance and ability to copy already successful models; (2) “Artistic Productions” that attempted to establish the proper mood and action through the performers’ research and technical expertise; and (3) “Experiential Productions,” where each actor was expected to relive, or “experience,” the feelings of his character every night within an ensemble setting. Boley, the director, spoke more and more about the importance of Stage Action in its relation to Affective Memory; Madame continued to stress Concentration as well as Affective Memory and Action as the “main points” of the Stanislavsky System. The Actor’s Work consisted of mental, physical, and emotional training. Of the three categories, Affective Memory, or the recall of past feelings, was the most difficult to achieve because it required the stimulation of unconscious sentiments. Yet the genuine production of it created the strongest impressions on the spectator. Later many Method detractors asserted that Strasberg must have misunderstood or ignored Boley’s modifications and championing of Action over Emotion Memory. However, Strasberg’s 1925 diary entries show no such misconstrued dichotomy of choice: he enthusiastically accepted Boley’s directorial classifications and overall aesthetic theories but the twenty-four year-old acolyte acquired his hands-on expertise in actor training from Ouspenskaya and her subordinates. Neither Strasberg nor any other Lab inductees then perceived a methodological contradiction. Both Boley and Madame guided the students in their search for powerful Affective Memories. These were always remembered experiences that were confidential and did not need to be discussed with the faculty or other pupils. But they required constant repetition since the recollection of physical sensations was indirect and nonintellectual. This memory of emotion was triggered by the five senses, not words. When properly controlled, the flood of authentic feeling could be “placed” in the actor’s private “Golden Box.” There, convincing and parallel substitutions for a character’s fluctuating emotions could be conjured up with relative ease. Boley compared these distinct mental associations to the tunes of familiar songs.

American Laboratory Theatre 29 On April 1, 1925, an intimate presentation from the Lab opened for public viewing. This was The Sea-Woman’s Cloak, an invented Irish folk-tale by the Southern writer Amelie Rives, a playwright and member of the Lab. Directed by Boley, this very modest show – with little in the way of makeup or costuming – was a kind of Poor Theatre. The performers created the haunting atmospherics of the piece through the imitation of ocean sounds beneath an undulating bolt of cloth and rendered the old Gaelic characters with authentic feeling. Audience reaction was caustically mixed. No one denied the robust work of the young actors but the evening lacked basic storytelling and scenic values that Rives’ fantasy demanded. In the Lab’s new and larger space (a converted school on West 58th Street), Boley tried a more lighthearted approach. In October 1925, he staged a Shakespearean comedy, Twelfth Night, more like a swordwielding, antic farce than any classical drama. This proved to be a successful strategy, in part, because his radical directorial vision utilized the Lab’s most obvious assets: its vivacious crew of young performers and artistically hell-bent designers. Boley concentrated on the “long distance mood” of the play: Twelfth Night, or What You Will as a festive occasion, “the happiest night of the year,” or a “jazz band foxtrot” played out during an extended birthday party. The overlapping flat and three-dimensional mise en scène added much anti-illusionist humor to the evening. More than anything, it restored Shakespeare’s comic apparition that must have delighted the original groundlings. Other Lab presentations directed by Boley could not mask the amateurish veneer and constricted range of his inexperienced studentactors. Boley’s basic style mingled intense realism with Vakhtangovlike theatricality; it was a mode of production that necessitated practiced and highly skilled performers. The major New York critics dismissed the small-scale art plays he selected for the Lab. Others saw theatrical jewels scattered within the Lab’s growing repertoire. Regrettably, the handful of profitable productions in 1927 and 1928 could never recoup the Lab’s initial loses. And even when the American stock market soared to new heights, neither the theatre nor the school could find significant philanthropic aid. There was also the old problem: Boley’s uncertain commitment to the Lab. Mainstream and Yiddish-language theatre producers still sought his directorial authority. No one could handle crowd scenes or Elizabethan spectacle like the MAT practitioner. Boley grew despondent; he fired his most trusted assistant. A gloomy “Polish mood” descended over him every time the Board of Directors inquired about his allegiance to the company.

30 Stanislavsky in America

Westward In 1928, Boley became an American citizen. One year later he divorced Natasha and left for Hollywood. Between 1930 and 1937, Boley directed eighteen feature films. Although many of them included established stars such as John Barrymore, Clark Gable, Joseph Schildkraut, Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Crawford, little was made of the director’s illustrious stage background. Joshua Logan, the dialogue coach for The Garden of Allah, captured Boley’s dilemma as a Hollywood director in his autobiography Josh (New York: Delacorte Press, 1976). On the Arizona set, which substituted for a Sahara oasis, Boley asked the twenty-eight-year-old, fresh from New York, to guide Charles Boyer and Dietrich in a poetic rendezvous. When Logan balked, Boley complained that he had far too many other activities to complete. Dietrich also carped that the Russian did not know how to direct women and attempted to seduce Logan into advocating her cause. In the end, Boley and his belligerent actors succumbed to the producer’s harsh constraints; their accents and character ideas were to be drastically reduced and the framing scenes reshot. Like so many other foreign artists in Hollywood, Boley was treated like a mere hired hand. On January 17, 1937, Richard Boleslavsky died in Los Angeles, a few weeks short of his forty-eighth birthday. By then, much of his fame rested not on the Lab work or his film oeuvre but with his sensational blockbuster books about his combat experiences in the Great War and the Russo-Polish Civil War – The Way of the Lancer (New York: The Literary Guild, 1932), and Lances Down (New York: The Literary Guild, 1932). Reportedly, Boley had planned to affix four more chapters to his best-selling publication Acting: The First Six Lessons.

Maria Ouspenskaya’s School Of Dramatic Arts The American Laboratory Theatre only lasted one year after Boley’s resignation. The MAT-trained actress and sometime Hollywood diva Alla Nazimova turned down the offer of becoming Artistic Director. Maria Germanova, from the Prague Group, was appointed in her place. With Francis Ferguson, the noted Shakespearean scholar and dramaturge, she directed the last of the Lab’s seasons in 1929 and 1930. Both the studio and the school officially shut down in June 1930. Like Boley, Ouspenskaya also branched out during the Lab’s middle and end days. She appeared in Arthur Hopkins’ Broadway revival of The Jest in 1926 and the next year as a servant in H.K. Ayliff’s long-running

American Laboratory Theatre 31 The Taming of the Shrew. Madame returned to her role as a master instructor at the Neighborhood Playhouse’s new school in 1928 and the Theatre Arts Institute in 1929. In May 1931, Ouspenskaya was asked to conduct a summer workshop in Mount Kisco, in upstate New York, under the supervision of Tamara Daykarhanova. Dayka’s specialties mostly related to the physical aspects of theatre and in 1930 she began to tutor wealthy debutants. Ouspenskaya’s internal approach perfectly complimented Daykarhanova’s instruction on deportment and stage etiquette. It was claimed that Ouspenskaya had an X-ray capacity to look into the student’s soul; Dayka knew how to remold each body and its means of locomotion. They were known as the two Madames and functioned as a morning–afternoon team until 1935. One year after the Lab disbanded, Ouspenskaya established her own studio on Riverside Drive. It was called Maria Ouspenskaya’s School of Dramatic Arts. Here she retained many of the old Lab staff for courses in Diction, Phonetics, Fencing, “Rhythmical Physical Control,” Ballet, and Makeup. The school swelled largely because of journalists’ coupling of Stanislavsky training with the novelty of the Group Theatre. Control of the Senses and Memory of Feelings were the essential features of Ouspenskaya’s training for Inner Development. A standard two-hour session would consist of two or three basic exercises and several études in Symbols, Characterization, and One-Minute Plays, followed by intense (and frequently emotionally charged) critiques by Madame.

“The Pin-up Grandma” In 1934, Madame herself appeared on Broadway in Sidney Howard’s adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel Dodsworth. Ouspenskaya so merged with her part, the maniacal Baroness Von Obersdorf, that her one dramatic “episode” nearly stopped the show. For the Hollywood version of Dodsworth two years later, both the Broadway lead Walter Huston and Madame were asked to reprise their stage roles. The American motion picture industry embraced Ouspenskaya. She endowed normally inert secondary characters with exotically comic and ironic shadings. And the woman exuded professionalism. In 1937, she played a near senile Polish countess in Conquest and again found depth and humor within a ridiculous and inconsequential part. It was a wonder that Garbo and Charles Boyer got top billing. (In fact, both the tempestuous sex goddess and Myrna Loy declined to work with the unlikely crowd-pleaser again.) As a French grandmother in the

32 Stanislavsky in America contemporary romantic comedy Love Affair, Madame received one of the film’s six Oscar nominations in 1939. Now it was time to relocate. Much of the New York entertainment world had already changed coasts. Not just actors, directors, and writers but choreographers, composers, lyricists, designers and gossip columnists were moving west. Hollywood had considerably matured artistically in the year of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. The studios were finally churning out a Golden Era. In September 1939, Ouspenskaya moved her school to Hollywood. To be sure, it guaranteed her new career possibilities – over the next decade, she would appear in seventeen films – but it stunted her teaching and the studio itself. Most of the Dramatic Arts staff and a goodly number of the New York students followed Madame to Los Angeles. They formed the nucleus of the Hollywood MO School of the Dramatic Arts. The new environment, however, was fraught with hurdles and uncertainty; Southern California had different scenic traditions and methods of preparation. At the new school, the three-year East Coast program was shortened by one year and Madame created special études for budding film stars who were sent to her by Hollywood agencies and major film studios. Teaching assistants were expected to invent exercises according to needs of the attendees. Instruction had been transformed into classroom coaching. But even then, not everyone was satisfied. Katherine Hepburn walked out of one of the classes in 1940 and many staff members bemoaned the overall “immoral atmosphere.” There was drama but insufficient art inside the academy. In the trades and fanzines, Ouspenskaya’s reputation as a performer grew. She even played parodies of herself: as a strict ballet mistress in Waterloo Bridge and a beloved dance teacher pressed into Manhattan’s randy nightclub scene in Dance, Girl, Dance. Her most widely acclaimed role involved black magic in the British hinterlands. In two popular horror classics, The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, she portrayed Maleva, a Gypsy fortuneteller. Fans could not get enough of her spooky impersonation. Critics for generations wrote about her startling presence: Ouspensksay-as-Maleva “makes my heart flutter,” one historian typically opined. And standup comedians, including Lenny Bruce, never tired of satirizing her ghostly pauses and somber stare. In the spring of 1943, Madame closed her school and returned to Broadway. She appeared in a long-suffering flop, Outrageous Fortune, but endured despite a bout of pneumonia. Ouspenskaya also worked in the Times Square USO Canteen and was made an honorary member of the cruiser USS New York.

American Laboratory Theatre 33 When the war ended, Madame traveled back to Hollywood and relaunched her school. It was now called The American Repertory Theatre and Studio. Like other Stanislavsky-oriented studios, it had strong appeal for ex-GIs and their younger, movie-mad siblings. Yet it only lasted a few years. Her film career slowly faded and her financial situation remained bleak. On December 3, 1949, Ouspenskaya died in an emergency room ward, the result of a self-inflicted incineration. It was said that she had passed out in her apartment while drinking and smoking in bed; her old addictions to alcohol and nicotine had ultimately killed her. Newspaper accounts scornfully reported that the Pin-up Grandma’s entire estate totaled a mere $358.32 in hard cash. Ouspenskaya’s ART Institute formerly closed its doors in 1955. AMERICAN LAB THEATRE (1923–30) / M A R I A OUSPENSKAYA’ S SCHOOL OF DRAMATIC ARTS E XE R C IS ES ( 1 93 1 – 4 9 ) Sources for the exercises: unpublished transcriptions of Richard Boleslavsky’s December 1923 lectures “The Creative Theatre”; Shirley White’s private correspondence (1924–26); Lee Strasberg’s January 1925 American Lab notebook; Stella Adler’s notes from American Lab classes in 1925; Richard Boleslavsky, Acting: The First Six Lessons (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1933); H.M., “They Learn to Act,” The Stage Magazine (September 1934); Federal Theatre (First Summer Theatre, A Report, 1937); “Kensight,” Ken (May 25, 1939); Maria Ouspenskaya, “Notes on Acting,” ART Magazine (October 1954–January 1955); Ronald Willis’ unpublished interview with Blanche Hogg (1964); Ronald Willis, “The American Laboratory Theatre, 1923–30” (Unpublished Dissertation: University of Iowa, 1968); J.W. Roberts’ Richard Boleslavsky (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1981); and interviews and correspondence with Stella Adler, Sabell Bender, Natasha Boleslavsky, Dean Goodman, Fred Harris, Mary Harris, Elizabeth Macdonald, Nellie McCaslin, Beatrice Straight, Lee Strasberg, and Mary Hunter Wolf. Concentration and Observation 1.

Concentrate on your fingers and hands. Notice every detail about them – the skin, nails, muscle, connecting tissues, bone – and observe how their construction separates us from other mammals. Also note the unique features of your fingers and hands.

34 Stanislavsky in America 2.

3.

4.

5.

Think of your fingertips as extremely sensitive antennae. Pick up a matchbox and investigate it carefully for five minutes. Memorize everything about it: its size and shape, how your hand fits around it, its surface texture and weight, its use of typography and color design. After putting it away, write what you remember and compare your description with the real object. Again pick up the matchbox. Notice the quality of the wood; how the box and individual matches have been constructed. Think how matches must have been invented; their relationship to fire; fire’s link to the beginning of civilization and the history of mankind. Carefully duplicate an apparently simple activity that you completed during the day, such as pouring tea for a guest. Check for the most isolated and minute details. Now watch another student imitate your action. Make certain that he has missed no essential gesture or feeling. Old Man’s Dance: Your class is divided into two lines that face one another. A student at the end of one line makes a movement or gesture with his arm or leg – or both. The person facing him in the opposite line imitates the movement and adds one of his own. Then a third student (in the first line) imitates the movement of the second actor and adds steps of his own. This activity continues, back and forth across the lines, until it reaches the last person.

Control of the five senses 6.

Listen to these imaginary sounds: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

7. 8. 9.

a mouse scratching in the corner, a foghorn, a train whistle, the approach of a subway train, dogs barking, a street full of passing automobiles.

Now hear an imaginary orchestra playing classical or operatic music. Follow this with music created by an imaginary jazz band. (Notice how your body changes with the variation in music.) If you wear glasses, take them off. See the world without the glasses. Look at a painting, then turn away and recall its details. Study the painting to see what you missed. Look at the painting one day

American Laboratory Theatre 35

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

later and note the other features that you forgot. Continue this for a week. Repeat this exercise, using your entire room as the object of study. Look at an illustration in a book. “Project” the image as a painting on a wall. Actually see – not remember – the painting within a frame hanging on your wall. (When you see the image with utter belief, you will have the thrill of the artist-painter.) Hold a bouquet of white roses in your hand. Try to ascertain which smells the most flagrant. Taste the sensation of (1) strong coffee, (2) vinegar, (3) an aspirin, and (4) a lemon. Find the places on your tongue that they stimulate. Feel a localized pain in your stomach, then in a tooth, and finally in your hand. Practice performing one of the following activities without any properties: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

picking up a cup and saucer, drinking a cup of tea, eating a grapefruit, putting on and taking off shoes and socks, combing your hair, sitting in an imaginary chair.

15. In a circle of classmates, pass from person to person an imaginary pigeon with an injured wing. Now pass an imaginary pot of tea. 16. Using only imaginary stimuli, drink coffee while you read a book and listen to some music. Smell an imaginary flower. Memory of feelings 17. Take yourself under observation. Discover the mood or emotion you are currently in. 18. Recall a specific period in your life that is still important to you. For instance, the last time that you were angry or irritated. Justify why you felt that way or reproach yourself for it. Relive and start to retain your emotion for a fixed period of time. (The amount of time should be increased from one minute to over an hour.) Remember all the details of the last twenty-four hours in your life. Select the most joyful and sad moments. Don’t think of the moods in general – instead focus on your five senses and what you were wearing, where you went, what you did, and whom you met. Think of last New Year’s Day, recalling all the circumstances of

36 Stanislavsky in America the occasion. Decide whether there were more happy or sad moments. 19. Bring a special garment to class, like an elegant dress. Allow it to stimulate in you the event for which you wore it and the past emotion associated with the event. Connection 20. Try to sense the precise mood and how each person feels before you say hello. 21. Sitting silently, transmit a command or wish, like a blessing for complete happiness, to someone in your circle. 22. Imagine you are at the seashore. Far in the distance, you see a sailboat silhouetted against the moon. Closer by is a seagull who suddenly swoops down to catch a fish. Concentrate on these images. Mentally communicate these images to people around you. 23. Bring warm sunshine into a cold, darkened room. 24. Enter a room as if it were a Buddhist temple. Let one of your classmates pretend to be a statue of the Buddha. Kneel before him and confess your sins. 25. You are in a big room. You want your greatest wish. Show the class your feelings. Adjustment 26. Hammer a nail into the wall, and consciously feel how your body moved and what original action and rhythm was. As you hammer the nail a second time, respond to the following Adjustments: (1) the nail is to hold a noose to hang yourself; (2) you are putting up a portrait of your sweetheart; (3) you are exhausted. 27. Now hammering the same nail, listen to the nonverbal responses of the audience, and unconsciously adjust your activity. 28. If you heard a gunshot, you would probably feel fear but your reaction would depend on your experience and circumstances. React to the sound as the following character or animal might: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

a barbarian woman (i.e., turns to defend herself), a child (i.e., cries), an insect (i.e., fleas), a lion (i.e., at first turns to run, then attacks), a Parisian woman (i.e., faints).

American Laboratory Theatre 37 Symbol exercises 29. Select a tree. Become that tree. Starting with spring let all the seasons and changes in weather transform you until you return to spring. 30. Transform yourself, physically and psychologically, into one of the following objects: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17)

a vase of fresh flowers, a steaming cup of jasmine tea, an old bundle of love letters, a hairbrush, a red silk shawl with white fringes, an egg scrambling, a dirty ashtray, a ripe apple about to fall from its branch, a shiny eggbeater, a purple envelope, a strip of bacon frying in a pan, an empty inkwell, a dying willow tree, a gentleman’s walking cane, a silver platter, a thread going through the eye of a needle, the highest pear in a tree.

31. You are the yellow flame of a candle, blown by the wind. Whisper to the dark beyond the window. Characterization 32. Create a character, using the following composite features: the head from a Botticelli painting, a posture from a Van Dyck painting, the arms of your sister (or brother), and the wrists of the mime Anga Enters. Let wind-driven clouds inspire your walk. 33. Choose a character to perform in an improvisation but first give your character a “symbol” that can psychologically and physically define him. This can be any imaginary object like a wooden cane, silver platter, or a hairbrush. 34. Find the heart of your character and learn to love him. Think “in the mind” of your character, and experience his thoughts and

38 Stanislavsky in America feelings. Start as a human being, then go to your character. Do not exhibit yourself, let the character show himself. 35. Pick imaginary fruits and vegetables (pears, nuts, potatoes, cantaloupes, and watermelons) from the appropriate trees, brushes and patches. Now pick them as if you are a monkey. Animal exercises 36. Create a character, beginning with your embodiment of an animal. Then practice walking as if you are (l) a monkey, (2) a horse, (3) an elephant, and (4) a squirrel. 37. Retaining the zoo atmosphere, divide yourselves into the tigers in cages and observers. Instead of imitating the tigers, feel their aggression and frustration of being caged. See the bars separating you from the world. The observers should feel and react to the actions of the actor-tigers. Let your bodily rhythms react naturally to the tigers’ moods.

One-minute plays and situations 38. Come into a room and pick up pages that have become scattered by the wind. Separate the pages that have become glued together. 39. Enter the room in order to drink a cup of tea. On the table, you find a letter, which you pick up and read. Continue to drink the tea as you read. (Always know what the contents of the letter are.) 40. Imagine that you have come to the zoo by yourself to study the monkeys. You are surprised to find others from the class around the monkey cages. Rather than “acting” or talking to your classmates, say only what you feel. 41. Walk across the room where your (imaginary) dog is lying sick on the floor. Bring the dog a bowl of water and attend to it. 42. In a group, use the studio space to prepare for a picnic. First you must cross an imaginary river. Find the spots on the floor that you imagine are stones and walk over them. Pass the imaginary bundles of food and supplies to your partners. Set up your picnic area. 43. Divide your group into “students” and a “teacher.” The “teacher” has made the “students” come to class on Saturday so the “students” want to do things that will annoy him. (Remember not to “act” your actions or to talk so much. Just do the actions. And always give yourself a “problem” as an individual student: you have a toothache; you are sleepy; you are excited because you have

American Laboratory Theatre 39

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

just received a present.) The “teacher” should react naturally. For example, taking away a student’s gift watch. Divide yourselves into American Indians and New England settlers. Discover the appropriate actions of your group. (For instance, the Indians might place their feet into the footsteps of the leader to conceal their numbers. The farmers, celebrating Christmas, might be dancing vigorously to keep warm.) The Indian group then presents gifts to the English farmers. You are part of a group of children waiting at a dock for your aunt to arrive on a boat (or at a railroad station). Someone announces the number of minutes, beginning with five minutes, for the boat to arrive. At the end of the last minute, it is announced that your aunt’s boat will be four hours later. Your group is on an ocean liner that is slowly sinking. Although divided into groups of “passengers” and “crew members,” each actor plays himself, instead of a character. The crew has organized the passengers into lines for admittance to the lifeboats. One actor, selected to play a woman with a baby, goes from passenger to passenger, begging to change places with them so she and her baby may go ahead of them in the line. Finally, one passenger relents and the woman departs in the lifeboat. Suddenly, another passenger realizes that the woman was carrying a small dog, not a baby. The remaining passengers and crew react to her deception. Organize a birthday party for a classmate. Create the occasion using imaginary properties. Just as the candles on the imaginary cake are being blown out, a snake crawls out. Someone quickly realizes that it was concealed in the cake by the practical joker in the group. Perform one of above improvisations in its natural mode. Now repeat the scene, pretending it is a tragedy. Then perform it again as a comedy. Next as a dance. And finally, re-enact the scene as it were an opera. (More focused stylistic differences might be discovered by playing the scene as if it were written by Moliére, then Noel Coward, then finally Eugene O’Neill.)

3

The Group Theatre

We were too busy and poor in 1931 to think of a name. They just called us “the Group” and it stuck. Lee Strasberg to the author, 1981

Of all the conduits of the Stanislavsky System in America, none has achieved a more storied eminence than the Group Theatre. The invention of three unlikely associates – Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford – it borrowed many of the American Laboratory Theatre’s most hallowed principles. The Group formed a true ensemble of professional performers under the directorship of a single artist, produced a repertory of new American plays for mass consumption, and devised a comprehensive program in Stanislavsky Technique. Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya issued few public statements about the Group. And the mentors’ words were unfailingly polite and always shrouded in commonplace indirection. Privately they could not have been pleased. The treatment that the Lab Theatre had received in the Jazz-Age press paled when measured against the attention lavished on their upstart offspring. How the Group achieved its iconic stature could be explained in several ways. For one, its crusade to survive on Broadway took place during the entire span of America’s Depression era. To be sure, it was a product of a defiant thirties’ culture but erroneously located at the center of the Workers Theatre movement. The fabled Group later did inspire two institutions long associated with the Stanislavsky System in the postwar United States: the Actors Lab and the Actors Studio. And by 1960, eighteen of the Group’s former actors and directors were teaching acting – and presumably recounting their salad days – in their own studios, workshop courses, or university theatre departments. On a more traceable show business level, the Group helped launch the careers of three mid-century titans who all began as minor or

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apprentice actors with the company. A former reform school graduate, jobbed into the company to play streetwise juveniles, John Garfield established the pattern for a new kind of movie star. His exhaustive preparations in Hollywood to unearth his character’s authenticity were so amusing and novel that his motion-picture colleagues in 1938 mockingly referred him to as “Group.” That year, Time Magazine placed Clifford Odets, the Group’s resident dramatist, on its cover and labeled him as “his country’s most promising playwright.” His lyrical morality tales are still performed and cherished as national treasures. Finally, Elia Kazan, once a technical wizard-cum-actor with the Group, dazzled both Broadway and Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s with his multi-layered direction and panoply of acting innovations. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award during a controversial ceremony in 1999. Throughout their lengthy careers in theatre, Strasberg and Clurman were denounced as megalomaniacal firebrands or poseurs. Yet their personal understanding of how much they inalterably transformed American culture was astonishingly modest. That and the internecine feuds of the Group members as well as the history of the company’s topsy-turvy fortunes, regrettably, have greatly distorted or ignored how much the Group influenced and continues to influence the teaching of acting in the international marketplace of performing arts. It spawned an army of the innovators.

The Group and its Method Strasberg and Clurman met backstage at the Theatre Guild in 1925 during the run of the Garrick Gaieties. An organization devoted to the exhibition of distinguished plays in stylish productions since 1919, the Theatre Guild was a magnet for young American dramatists and serious actors. Echoing the lost practice of turn-of-century stock companies, featured stars took on apprentices. Untried performers could work their way up the scale to more elevated positions. Professional directors, designers, and other recognized practitioners were hired for individual shows. There was nothing like it on Broadway. Despite its fondness for British and Continental playwrights, the Guild lacked most of the defining characteristics of a European art theatre. It possessed no meaningful Artistic Director or particular style. Its playbills did not contain manifesto-like statements, hawking some challenging aesthetic or political philosophy, only biographical entries. One of the main attractions for the Guild’s audiences was its wide and bewildering range of plays. Although highly subsidized, the Guild’s

42 Stanislavsky in America operation was a purely commercial venture. It lived or died off its box office receipts. Crawford, a twenty-seven-year-old casting director at the Guild, had known Clurman as a supernumerary and disgruntled stage manager. An upper-middle class Jewish intellectual from Manhattan, Clurman intrigued Crawford with his unrelenting plea for a stable American theatre company that fostered “the craft of acting” and the development of indigenous plays which mirrored the longings and problems of its age. After all, he had witnessed such as a model in Paris – Jacques Copeau’s Vieux Colombier Theatre. To Crawford, a taciturn lesbian from the Midwest, Clurman’s ferocious rants must have seemed like revolutionary oratory from some Old Testament seer-in-waiting. Clurman then introduced Crawford to Strasberg, another Guild trainee who spent a few months at Boleslavsky’s Lab. An expatriate from the impoverished Lower East Side, Strasberg appeared even more wildly visionary. He proselytized about Boley and Madame’s prophetic notions on the Stanislavsky Technique and “truthful acting.” Crawford was taken with the young men’s rhetoric. It was, to be sure, a new game in town. And just as the Lab was going under, this Group began to gain adherents. Under the rubric of the Theatre Guild Studio, Crawford produced Red Rust, a minor Soviet agitprop in 1929. Strasberg played an agitator called Freckles and the production attracted a new class of spectator to the Guild: left-wing theatregoers who sung along when the Internationale was played in the orchestra pit before the curtain went up. In November 1930, Clurman started to hold public talks about his idée fixe. He raved like an evangelical preacher about the trio’s incipient mission. Civilized societies required a theatrical reflecting glass and only a trained ensemble could provide one. (The Russian-born designer Boris Aronson jibed that Clurman sounded like a hysterical Father Divine before his animated Harlem flock on Sunday morning.) Clurman’s diatribes roundly tossed historical anecdote and art mysticism into the ether, sprinkled with heavy doses of pensive idealism. It was MATism in an American key. The weekly lectures began in Clurman’s hotel room, shifted to Crawford’s apartment, and finally, when ample crowds materialized, repaired to a donated rehearsal room in Steinway Hall. The excitement among New York’s largely jobless pool of actors grew over the next seven months. Several hundred saw it as a career salvation; they jostled to be among the theatre elect. While Crawford interrogated the Clurman devotees in her Guild office, Strasberg sat at a corner desk behind a sports section of a newspaper

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that concealed his face. If Strasberg liked the applicant’s responses, he remained still; if not, he signaled his disapproval by ruffling the sheets of the paper. Twenty-eight wide-eyed actors, including three Guild regulars, were chosen for the daring enterprise. The Theatre Guild had optioned Paul Green’s Southern gothic melodrama, The House of Connelly, but could not find a place for it in their repertoire. It presented the intergenerational warfare between the feudal Jim-Crow South and the heroic New South. The Group directors changed the tragically dark ending, where two black female servants strangle the amorous protagonists. The original script, of course, was in line with the European interwar skepticism à la Theatre Guild. Clurman altered the final scene so the class-mismatched lovers could optimistically proclaim their unimpeded independence in a heightened Union Square-ish harangue. The Manhattan arbitrators of theatrical realism quarreled over both endings. Crawford managed to obtain permission to stage the revised Green play and, with additional funds, finance the considerable expenses for summer-long rehearsal retreat. Under the “auspices” of the Theatre Guild, the “experimental” unit was formally approved. The crafty junior producer acquired the rental of a boarding school and renovated barn on a Connecticut estate gratis. Neither the Guild’s Board of Directors nor the young rebels were entirely happy with the arrangement. They called themselves “the Group,” their system of training “the Method,” and recorded their private thoughts in a communal summer diary referred to as “the Book.” The designated performers – a few with family and friends – and their directors left New York for Brookfield Center in a caravan of cars on June 8, 1931.

Brookfield Center Although the Group officially listed three directors, only Strasberg acquired the unceremonious position of Artistic Director; Crawford became, out of necessity, the executive producer and Clurman the organization’s spokesman and dramaturge. Essentially, Strasberg took on the dual roles of Madame and Boley (the director) while Clurman parroted Boley (the theoretician) in the lecture hall. Crawford functioned as the responsible adult, overseeing the rehearsals and preparing the fall opening. The Group players received no contracts and were assigned more or less equal salaries. Here again, a reliance on First Studio morality reigned. It was later known as the “truth of emotion” summer. Strasberg initiated the actors into Affective Memory work, which he and the

44 Stanislavsky in America company tagged “Method” in order to separate it from its Lab origins. To recreate authentic emotion, the Group performers were asked to describe past experiences in a sensorial, present tense, then they were sent off to put the last touches on their private deliberations. This was called “taking an exercise.” On Day One, Crawford read Green’s script to the actors. After Clurman discussed the play’s intellectual gist and its plan of action (or “Spine”), parts were assigned. Each performer received a stack of pink sheets that contained only his or her cue lines and dialogue. Rehearsals centered on individual scenes, which started with the recreation of various “moods” and improvised activity. Character development proceeded slowly since Clurman proclaimed that it had to organically evolve out of the atmosphere and plot of the play. In fact, he believed that characterization was the very last part of the rehearsal process. Since the ten-week tutorial involved both Method fundamentals and conventional production preparation, many of the neophytes thought the instruction was difficult and frequently confusing. The long sessions unfolded in fits and starts. Some of the performers reacted badly to the directors’ relentless demands. Strasberg’s Emotional Memory études caused the most friction. He appeared to be more wedded to their significance and theatrical worth than Madame Ouspenskaya herself. Wendell Phillips, who witnessed a replacement rehearsal of Success Story in December 1932, wonderfully captured exactly how Strasberg folded Affective Memory into his direction of scenes. A new Group member, Roman Bohnen (known as Bud), was cast as a substitute for Franchot Tone, who played Raymond Merritt, the dissolute scion of the founder of a Madison Avenue advertising firm. Although the nominal president of the family business, Merritt was an empty suit mainly interested in beautiful women and fine wine. At the conclusion of the Second Act, he realized that he lost the battle for the control of the company. Sol Ginsberg, an aggressive street tough from the Lower East Side, had outmaneuvered him. Now Merritt was content to play out the role for which he had been educated, a mere bon vivant. But two years later, at the beginning of Act Three, he discovers that Ginsberg has appropriated the affections of his female admirers as well. On the Maxine Elliott stage, Strasberg attempted to induct Bohnen into Merritt’s despondent emotional state. According to

The Group Theatre Phillips, the director and Group understudy sat on folding chairs during a rehearsal break. Lee Strasberg: Do you remember some time when you felt like that, walking in the rain? Bud Bohnen: Not off the top of my head. Lee: Take your time. Silence. Bud: This may be what you want. It was in Chicago. Hilder [Bohnen’s wife] and I had an apartment in an old north Michigan Avenue made-over mansion. Lee: Where were you just before you walked in the rain? Bud: In the apartment. I was listening to music. I don’t remember what. Hilder called from the kitchenette. She wanted me to go to the store. We were out of something. I don’t remember what. And I protested. I remember that. What else do you want to know? Lee: Describe the room to me. Bud: It was a walnut-stained wooden paneled room. And it had beams in the ceiling stained as were the walls. There was a fireplace. It was large with shinny green glazed square tiles. There were Oriental throw rugs on a parquet oak floor. There was a mission style library table in the center of the room, two wingback upholstered chairs with large flowered fitted covers on them, another plush upholstered chair, and a rocker. There were no hangings nor pictures on the walls. There were two windows with green heavy velour drapes. Lee: And you are? Bud: I’m annoyed. Why didn’t Hilder get butter when she was at the store? I remember what it was now, butter. Lee: How do you know you’re annoyed? Bud: How do I know? I remember. I threw the newspaper down. I was reading the newspaper and listening to music. I was reading an interesting review. Lee: Speak in the present tense, please. Bud (with restrained anger): What? Lee: Talk as if it is happening now. Bud: Oh. Lee: Go on. Bud: Go on, where? Lee: How did you know you were angry?

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46 Stanislavsky in America Bud: I don’t know what you mean? Lee: Well, did your face feel flushed? Was your heartbeat faster? Did the muscles of your forehead and hands contract? Bud: My breathing was tense. Lee: Present tense, please. Bud: You just used … Lee: So? This is your exercise. Bud: My breathing is tense. Lee: And? Bud: I walk to the closet door to get my umbrella. It’s drizzling outside. Lee: What kind of handle on the closet door? Bud: It was – it is brass. Lee: Go on. Bud: The door sticks. So I have to give it a jerk. I get my raincoat. It’s a yellow slicker. Lee: Can you feel the texture of it? How heavy is it? Is there a smell to the closet, to the slicker? Bud: I don’t know how much it weighs. Lee: I’m not interested in that. Can you feel the weight of it now, in your arm? Pause. Bud: Yes. And I can feel the texture. And (after another pause), smell the closet. I put on the slicker. I don’t want my umbrella, after all. I go to the front door. It’s right beside the closet. And it’s heavy paneled wood, with a brass, heavy brass with ovoid shape and rough feel in the palm of my hand. I open the door and immediately I am full of the feel and the smell of fresh, clean, moist air. Lee: What do you see? Bud: I see the white waves rolling in, on Oak Street beach. I see the traffic in front of it, open-top busses with no one sitting on top – cars. I can hear the tires splashing the wet pavement. I see one particular tree, directly in front of me, next to the curb. It’s an elm tree. There’s a sidewalk from my door to the Michigan Avenue sidewalk. There’s a lilac bush to my right, wet grass on both sides of the sidewalk. And the sidewalk has a shiny cover like glass. Only it’s water. And there are lots of fishing worms in the water that have been washed up out of the earth. I feel an unsteady sense of balance as I look at them. I can feel the mist in my face and on my hair.

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Bud’s voice drops. All the muscles of his body seem limp. Lee: Go make your change, now. While you’re doing it keep remembering the sensory details, sensorially, of everything from opening the closet door to where we stopped. Concentrate. Whatever else takes your attention, make sure it allows you to come back, in your concentration, to these sensorial details. Phillips remembered: “There was no doubt that the exercise had given Bud just the perfect inner rhythm for playing the change in the man, a change that in life would have taken perhaps fifteen or so years as the play suggested. That change had to occur in less than eight minutes in the theatre. Bud was able to acquire that inner rhythm change in, maybe, twenty-five minutes, in rehearsal. I was fascinated by the technique and followed the further development of it.” One aspect of the day-long rehearsals everyone enjoyed was the improvisation exercises. These usually entailed violent and frantic action in an isolated setting: on an island, sinking ship or, once, in a dirigible. Some took on a lighter tone. For instance, in a favorite of Ruth Nelson, a village rumor quickly grows out of hand. One of the variations on this improvisation drops it into a wedding ceremony. Townspeople begin to whisper to one another: “She’s not free to marry.” “No, she’s already married.” “I hear she has a child out of wedlock!” “Has a disease.” The others react: “Oh, it’s not true.” A small argument ensues. Eventually, it develops into a real fight with each actor retaining his or her own sense of character detail and personal attitude. Nelson explained how the wacky improvised scenes functioned as a foundation for the coming season: “We would work on these things day after day. Then we would sit down and read The House of Connelly and get closer to the problems of the play. We discussed the different classes of people – the tenant farmers, the aristocracy. The improvisations got closer to the play. They became less general, had fewer people, more intimate situations. First thing you know we’d be doing the play with our own words. If we remembered words from Green, we’d use them – but the main thing was that the moment was clear. We would re-read the play. We would never memorize. We knew the situation so well we could use our own words. One fine day before we went into town, we’d sit down with someone on book to correct errors. Never did anyone work on book.”

48 Stanislavsky in America Margaret (“Beanie”) Barker fondly recalled another Connelly improv. The fifteen supernumeraries were caught in a burning mineshaft, causing them to crawl down miniature corridors and automatically invent distinct characters and relationships. She claimed: “It created a group sense. When you all play in a mine together, you have to have some sort of relationship. Is it dark? Who is to help me see? Does somebody have a light? Do you have a match? Dare we burn up that much air?” But if much of the Group’s first-year rehearsal work seems standard fare today, some of Strasberg’s direction for Connelly did not. Twice during each performance, Franchot Tone, playing the lead, was given a number of variable acting choices. This caused his partners to respond differently each evening. Strasberg believed that this “open-endedness,” however slight in the spectators’ eyes, allowed his actors a sense of freedom and variety that contrasted markedly with a typically “frozen” Broadway performance. On a social level, Strasberg fumed against the actors’ recreational offstage merry-making. (Only Tone dared to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday with pranks and firecrackers.) In the Brookfield Daybook, Odets compared Clurman and Strasberg to angry biblical prophets; they were never entirely satisfied with their acolytes’ exertions, overly determined, argumentative, and unsympathetic to what seemed to be sincere inquiries. A number of the Group inductees were gay or lesbian. This was their first unsupervised free time as young adults. Like the heterosexuals, they formed temporary sexual relationships and playfully mocked the new-fangled scenic work. For instance, Bobby Lewis pressed his swimming-pool teammates into stripping off their trunks in order to improvise a “truthful” Nudist Cult scene. More discretely, a lovesick Crawford rode off into the countryside with Dorothy Patten, her new partner-in-arms. At midnight, Clurman continued his nonstop and often droll courtship with the married vixen Stella Adler. One resolute ingénue, Paula Miller, pursued the somber Strasberg. Sexual machinations naturally upended the Group’s Puritan all-work ethic. Clurman papered over some of the dissension with his early morning bombast and ensemble boosterism. He assured his colleagues that if Connelly succeeded the Group would continue for twenty more years; if it failed, then the Group would merely persist for two decades. During one outdoor Clurman lecture, Lewis mimed his ears falling off from overuse. He also provoked giggles when Clurman discoursed incessantly about the Depression’s debilitating effect on American life and Lewis comically yanked out his empty pockets; as he often explained these were his promised Hoover dollars.

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Toward the end of August, The House of Connelly looked more and more like a professional production. Not everyone was pleased, of course, especially the Guild administrators, who had more than a passing interest in the project. Even Paul Green surfaced in Brookfield Center but the performers were more inquisitive about the playwright’s rural Carolinian accent than his reserved dramaturgical commentary. In general, Strasberg treated the guests as nuisances. Most knew little about acting and his acerbic personality made it impossible for him to countenance even gentle criticism. It was a trait that startled many in the Group and was duly recorded in the Book. To disparage the performers’ rehearsal gaffes was internal critique and justifiable; to lash out at outsiders seemed unnecessary and counterproductive. The Brookfield Group carted back to New York City in a state of youthful trepidation and youthful sanguinity. Clurman’s vivacious blandishments, notwithstanding, most felt that it was do or die. They were guaranteed two seasons of work, to be sure; yet a poor showing probably meant a dismal collective future, reimbursed with a pocketful of Hoover dollars.

First season The New York art, fashion, nightclub, and theatre season typically began shortly after Labor Day. Businessmen and their families had just returned to the city and entertainment reporters were gearing up to cover the fall premieres. Most new theatre productions, however, were locked into their second or third week of a normal five-week rehearsal process. This meant that reviewers had to backpedal for the better part of September, looking for preview filler or backstage human-interest stories. The Group, which spent all of July and August in rehearsal, wisely decided to open Connelly on September 28, 1931 at the Martin Beck Theatre. Besides having a compelling backstory, their first-in-the-season debut provided the entire New York theatre press corps with solid material for critical reportage. That decision was brilliantly conceived. Few neophyte theatre organizations could outlive an indifferent or too curt journalistic introduction. Even middling reviews in the toniest of newspapers or in the right columns might stimulate spectator interest. The House of Connelly could not completely remove its Theatre Guild branding. No matter how cleverly promoted or radically staged, the play reeked of high culture and therefore appealed exclusively to New York’s carriage trade and Guild subscribers. The Group directors anxiously watched the premiere from the back of the house. The

50 Stanislavsky in America opening moments of the evening were a bit shaky: the lighting seemed unnaturally dim and a few of the actors did not project fully. Some scenes in the middle sections lacked the rhythm and vitality that was so brilliantly realized in the Brookfield rehearsals. By the play’s end, however, the audience responded warmly to the Group’s initial foray. Crawford counted sixteen curtain calls and six more after Green took to the stage. The first-night critics, more or less overlooked the excessively talkie script and the not-always-convincing Southern characterizations. The New York Post hailed the Group’s idealism and injection of “new blood” on Broadway. Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times reviewer, was even more enthusiastic. He compared the Group’s ensemble to a band of musicians, who performed without “a gaudy, brittle, or facile stroke.” He declared: “Something fine and true has been started in the American theatre.” Connelly ran for ninety-one performances but the Group’s second production at the Mansfield Theatre did not fare as well. Strasberg attempted to show the range of the company by choosing a left-wing propaganda play written by Claire and Paul Sifton. Originally titled Son of God, 1931-unveiled the downward sociological impact of the Depression and the unemployment crisis in New York in fourteen blackout sketches. Like Boley, Strasberg spent much of the five-week rehearsal period on perfecting the visual and individual placement of secondary actors in the play’s crowd scenes. In order to realize this, the hell-bent director often ignored the larger issues of blocking and interaction with his lighting and scenic staff. Paul Sifton registered amazement when the production had fallen behind schedule and Strasberg consumed a precious thirty minutes coaching a walk-on in an Affective Memory exercise. It was a charge that would shadow the Method director for much of his career; he was more devoted to acting technique than mounting professional shows. When 1931- opened in December, neither the Guild’s subscribers nor the theatre reviewers could accept its foreboding political message. The fabulist tragedy was thought to be more depressing and grim than the social reality on the streets. Only atypical Broadway, working-class spectators in the balcony welcomed the heavy-handed agitprop. During the First Act, flocks of them paraded down the aisles to fill the empty Mezzanine seats. Financially, 1931- was a disaster. Following the thirteenth performance, Crawford stopped the production and revived Connelly after New Year’s. In February 1932, the Group formally terminated its strained relationship with the Theatre Guild and declared their newly independent

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status. Yet, in their haste, the directors selected another inappropriate vehicle to showcase the Group’s acting talents. This time Strasberg staged Maxwell Anderson’s Night Over Taos, a historical romance set in the Spanish colony of New Mexico. While the critics praised its lavish atmospheric rending and fine dialogue, most considered the Group’s teamwork peculiarly hollow and unimpressive. In the words of the ensemble players, their characters were conceived “as persons not as parts.” Unfortunately, their individually developed types only registered a fragile commonality and barely interacted with any stylistic unity. Taos, like 1931-, bungled through thirteen evening and matinee shows.

Discovery of Vakhtangov In June 1932, fifty Group members and associates congregated at a former summer camp in Dover Furnace, New York to begin their second ten-week retreat. The directors privately smarted over their waning luck on Broadway and added more expressive technique and experimentation to the company’s acting classes. They rehearsed John Howard Lawson’s Success Story and Dawn Powell’s The Big Party. Both plays inhabited a political-aesthetic terrain somewhere between the heralded Connelly and despised 1931-. The new dramas savaged American Capitalism in their authors’ depiction of class struggle among the white-collar elites on Madison Avenue. Before dinner each evening, the Group’s Russian-born dishwasher, Mark Schmidt, read his ad hoc translations from various Soviet books and magazine articles on the Soviet avant-garde and Evgeni Vakhtangov. Sovetski Teatr had just printed Iosif Rapoport’s breakdown of the Vaktangov Theatre acting regime in its June issue. “The Work of the Actor” outlined dozens of inventive acting études in glowing detail. These immediately aroused the Group’s fervor for more elaborate preparations. Improvisations of all sorts were concocted. For two hours in the early afternoon and two more hours for non-leads in the evening, the actors practiced theatrical games and contests. Some were nothing more than the playing of opposites: Elia Kazan invoked a dumb, leapfrogging Irishman for Twelfth Night’s Sir Andrew. In the guise of a depressed matador, Tony Kraber sang a heroic aria from Carmen. As a jaded dilettante, Mary Virginia Farmer pranced to Ravel. With Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in the background, Kraber created a pantomime of a miser counting his money, while he sensorially recalled climbing a mast in the midst of a sea storm. Bobby Lewis performed a muchbeloved sketch as a meek cleric who, after discovering that his hot

52 Stanislavsky in America water is out, tremblingly steps into his cold shower, intoning Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric.” It was clear: mismatched physical actions could convey fresh and unexpected significance to timeworn poetry and musical scores. Then an evening of charades or masquerades took root as each Group member was assigned a specific character or type – like Confucius, Camille, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, or Texas Guinan – and scrambled to assemble a recognizable facsimile from scraps of paper and assorted clothing. After half an hour, the actors returned to the dining room in makeup and costume. Sandy Meisner adorned himself in the outfit of a coachman. Alix Walker became a French washerwoman out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. With parted hair and cotton balls in his cheeks, Lewis created a memorable Herbert Hoover. Then the invented characters interacted with one another. Another madcap, game-like pastime involved the use of objects. When the dinner plates were cleared, three articles – usually comically unrelated, like an alarm clock, a book, and a hairpin – were placed on a table; then each actor had to invent a fantastic and unified story about them. Unfortunately, the Russian kitchen help became so adept at the imaginative storytelling that the Group actors quickly dropped this fast-draw event. Nelson remembers improvisations that dealt with seemingly unmotivated movements. For example, Strasberg told her to enter with her partner and begin a conversation about anything but that which was foremost in their minds, like an awful action caused by her partner’s brother. To this, a second physical action was added: Nelson had to keep moving some part of her body at all times. Finding reasons to gesture with her arms, fingers or tongue made it feel more like a dance for her, bringing a new richness to the character. One category of improvisation was based on the actor’s reactive pantomime to a single word, given to them by Strasberg or Clurman. The word “Liberty” for one actress became the image of the Statue of Liberty, whose torch slowly transforms into a cocktail glass. Odets took the word “America” and created the sketch of a hurried businessman who wakes in a start, dresses on the run, sprints to the subway, up an elevator, dashes to his office and, after lighting a cigar, puts his feet on his desk with apparently nothing to do. For “Newton’s Apple,” one actor merely climbed on a desk, bunched himself into a ball and fell off. The exercises proliferated into two- and four-person improvisations. One of these began after a couple was presented with three random words, like “Iron-Fish-Butter jug,” “Soup-Kill-Store,” “Moon-Baloney-Skeleton,”

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or “Nose-Sing-Beer.” Given one minute to huddle and plan a sketch, they had to use these images as springboards for scenes. Two actors made “Poison-Explosive-MO” into FBI codewords. Then the teams were told to dispense the same word-trios in a Russian, French, or Chinese patois of gibberish. Strasberg taught the Group actors to find “heightened significance” in classical and modern art, to be able to duplicate the expressions and gestures of figures in paintings, to feel the visceral atmosphere in the frame. Nelson developed and directed an improvisation based on the simple line drawing of Käthe Kollwitz that illustrated the nobility of German workingwomen and their starving children to the music of Gustav Mahler’s Song on the Death of Children. A whole scenario was invented as Frances Williams moved from one position in a drawing to the next. Barker and Meisner used reproductions of Giotto’s paintings for work on Twelfth Night. Although she played Olivia, Barker’s movements were not in the Group’s realistic mode; they were stylized and expressive, motivated by the Renaissance canon. For Barker, the problem was “keeping the tempo, like a dancer” while declaiming the dialogue from Twelfth Night. As the clown, Meisner moved from one Giotto image to another in a rhythm and tempo totally different from Barker’s. More ambitious still were Barker’s spontaneous poses inspired by an André Obey play. In it, three women continuously metamorphosized from Toulouse-Lautrec paintings, Fifth Avenue model photographs, and Goya sketches. For Strasberg, the most absorbing of Vakhtangov reformulations – besides the improvisational études – had to do with the restored emphasis on Relaxation (later translated as “Muscular Freedom”), Sense Memory, Public Solitude, and the introduction of Justification and Adjustment. These linked divisions of actor training formed the core of his mature Method teaching. In a sense, the conventional criticism about Method – that it did not strictly adhere to Stanislavsky’s System – was correct. Strasberg incorporated Vakhtangov’s analysis and additions to it during the summer of 1932. Strasberg’s Method superimposed Vakhtangovism over his American Lab tutelage. At the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow, the differences between the First Studio work and their instruction were elucidated with this example: to stimulate the experience of an equestrian ride, Stanislavsky would have the actor sit on a chair and imagine that the wooden object was a horse in motion; Vakhtangov dispensed with the galloping image and asked the actor to feel the wind gusting against his face and hair, to smell the country breeze, to react to the sashaying of the leather saddle. Rapoport claimed that Sense Memory in all its fine detail could

54 Stanislavsky in America induce a stronger and more direct physical response than any generalized suggestion. Justification took the actor out of the play and its internal logic into a private realm. Instead of seeking the character’s emotional truth, the performer could conjure up any substitute experience that gave him or her an appropriate sentiment. This kind of Affective Memory did not have to relate to the role or scene; it needed only to invoke a truthful sensation and corresponding theatrical expression. After all, the audience did not know what was inside the actor’s mind when he or she performed on the stage. Substitution as an acting strategy, of course, had a long and rich history. For a performance of Electra in fourth-century BC Athens, the tragic actor Polus placed the actual ashes of his dead son in an urn that was supposed to contain the remains of Orestes. He used this to simulate a true sensation of grief and lamentation. In 1814, Edmund Kean reflected upon his deceased adopted uncle when he held up the skull of “Poor Yorick” in Hamlet. Even Boley wrote about substituting the memory of swatting a mosquito for an actor playing a brigand who is contemplating a murder. After all, few performers resembled or had comparable histories to the hardened criminals or death-defying heroes they were asked to portray. But Justification was not about substitute experiences and their emotional amplification; analogous feelings or actions of a character could be generated through a different kind of reality. For instance, an actor performing Hamlet’s Soliloquy could sensorially recall the internal debate he once had between the choice of two sweethearts or decide which of two directors he preferred. If the actor’s internal state seemed amiss because the Justification did not match the physical circumstances, then it could be radically changed. In other words, the actor could continue to re-adjust his or her sources of inspiration to fit the scenic needs. For example, an actress might use an Affective Memory of dating an immature classmate to display Medea’s motherly qualities. But if her director disapproved of her appearance or movement, then the actress might alter her emotional state to include her immediate feelings about the plight of the director himself. The important thing here was unearthing authentic and personal material to motivate the performer into proper expressive behavior. During the Dover Furnace summer, Strasberg interwove the Vakhtangov revisions into his directing. When Stella Adler had difficulty playing the self-effacing secretary Sarah Glassman in Success Story, the director calmly took her aside. Her problem, she asserted, was in Sarah’s timorous

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approach to romance. Stella could not sublimate her desires for four years and then make an impassioned declaration of love. “When I’m in love, Lee, I’m in love!” she protested. Strasberg inquired about Stella’s personal life; was there ever a time when she had to conceal her yearnings. Stella thought for a while and responded that on a five-day cruise from New York to France, she once had to restrain herself from initiating a romantic relationship with a married man because of the brevity of the trip and the probable long-term consequences of the tryst. Strasberg jumped at a solution and gave Stella a “Shipboard Adjustment.” During the play, she was to re-experience the rocking of the ocean liner and inhale the salt-sea air. That, he hoped, would truthfully draw Stella into the repressed mentality of her character. Theatre journals and entertainment columnists had a field day reporting on the Group’s rehearsal activities and improvisations, which were amusing to watch and fun to describe. The Greenwich Village choreographer Helen Tamiris led the Group in morning stretching and movement drills. These progressed into mechanical gestures and Machine Dances. Chanting and repetitive diction warbles could be heard across the Berkshire hideaway at all hours. Sessions in Communication schooled the actors in Subtext: varying the tonalities and rhythm of dialogue automatically changed the speaker’s meaning. Any sentence could be delivered in twenty contrasting ways. That way every shade of meaning could be wrung from the simplest of dialogue. Finally the company integrated what Boley called the Outer Means of Expression with their internal Method preparations. Despite the Group’s educational and fulsome summer period and the effusive promotions that followed, Success Story did not live up to its name. The reviews in September 1932 were curiously tepid. Most critics faulted Lawson’s play. It was wordy and its subterranean social agitation hard to follow yet the acting was deemed superb. Atkinson, in The Times, praised Luther Adler for his passionate embodiment of an “East Side hothead” (read Jew) and Stella was widely esteemed for giving “a splendid performance, profound, emotional, and true.” Noel Coward and Fanny Brice second-acted the show several times just to observe Stella’s poignant cri du coeur before the curtain fell. No matter. Success Story’s demise put the Group in an economic and psychological tailspin. They needed a hit pronto. But Crawford’s direction of The Big Party in January 1933 actually fared worse. Except for an out-of-control party scene, the entire project was condemned as brooding and dull. The production barely survived one complete week. The ambiance surrounding the Big White Way had drastically changed in 1933. Depression-era audiences were abandoning Broadway

56 Stanislavsky in America en masse for Hollywood sparkle and laughs. Neither the legitimate theatre nor musical variety had retained their abilities to enlighten or amuse.

Success in White In June, the dispirited Group retreated to Green Mansions, New York. Crawford implored the directorate to option Crisis, a new script that had been circulating through the Theatre Guild. It was a hospital potboiler by Sidney Kingsley, a twenty-seven-year-old playwright. Clurman and Strasberg had little enthusiasm for it, except for its upbeat Connelly-like finale. In the last scene, the heroic young doctor accepts responsibility for impregnating a nurse, whom he will marry; breaks off his engagement with the callous daughter of the hospital’s main patron; and sets out to become a general practitioner. The provocative drama was the first to display the internal workings of the medical profession and it climaxed with a surgical abortion in full sight of the audience. Kingsley based Crisis on first-hand observations and peppered the dubious plot with a realistic depiction of a contemporary hospital environment. The Group had no other plays to rehearse and this one contained a host of minor characters. Also, the interns’ playful socializing, concentrated medical preparations, and the life-or-death operation paralleled, in Strasberg’s estimation, the pre-production and theatrical work of the Group itself. He began to direct it under the revised title Men in White. The actors earnestly watched pre-op techniques at local clinics and studied basic medical procedures, including sterilization and anesthesia. They observed the confined spatial atmosphere of the typical OR, and learned how to scrub up and apply topical antiseptics. How nurses and interns behaved around the surgical table, the placement of the chief surgeon, his means of communication, even the proper selection of instruments for incision or suturing were all carefully scrutinized. For Strasberg, surgery resembled dance. There was an established division of labor and it unfolded with a balletic sense of precise movement and scoring. Even an outsider could detect the artistic labor of a surgical team working in tandem. Strasberg furthered the choreographic analogy by conducting the scrub scene in various modes: intensely, in slow motion to the thundering music of Beethoven; then farcically to an Offenbach operetta theme. While the actors toiled to find appropriate backstories and individual actions, not everything clicked readily. The Group’s stable of character types did exactly match the needs of Men in White. For instance, Joe

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Bromberg, who was cast as Dr. Hochberg, the all-serious senior physician, looked almost comical in a hospital gown, covering his grizzly physique. Nothing in Bromberg’s hectoring delivery sounded authentic either. To all concerned, he appeared like a Borscht Belt tumbler playacting a hospital bureaucrat. After Kingsley registered a complaint, Strasberg gave Bromberg a private Adjustment: he was not to play Dr. Hochberg openly as a character in Men in White but as an FBI spy who has infiltrated the Group in order to ferret out Communist sympathizers. Listening to how the Group performers spoke their lines he, as an undercover agent pretending to be an actor, would determine which were, in fact, clandestine Reds. No one in the Group was to learn of Bromberg’s new role. In the words of Vakhtangov, “Justification was the actor’s secret.” The “FBI Adjustment” worked magically. Overnight, Bromberg embodied a more complicated and stern stage persona. Instead of barking vacantly at his staff of orderlies, this hospital chieftain spoke guardedly and parsed his underlings’ choice of words and tone. Critics later extolled Bromberg’s disturbing characterization. He was indeed a familiar personality to anxious family members awaiting results about their loved ones in hospital foyers but a fresh sensation on Broadway. (Ironically, Bromberg himself would fall victim to the McCarthy antiCommunist crusade. The forty-eight-year-old actor died of heart failure in London in 1951 after refusing to testify as a “friendly witness” before the House of Un-American Activities Committee hearings in Washington.) This time Strasberg struck gold. Men in White satisfied both the mavens of American theatrical taste and their performance-shy readers. Audiences flocked to the Broadhurst Theatre to view a new kind of drama. Word-of-mouth excitement proved contagious. The production ran for 311 performances. Reports from the Group treasurer confirmed that ticket sales and profits were so abundant that no company performer could be excused from the production until spring 1934, except on dark nights. For eight months, critics staked out ingenious ways to comment on the Group’s techniques: the actors switched roles and continued to rehearse nonstop in hospital gowns, handling real medical equipment; dialogue was sometimes altered to keep the show from going stale, and Lewis’ comic intern, Shorty, varied his jokes and songs each night. Vogue and Stage Magazine printed publicity stills of Alexander Kirkland and Phoebe Brand, the Group’s leads. Even physicians and hospital authorities begrudgingly gave Kingsley’s meler their stamp of approval. They assumed the playwright must have been a former medical

58 Stanislavsky in America student. After all, excerpts of the Hippocratic oath were tucked in the program notes. Writing under the pseudonym, Harold Edgar, Clurman published accolades about Men in White in the Communist Daily Worker and the left-wing monthly New Theatre. The local radio station WJZ promoted the scenic phenomenon in a studio broadcast in January 1934. And after the 150th performance, one columnist teasingly hinted that a play about the behind-the-scenes business world, Men in Red, would be mounted as a natural sequel. Men in White shattered all Broadway records and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Playwriting in 1934.

New sources In March 1934, the Group mounted its second production for the 1933–34 season: Lawson’s Gentlewoman. The reviews were catastrophically negative. Once again, a spring debacle eclipsed the Group’s autumn triumph. This time, however, the downward turn had enduring consequences. The Group’s performers could no longer tolerate the company’s frenetic roller coaster ride. Something had to change. Since each Group production was funded as a separate entity, neither the directors nor the actors benefited directly or bore the monetary shortfall from Men in White or Gentlewoman. They received a modest fixed salary from the financially strained organization. Kingsley, now internationally acclaimed, decided to reward Strasberg for his work on Men in White. The director’s new wife, Paula Miller, implored the playwright to take Lee with him to Russia. Kingsley agreed and, after a stopover in Budapest for the European premiere of Men in White, the writer and director disembarked in Moscow in early May. Stella Adler joined them at the Hotel Metropole a few days later. Clurman arrived at the end of June. For Strasberg, the Moscow trip was a great awakening. The MAT performances depressed him; they were poorly staged – one nonspeaking actor occasionally peered out into the house – and displayed signs of sloppy direction and general inaptitude. With Stella, he paid his respects to Vakhtangov’s widow and visited the Vakhtangov Theatre. Most spectacular was the stage work of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nikolai Okhlopkov, the leading avatars of Soviet anti-realism in theatre. Strasberg witnessed two sessions of Biomechanics at the Meyerhold Theatre. This superphysical regimen, which was created in opposition to the Stanislavsky System in the early 1920s, failed to impress the thirtythree year-old American. It promised much but ignored the truthful expression of emotion. When Strasberg carped about the overall value

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of the exercises to Meyerhold himself, the Russian acknowledged its shortcomings. His actors “were bad,” the homme de théâtre admitted. Yet Meyerhold’s productions unfolded with a dynamicism and vivacious theatricality that simply astonished. Strasberg had stumbled upon a new mentor and directorial inspiration. He was anxious to inject Meyerhold’s visual power to enchant and avant-garde vitality into the Group’s detailed and traditionally paced ethos. His actors could truly invoke authentic feeling while inhabiting the confines of sharply edited or plaintively nonrealistic dramas. Strasberg’s enthusiasm for the most extreme of Soviet innovators reached a feverish pitch as soon as he returned to American soil. He jotted off his first public statement on theatre, “The Magic of Meyerhold,” which appeared in the September 1934 issue of New Theatre. Kingsley and his Group comrades explored the Moscow theatre scene for other revelations. Its range and depth was central to the capital’s identity. Hundreds of ticket-hungry spectators waited apprehensively around every playhouse for cancellations. It was commonplace to see generals seated next to kvass-vendors in the packed auditoriums. Not just theatre critics and intellectuals but ordinary Muscovites followed the gala openings. Each theatre had a distinct personality and a devoted fan base. This was the Mecca of the performing arts. Stella marveled at the Russian actors’ sense of job security and social elevation – aspects of theatre life that she had not experienced since her brisk days on the Yiddish stage. Kingsley and Strasberg hunted down Russian directors and playwrights at private theatre clubs late at night, after sitting through their four-hour productions, and stared mutely at these “knights of culture” while their interpreter explicated the discussions around the table. Clurman (who returned to Moscow the following spring with Crawford) was later awe-struck with Stanislavsky’s “temporhythm machine,” a contraption that Soviet engineers had constructed for his master classes. When MAT performers moved or spoke according to the rhythmic underpinnings of the play, Stanislavsky pressed a button that lighted a blue bulb on an electric board; actions that the old director perceived of as imprecise or out-of-step sparked a red light. Clurman and Stella spent July 1934 in Paris. They visited Copeau, one of Clurman’s initial muses, and he arranged for them to meet with Stanislavsky. The MAT founder was convalescing in a small apartment in the 16th Arrondissement. Since his sons had previously joined the Russian émigré community in France and Switzerland, this was a rare opportunity for Stanislavsky to reconnect with his children. Stella and Clurman were invited to lunch with the Russians. Stella’s chance encounter with Stanislavsky in Paris would soon upend Strasberg’s

60 Stanislavsky in America position in the Group and the singularity of his Method. She spent a total of three weeks with the ailing master. They chatted in the afternoons about American and Soviet theatre, Stanislavsky’s latest discoveries, and her private difficulties with Strasberg’s direction.

The actors’ revolt At the Group’s 1934 late summer retreat at a ramshackle hotel in Ellenville, New York, Strasberg was clearly enervated by his Moscow discoveries but many of the actors worried that their teacher might have incorporated the wrong lessons from the Soviet experiment. In Russia, artistic directors had immense power; they sanctioned all administrative and talent appointments, selected their repertoires, organized the schooling of pupils, oversaw the long rehearsal process, and were responsible for the ensemble’s stylistic imprint. Except in matters political, they controlled everything related to their theatre and its members. Before and during the Stalinist era, few Russian directors could be considered less than tyrannical. Their directives were nonnegotiable. Arguments and collective decision-making in Moscow studios were unimaginable. The director ruled his theatre exactly like a czar. He did not even need an army or threat of imprisonment to enforce his edicts. Crawford had secured a new costume drama, Gold Eagle Guy by a Greenwich Village writer, Melvin Levy. A closet history of San Francisco from the Civil War through the 1906 Earthquake, it was yet another picaresque indictment of American Capitalism. Strasberg should have scotched the silly project but its epic qualities had obvious Meyerholdian possibilities. The mobile set pieces and Wild West rhythms required a montage of styles in the theatrical Russian manner. In some ways, it was the worst time for Strasberg to introduce accelerated training. After Men in White, the Group actors had established themselves as independent purveyors of the Stanislavsky technique. They no longer enjoyed the psychophysical work under Strasberg’s strict guidance. It did not seem necessary to repeat the old familiar work. Not only could the Group members practice the Method among themselves in their own ways, a few of them started to teach it outside the Group. Additionally, Gold Eagle Guy had some problematic resemblances to the disastrous Night Over Taos. On August 7, Stella swept into Ellenville with novel insights and a chart that illustrated the MAT’s correct approach to acting. Unlike Strasberg and Kingsley, she adored the current MAT productions and she had just spent nearly a month with Stanislavsky, learning his more

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indirect technique to evoke emotion. To the actors, this was a startling and welcomed challenge to the Method. While Strasberg had suggested many physical (or Meyerholdian) additions to be placed over their Affective Memory work, Stella explained that Stanislavsky started with the Given Circumstances of the play and these led seamlessly to the performers’ truthful Action onstage. Strasberg was so upset with Stella’s thesis that he refused to attend her whirlwind lecture. He also declined to debate her. If Stanislavsky had actually abandoned his emphasis on the centrality on Emotional Recall, according to Strasberg, then he had reverted to his old pre-First Studio methodology. This retrenchment would explain the sad state of the MAT performances. Besides, the Group’s Method in 1934 owed more to Vakhtangov than Stanislavsky himself. Strasberg maintained that his Method was superior to that of the master. It was a scandalous response, in the thinking of many members, and violated much of Strasberg and Clurman’s previous statements. As a compromise and at the urging of some of the Group regulars, Stella would teach this “improved,” if heretical, approach to acting. For Morris Carnovsky, Brand, Lewis, Meisner, and their supporters, this was a psychic release and a path away from Strasberg’s iron grip. The Group had outgrown the dictates of its authoritarian directorate. Stella’s classes sparkled at first and proved to be a tonic to Strasberg’s sudden unsteady hand. The rehearsals of Gold Eagle Guy went badly. No aspect of Strasberg’s direction – neither the internal or outer études – could mend the weak script. When it opened to horrid reviews in November 1934, the final blow fell. Strasberg found himself displaced. The Group would no longer be his exclusive principality. But the first to topple the thirty-three-year-old former wunderkind from his lofty throne were his lesser and politically energized actors.

Drifting left The Depression years slowly transformed New York’s theatre scene. Before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal galvanized the entertainment industry to produce works that propped up the Administration’s campaign for a national recovery, plays with progressive themes such as 1931- and Success Story appeared haphazardly on Broadway. And these failed to satisfy the general theatregoing public for old-fashioned divertissement and distraction. By 1932, the mood continued to darken as employment plummeted across the city. Politicians and financiers seemed powerless to fix the jerry-rigged system.

62 Stanislavsky in America At the outer fringes of Broadway, in the Village and throughout the boroughs, amateur drama groups gave voice to the increasingly radical sentiments of the immigrant underclass, pro-Soviet ideologues, and their fellow travelers. The most common manifestations of left-wing sloganeering took the form of agitprop presentations. Borrowing from 1920’s Soviet and Communist German models, these performances were direct and unadorned. They rallied against the stagnant policies and bromides of the parties in power. Dozens of small itinerant groups surfaced in parks, union halls, and leftist clubhouses, barking out revolutionary solutions for the incessant social malaise. Their scenic means were minimal. For the most part, the poetic political dialogues resembled animated placards. More advanced companies studded their productions with parades of caricatured villains and musical interludes. Sleek proletariat figures struck down unscrupulous exploiters, pushed their Capitalist lackeys to the side, and unmasked class traitors. Like their European progenitors, however, the American agitprop groups exhausted their limited technical skills and narrative abilities after a few seasons. Even the most accomplished agitprops lost their novelty as the Depression deepened. The Group offered a more sophisticated process for theatre making. Besides having produced a goodly number of full-length productions, it used an advanced acting method that originated in Russia, the workers’ homeland. The politics of the Group was both reformist and revolutionary. A significant faction of the company openly supported the Communist Party and nearly every member appeared at the annual May Day celebrations in Union Square. Marxist theology was a lingua franca across the Group supper tables. True believers proclaimed that conflict, Aristotle’s motivating principle of drama, was analogous to the daily realities of class struggle. In 1933, one Group actor, Mary Virginia Farmer, led Method exercises at the radical Theatre Collective. Over the next two years, Strasberg, Carnovsky, Crawford, Odets, Meisner, Lewis Leverett, and Molly Day Thatcher joined her and trained some 150 amateur actors and writers at their Greenwich Village flat. Other socially active troupes in New York requested the Group’s assistance. In 1934, the Theatre Union offered Odets the position as acting teacher. The Theatre of Action (formerly the Shock Troupe of the Workers Laboratory Theatre) was headed by Stephen Karnot, who had studied with Boley at the Lab and then with Meyerhold in Moscow. Now he implored Elia Kazan (a wild-brand Group apprentice), Meisner, and Strasberg to instruct his actors. The biomechanical exercises that Karnot and his wife taught were insufficient for the character-based plays that his company hoped to mount.

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In spring 1935, the New Theatre School, a consortium academy of radical theatre companies, advertised a course in acting fundamentals taught by Bromberg, Kazan, and Strasberg. The next year, the Chicago Repertory Group (formerly called The Group until Crawford threatened legal action) hired Odets, Lewis, and Carnovsky to teach them the Method. They were the only leftist organization west of New Jersey to receive training in Strasberg’s regimen. Why Group members appeared so eager to teach in these less-thanprofessional arenas is complex. For one, many shared the political thinking of the nascent theatre collectives. Although meager, the honoraria supplemented their modest Group salaries. More importantly, the members’ impulse to educate related to their newfound status: their skills were in demand. Also, teaching allowed them to accentuate aspects of Strasberg’s Method that they thought useful and expunge the parts that they disliked. For instance, the improvisations that Kazan led at the Theatre of Action contained much more conflict and physical violence than the typical Group setups. Lewis grounded his Sense Memory exercises directly to Fantasy and Imagination. Carnovsky emphasized Subtext as a means of anchoring poetic speech to the actor’s scenic range. Odets made his young charges start with photographic images from a stack of newspapers and then form characters. As junior instructors, they were excavating their private ways into the Method. By the fall of 1934, the Group’s preparations had gone far beyond tabloid curiosity. They became a fascinating amusement at adult summer camps and leftist benefits. Their improvisational scenes would be a mainstay and were widely imitated by the amateur troupes. To the surprise of some, they proved that Method actors could also perform for laughs. John Anderson, in the Journal-American, claimed the Group’s reputation was so dour that the members were taught to perform “sad somersaults.” The Group improvisations were presented publicly in New York on February 10, 1935, as a curtain raiser for Odets’ Waiting for Lefty. Eight short presentations were announced: (1) “An Original Idea of the Gravedigger’s Scene from Hamlet.” Meisner, as Chief Gravedigger, assumed the role of professor to Florence Cooper’s pupil, using only the words of Shakespeare. (2) Tony Kraber sang a number of “Western Songs.” (3) “Improvisations to the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.” Odets, Bromberg and Walter Coy recreated their rehearsal for the abortion operation in Men in White. Their delicate, evident realism was highly praised by the evening’s critics, some of whom thought the sketch was superior to Lefty. (4) “Operation on Hitler.” In

64 Stanislavsky in America a Commedia version of the previous piece, Kazan and Kraber, after much play as clown-surgeons, discovered that Hitler had no heart. (5) “Red Hamlet.” In a solo part, Lewis enacted Hamlet’s soliloquy as a leftist political cartoon – for example, “to be” was interpreted as the worker breaking his chains; “or not to be” as a cigar-smoking capitalist. (6) “Stylized Sketch from Cartoons of George Grosz.” Directed by Art Smith, this ensemble scene had actors change from the poses of one Grosz painting to the next as Grosz’ fat bourgeois characters recited lines from the Book of Psalms while pianola music from The Blue Angel chimed. (7) “Lincoln and Grant (with Liberties).” This was an absurd sketch with Strasberg slinking around as a “mysterious Chinaman,” while Carnovsky and Bromberg played the two presidents as Lower Side denizens who chanced upon each other in a park. The cigarchomping Carnovsky greeted Bromberg-Lincoln as “Abbie!” To which Lincoln angrily replied, “Useless! You’ve made from the White House a Black House!” Responding to a barrage of audience criticism, the exercise was reformulated as “Two Bums on a Park Bench.” Here, Bromberg and Carnovsky depicted two homeless Jews with distinct vaudeville characteristics. In a Russo-Yiddish gibberish, Bromberg, the pessimistic hobo, began to complain about the world; the down-and-out optimist, Carnovsky answered him in the same jargon, motioning to the sun and their park surroundings. As soon as Bromberg turned away, Carnovsky gestured to an invisible table of provisions that he just set and pointed to an imaginary bottle: “Champagnsky!” Maniacally uncorking the “boobly,” Bromberg managed to down a draught before developing a severe case of hiccoughs. Carnovsky shook him back down to reality and silence, and after a quiet moment, hiccoughed himself. (8) “Dance Burlesque.” Another unadvertised sketch, this was a Group standard of stand-up comedy. Lewis satirized various modern dancers, beginning with Mary Wigman, whom he portrayed as a heavy-handed, mechanically stomping Frau. Also parodied were Martha Graham and Uday Shankar. Kazan accompanied him on drums. After its agitprop infancy, the Workers Theatre movement demanded more erudite and complex scripts. Here again Group members tried their hands. They knew effective propaganda could only be extracted from three-dimensional characters and realistic conflict. Audiences and performers needed more than catchy slogans and stock plots to emotionally identify with the characters on the stage. In June 1934, Kazan and Smith co-authored and directed a documentary rant, Dimitroff: A Play of Mass Pressure for a New Theatre League benefit. Dramatically it merged real personalities and dialogue

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within an exciting agitprop-blackout structure. Dimitroff revealed the Nazi conspiracy to destroy the Reichstag, the imposition of the Third Reich, and the anti-Communist show-trial that followed. Although under-rehearsed, it demonstrated the efficacy of Method acting, (seemingly) naturalistic writing, and the propaganda arts. Considerably more successful was Odets’ Waiting for Lefty. This one-act drama was set in a present-day American union hall and depicted the clash between the corrupt labor management and the downtrodden workers who must decide whether or not to strike. Seated in a semi-circle, the taxi drivers wait for Lefty, their activist representative, to arrive. Interspersed are seven flashback vignettes that unveil the cabbies’ personal histories. At the play’s conclusion, a messenger declares that Lefty has been murdered, which stirs the workers to rise up and support the walkout. In its final sketch, Dimitroff addressed its spectators to use “mass pressure” to free Dimitroff’s Comintern colleagues still imprisoned in Germany. Lefty treated its audience as union associates from the get-go and had a different result; the spectators frantically joined the stage characters in calling for the strike. Staged by Odets and Meisner, the one-night performance of Lefty generated an overwhelming response. The audience was so enthused by its emotive harangue that they almost brought down both balconies at the Civic Repertory Theatre. With the actors, they hooped, stomped, and whistled to strike. The performance received twenty-eight curtain calls and twenty minutes of ovations. Waiting for Lefty soon entered thirties’ folklore as the most produced agitprop of its time. It also established Odets as America’s leading playwright for social action and class warfare. Within the Group, Odets’ writing status was less certain. Strasberg had rejected one of his earlier plays, Awake and Sing!, a contemporary “kitchen sink” melodrama about a middle-class Jewish household in the Bronx. It also contained Odets’ unique “poetic realistic” dialogue, which here percolated with bitter Jewish rhetoric and believable side characters, laced with a hearty familial struggle between generations and their tactics for self-actualization. Written specifically for the Group ensemble, Stella insisted that they open their 1935 season with it, although, in an early reading when it as entitled I Got the Blues, she found disquieting anti-Semitic tropes. This would be Clurman’s first foray into directing.

Clurman at the helm As the Group’s resident intellectual and public face for nearly seven years, Clurman in 1935 presented a comic back-of-the-house figure, Strasberg’s talkative sidekick. It was unclear to the actors what

66 Stanislavsky in America Clurman could accomplish as a practicing director. Already the directing teams of Kazan-and-Smith and Odets-and-Meisner had succeeded in small political venues but Crawford, the company’s third director, pretty much crashed in her Broadway attempts to stage even the simplest of social dramas. The directing in her Group shows fizzled. Critics attacked it as unfocused, aimless, despondent, lacking in detail, and utterly blank. Clurman claimed that his short trip to Moscow inspired him as a theatre practitioner. There were many houses in the Stanislavsky–Vakhtangov pantheon. Awake and Sing! had the kind of dramaturgical density that appealed to Clurman’s analytical temperament. To be sure, the performers did not need to worry about Clurman stopping the rehearsals for Emotion Recall exercises. Odets’ play could be directed like any other legitimate script; the performers would develop of their own character creations. Awake and Sing! captured an atmospheric moment in mid-Depression America. It dealt with the conflicted aspirations of the virtually invisible, outer borough tenement-world. The New York Post tagged it, “Chekhov in the Bronx.” Other reviewers situated the play in the homey environment of “sidestreet Bronx.” Its portrayal of bickering, class-conscious Jews as both victims and aggressors was novel. Walter Winchell, in his New York Mirror excitement, hailed Awake as, “a grand drama about the low class of Hebrews, Bronx peasants, but human. It is as non-Aryan as a Bronx Express and as swift.” The influential Yiddish press, which had identified the company from day one as an English-language Jewish (more or less) institution, now had something to crow about. Once again, the Group was back in business. Waiting for Lefty and Odet’s second Group one-acter, Til the Day I Die, an agitprop about the underground life in Nazi Germany, ran in tandem with Awake. And when Paradise Lost, still another Odetsian “bourgeois crisis” drama directed by Clurman, opened in December on Broadway, 1935 was commonly branded as “the year of Odets.” Of course, not every newspaper hailed the brainy Group unknown as the reining symbol of modern theatre. Many of New York’s dailies such as The Sun and the World-Telegram were unabashedly reactionary and scorned the Group’s resurrection. A typical comment from one entertainment column: “Overheard in the foyer before the first act: ‘Notice how different a Group Theatre audience is? So Bohemian.’ Hobo-hemian, if you asked us – or smelled some of them.”

Strasberg’s final experiments In 1936, everything at the Group became jumbled. Strasberg assumed the position of militant avant-gardist; Stella taught “Problems of

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Acting,” according to Stanislavsky; and Clurman was nominated as Managing Director in the company’s reorganization. The Group’s actors relished the institutional shake-up and the explosion of techniques. Theatre reviewers and the public were less kind. Adapted from Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy, The Case of Clyde Griffiths seemed to be an ideal revolutionary script for the Group. Its original authors were Erwin Piscator, the founder of Epic Theatre in Berlin, and a German translator, Lena Goldschmidt. The socially provocative play dropped a familiar American classic story into a Soviet-style morality format. The baritone Carnovsky starred as an omniscient Speaker in the orchestra pit, who stop–started the scenes. Meanwhile onstage, the Group actors performed the twisted Dreiserian love-triangle as a psychodrama of desperate ambition. Was it Capitalist greed, alcoholism, the sexual impulse, or old-fashioned religious guilt that was responsible for Roberta Alden’s homicide? It was a Freudian murder mystery, interrupted and elucidated by a Marxist God of Fate. Strasberg’s fast-moving direction and the actors’ noirish enactments impressed the New Yorker audience but Piscator’s proselytizing denunciation of the free-enterprise system was exceedingly predictable and ultimately inane. The performers were told to reverse the traditional relationship of actors-to-spectators; they were to treat the playgoers exactly as a director might instruct his acting staff. Critics compared the production to a left-wing kindergarten lesson, “drama with a pointer.” Clyde Griffiths closed after nineteen performances. In June 1936, Crawford brought Kurt Weill into the Group’s sphere. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Weill was anxious to establish his presence in the adopted homeland. At their summer encampment at Pinebrook Club in Nichols, Connecticut, he lectured on the link between Marxism and popular culture. It was a double misreading: Weill thought that the Group was an American Communist front organization, particularly after their mounting of Piscator’s Griffiths text; the Group assumed that Weill, known as Bertolt Brecht’s stalwart collaborator in The Three Penny Opera, was a member in good-standing with the German Communist Party in exile. Each feared that they would be exposed as insufficiently Red. Crawford commissioned Paul Green to write a musical comedy over the summer with Weill as the composer. Again in Strasberg’s newly liberated directorial planning, this was a golden opportunity to wrench the idea of Method from drawn-out psychological realism. Like Vakhtangov’s Turandot and Stanislavsky’s The Burning Heart, the MAT’s 1926 answer to Meyerhold, the Green–Weill musical could demonstrate

68 Stanislavsky in America that the Stanislavsky Technique could be utilized for any genre or style. Although Griffiths had combined realism with Epic Theatre enstrangement, basically the scenes were textbook naturalism with cold narrative disruptions. Curiously, while the Group waited for a completed text and score, Stella taught basic acting in a manner that pretty much reprised the American Lab and Strasberg’s earliest exercises, especially those related to Sense Memory. Her slant was more intellectual and physically active; while she invoked Stanislavsky’s Given Circumstances, Adler pushed her pupils into discovering minute actions consistent with their characters. At the same time, Strasberg encouraged his scene study group to work on classics, like The Seagull and familiar Theatre Guild melodramas. He critiqued the scenes, using the language of Spines, Actions, and Beats. The new Group play, Johnny Johnson: A Legend, was conceived as an American variation on another Piscator favorite, The Adventures of the Good Sergeant Schweik. The story of a Czech nonentity who almost survives the mass slaughter in the Great War through flubs and stupidity enjoyed great success in Europe as a novel and play. The Group production would also be staged as a farcical, anti-war folk-tale; but its obvious allegorical meanings were hidden behind Green’s enchanting lyrics and droll characterizations. Clurman spent a week on the script, breaking down the performers’ Problems, Actions, Motivations, and Adjustments. In September, he turned Johnny Johnson over to Strasberg. Stylistically, it was the Group’s most taxing enterprise. The actors had to sing and dance as well as emote in small-town American, British, French, and German accents. Strasberg, naturally, rejected rigid Broadway notions that directorially separated the principals from the chorus and stable of dancers. Each Group actor, no matter how minor his or her character, had to cultivate a unique physicality and sound, based on a specific backstory. To achieve this internal realism, the actors justified every grotesque activity and musical interlude. For instance, Strasberg blocked one combat scene where American and German front-line units charged one another with bayonets while poison gas and dust clouded their vision. He added this cultural adjustment: growing up on the prairie, the Americans perceived only distant images. The Germans, due to their studious adolescences, on the other hand, were congenitally nearsighted. Neither side was able to connect in the dense, artificial fog of war. The theatrical result of the crowd scenes in Johnny Johnson was both humorous and genuine. It was a triumph of Vakhtangovian magic.

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When Johnny Johnson opened on November 19, 1936, the firstnighters applauded for ten minutes. The critics, however, were confused. It was unlike any Group performance they had reviewed and suggested little resemblance to the lighter musical fare that normally graced the Great White Way. All of them wrote that Green’s play unfolded with sardonic surprise, Weill’s folksy music was hummable, and performances were artful and imaginative. Still the production fell into no fixed category. The burlesque atmosphere the actors attained overwhelmed the musical’s essentially serious, anti-military communiqué. Vestiges of the pacifist diatribe trailed off in a haunting ballad when the curtain came down. In the weeks that followed, Johnny Johnson desperately searched for a paying audience. Not quite a hit or a flop, it nearly bankrupted the Group and ended Strasberg’s tenure. In April 1937, worried that the directorate had lost its financial and artistic bearings, the Group actors secretly formed a committee and issued a booklet of demands that gave them a voice in all future decision-making. Strasberg and Crawford resigned after reading it.

Née Julie Garfinkle Hollywood’s final conversion to sound recording on celluloid in 1930 paralleled two other epoch shifts: a universal acknowledgement of the Depression’s moldering effect on American life; and the beginning of the Group. In fact, the sound revolution in film and the growing popularity of radio drama significantly transformed the entertainment industries both in Southern California and Manhattan. Spectators nationwide expected more complex plots and captivating voices. Studio heads and theatre producers needed writers who could fabricate snappy dialogue and actors to deliver it. New York columnists gammed on to the question, “Who would opt out of the tentative Broadway world for bountiful fame and wealth on the sunny West Coast?” “Going Hollywood” promised unimaginable riches in an arena of employment uncertainty: a typical Broadway actor’s salary could increase tenfold while the reduced time on a film set was naught when contrasted to the number of hard scrapple weeks in a rehearsal-and-production theatre run. Interviews with Group members almost always compared their priestly devotion to serious art against the seductions of the moneymad cinema emporiums. Some Group actors did succumb to the beckoning Siren calls, namely Tone and Kirkland, but they were handsome leading men who could easily return to the East Coast

70 Stanislavsky in America monastery. In fact, Tone, who had received a contract from MGM in late 1932 and married Joan Crawford three years later, continued to financially support the Group and lend it substantial newspaper prestige. With the Group’s secondary actors, the circumstances were quite different; “going Hollywood” meant an abrupt end to their ensemble nuptials. They would be forever consigned to being hired hands in the basements of Los Angeles’ image factories. Only one minor Group actor achieved phenomenal success in the vast motion-picture landscape of the 1930s and wrapped himself in the Method banner. This was John Garfield. To be sure, he was one of Broadway’s most unlikely candidates for Hollywood stardom. Born Jacob Julius Garfinkle to an immigrant Jewish family in the Lower East Side, Garfield went from cocky juvenile delinquent to ace high school debater through the guidance of an enlightened principal at a Bronx reform school. Taken with the boy’s winsome personality, the educator re-channel-ed the young street fighter’s competitive streak into public school boxing and debate. When diagnosed with a heart condition, however, he was forced to abandon the ring. But the teenage Julie relished his newfound status as a smart-alec orator. He claimed it put him in proximity with a better class of female. In 1929, Garfield won a scholarship to study with Ouspenskaya. After the Lab closed, he attempted to break into off-Broadway at Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre. At the Group’s outset, Garfield befriended Odets and Bobby Lewis but joining their ranks was no easy task. The junior actor was one of hundreds of small-time wannabes. Exactly how the feisty Garfield was finally accepted in the Group has been chronicled in numerous contradictory versions. According to Kingsley, it started with a petty theft. In 1934, Kingsley was invited to speak at an adult summer camp in Vermont. Before dining in their cafeteria, the playwright placed his copy of Kenneth Macgowan’s Continental Stagecraft on a wooden shelf. When Kingsley went to retrieve the luxuriously printed text after lunch, it was gone. The camp director said that he had a strong hunch who would have stolen it and returned with Julie dispassionately holding the book. Kingsley inquired what the twenty-year-old worker was going to do with the costly item; sell it to a used book dealer on Fourth Avenue? The shameless thief disputed Kingsley’s conjecture. Garfield claimed that he had taken it for his own private use. As a budding performer, he needed to learn everything about acting. The famed playwright was so amused by Garfield’s brazen rejoinder that he begged the befuddled executive to forget the whole matter and later drove Julie to meet the Group

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directorate. Strasberg interviewed the criminal aesthete in his trademarked gruff manner and inducted the charming renegade into the company. During the riotous 1934 summer, when Communist Party dissenters gathered in closed-door meetings to topple the Group’s apolitical administration, when Adlerlites challenged Strasberg’s teachings, when nasty personal disputes had soured the daily give-and-take of the Gold Eagle Guy rehearsals, one judgment was shared by all: Julie Garfield was a sensational new acting associate. His cheery enthusiasm and under-class candor brought new vitality to the old institution. Garfield was agreeable to all theories and options. There was nothing that he would not do to be on stage. In Gold Eagle Guy, Julie was clearly the most biomechanical of actors in Strasberg’s Meyerholdian vision. During the rehearsals, he dived down Donald Oenslager’s two-story set and landed with a smirk. This was his super-athletic response to the San Francisco Earthquake. As the original Sid in the New Theatre fundraiser Waiting for Lefty, Julie charmed as a penniless hack, who soft-shoes a Pat Rooney imitation to make his paramour laugh. For Odets’ Awake and Sing!, he totally embodied Ralph Berger, a disgruntled stock clerk, with proletarian conviction. The critics and audiences adored his touching portrayal of a naïve Bronx youth. Even in Johnny Johnson, as the German sniper Johan Long, Garfield unearthed the pathos and humanity of a sixteen-year-old innocent amidst Green’s comic rendering of all-out war.

“Golden Boy” By the spring of 1937, the saga of the Group as a utopic cooperative of itinerant players had reached a long predicted finale. Odets’ elegiac calls-to-arms had brought them accolades but not the finances to continue as an ensemble. Clurman with Kazan and Luther Adler went to Hollywood to scout out untarnished sources of support. They returned in April empty-handed. Stella set off for La-La land as well and found film work. Everything now depended on Odets. Through the summer, he pounded out his incomparable melodrama, Golden Boy. It was the story of a twenty-one-year-old violinist, a first generation American-Italian who becomes a lightweight boxing champion. It bound together a dozen Depression themes: a loving father who sacrifices so his son can be an artist; a loyal trade-unionist brother; a bad-good moll who slowly falls for the hero; the mob infiltration of sports; and the morally tangled – but ultimately tragic – striving for personal success in 1930s America.

72 Stanislavsky in America Odets wrote Golden Boy as a vehicle for Garfield and hoped it could elevate prizefighting as an up-to-date and symbolic theatre topic, just as Kingsley had done with medicine. Clurman found the script irresistible but was so desperate that he cast Luther as the lead; Julie was too much of a risk. Moreover, Clurman invited Frances Farmer, an idealistic Hollywood star, to play Golden Boy’s temptress. Even worse, the Group members were treated like pickup actors; the half of them who were not listed as characters were shunted to the side. Garfield was cast in a minor part of Siggie, the upbeat, wife-beating taxi driver. Again he almost stole the show. But all of the performers – including Farmer, Carnovsky (as the immigrant and music-loving father), and Kazan (as a freaky Italian gangster) – were in top form. Golden Boy proved to be the Group’s greatest single achievement. It ran on Broadway for 250 performances, toured in five cities, and was remounted as an independent Group production in San Francisco and London. It had gritty glamour, suspense, working-class humor, a poetic raciness, and high drama. Golden Boy outshone Men in White as the model of the Group’s popular aesthetic.

The next generation At the end of 1937, Bobby Lewis established the Group Theatre Studio with Kazan. It was supposed to employ most of the lesser Group members as instructors and produce additional income for the company through tuition and grants. Problematically, the key Group teachers found themselves quite busy with projects of their own. They were often away on tour or working on Broadway. As an apprentice Group director, Kazan staged Robert Ardrey’s Casey Jones in February. (Most reviewers and Life Magazine in a March 1938 photo-spread labeled Mordecai Gorelik’s railroad set the real star.) One year later, Lewis tried his hand as a director with the lyrical and oddly poignant My Heart’s in the Highlands by William Saroyan. Despite the added financial burdens, partly caused by their school, Clurman approved both productions of his actors-cum-directors. But his Board of Directors forced him to close the Studio after only one year. Meanwhile Odets churned out Rocket to the Moon, another triangulated love story about a dentist who must choose between social standing and individual-erotic happiness. Leif Erickson (Farmer’s dashing husband) and Eleanor Lynn (a B-movie ingénue) played the leads. Yet Clurman’s manic direction could not overtake the hokey script or its Hollywood imprimatur. Rocket to the Moon limped through the 1938–39 season, dodging poor reviews and indifferent audiences.

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Seduction and decline The Group launched another Broadway production to mingle proletarian stereotypes, played by the ensemble, with motion-picture luminaries. In January 1939, Clurman mounted Irwin Shaw’s Gentle People, a New York parable about fascism and a terrified community’s resistance to it. It starred Tone as a smug local gangster and Sylvia Sidney, Luther Adler’s wife and bona fide Hollywood diva, as his love interest. In the end, the downtrodden fishermen overcome their aversion to violence and drown the menacing Tone character. Although Gentle People was advertised as a political allegory in heralds and giveaway matchbooks, the production also suggested the Group’s psychological victory over motion-picture interlopers. In fact, the opposite was true. Individual Group actors had drifted out to Southern California by the tail end of the 1930s. Stella played an outrée public relations glam-gal in Paramount’s Love On Toast (1937). Bromberg, Lee J. Cobb, and Carnovsky managed to sneak into assorted costume epics and Westerns. Mostly it was Garfield who assumed the mantle of a real Golden Boy. In Michael Curitz’ Four Daughters (1938), a minor flick designated primarily for teens and young women, Julie – now “John Garfield” – created a stir. His portrayal of Mickey Borden, an up-from-the-slums musical genius and rebel, reflected an entirely novel sexy type with a gripping pre-Hollywood biography. Not only was Garfield like his smart-mouthed persona, he insisted on learning to play piano rather than miming the craft. “John Garfield Fan Clubs” sprung up across the United States and the Bronx contender received an Oscar Nomination for Best Supporting Actor. All this in his first feature. Warner Brothers immediately followed up with Garfield/Borden vehicles in Daughters Courageous (1939) and Four Wives (1939). Busby Berkeley catapulted him into permanent national prominence with his jailhouse blockbuster They Made Me a Criminal (1939). When the Group’s Gentle People reprised as Out the Fog (1941), Julie played Tone’s tough guy part. Garfield quickly became the roguish face of New Hollywood. He was boyishly handsome, fun to watch, an uncommonly prolific actor, quick-witted, an acknowledged left-winger, sexually promiscuous, and dismissive of the industry’s notions of decorum and pretense. As a barely grownup street kid, he provided great copy for the story-hungry film monthlies. During World War Two, Julie became the everyboy sailor, army infantryman, downed flier, and self-sacrificing marine in five moral-building features. By the time he garnered a second

74 Stanislavsky in America nomination for an Academy Award – for Best Actor in Body and Soul (1947) – Garfield had already appeared in over two-dozen films. Meanwhile the Group resumed its staggering decline. In March 1939, Clurman revived Awake and Sing! Almost no one came. During the summer in Smithtown, the company intensely rehearsed Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, thinking that this was a promising new course, but decided to delay its production indefinitely. In the fall, Kazan mounted Ardrey’s ghost-ridden paean Thunder Rock. Although Frances Farmer displayed sparks as the weary femme fatale, audiences again stayed away in proverbial droves. In 1940, Clurman mounted two more productions, Odets’ Night Music and Irwin Shaw’s Retreat to Pleasure. Neither the snarl of theatrical misfits nor the caprice of hedonistic bourgeoisie delivered the needed punch. They were roundly declared embarrassing flops. At the end of the year, the Group announced its formal disestablishment with no practical hope for revival. Many articles mourned the Group’s ruinous season and its sad demise. Most of the company, including its director, headed out to their detested and always tempting habitat, Southern California. GROUP THEATRE EXERCISES ( 1931– 4 0 ) Sources for the exercises: The unpublished Group Theatre daybook from Brookfield, Conn. (Summer 1931); articles from Midwest Daily Record, Ken, New York Herald-Tribune, New York Post, The New York Times, New York World-Telegram, and The Stage (1931–39); Roman Bohnen’s 1932 correspondence with his father [Lincoln Center collection]; Elia Kazan, Joseph Bromberg, and Lee Strasberg, “Outline for an Elementary Course in Acting” (1935); Helen Tamiris, “The Dance and Acting,” New Theatre (March 1935); unpublished Group Theatre notebooks of Tony Kraber and Willy Barton (1936–39); unpublished transcription of Lee Strasberg’s rehearsals of Johnny Johnson (1936); “Kensight,” Ken (May 25, 1939); unpublished Group Theatre Smithtown notebook (Summer 1939); Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945); Raymond Gasper, “A Study of the Group Theatre and Its Contributions to Theatrical Production in America” (Unpublished Dissertation: Ohio State University, 1955); Mel Gordon, “Acting Experiments in the Group,” The Drama Review T104 (Winter 1984); Wendy Smith, Real Life Drama (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); and interviews with Margaret Barker, Willy Barton, Phoebe Brand, Morris Carnovsky, Harold Clurman, Cheryl

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Crawford, Howard Da Silva, Ruth Eliot, Michael Gordon, Tony Kraber, Will Lee, Bobby Lewis, Ruth Nelson, Pearl Pearson, Wendell Phillips, and Lee Strasberg. Justification 1.

2.

3.

4.

Stand on the stage holding an object in your hand. Now weigh the object or look for defects in it. (At first, you were probably nervous and uneasy, standing in front of an audience without any purpose, then having some action, such as judging the value of the object, should have caused you to feel at ease.) Perform an activity, such as knocking on a wall, lying on the floor, cleaning an object, arranging the room, hiding yourself, or finding an object. Explain aloud why you are doing the activity. That is, find a justification for it – i.e., knocking to wake up someone. (The justification should give a lively quality to each action.) Start to move freely around the room. At the sound of a whistle, arrest your motion and assume a stationary pose. Find an immediate justification for this unplanned position. (For example, you raised your arm. Justification: you are reaching for something.) Begin a conversation with your partner, discussing anything but what is foremost on your minds (i.e., some horrible action that your partner’s brother did). Always keep one part of your body – a hand, a finger, tongue – in constant movement. Justify that movement.

Sense memory 5.

Hold a fork in your hand. Now, without pantomiming, pick up an imaginary fork and feel its weight and shape. (Later check back with the real object to see the difference.) 6. Take a lemon and smell it. Now try to retain the lemon’s smell without handling the actual fruit. 7. Using your sense memory, taste a swallow of Scotch in the back of your tongue. 8. Feel a cold chill on your back while sitting in the summer sun. 9. Using an object that you have observed, create an action that allows you to describe it to a partner. For example, if you choose a watch, describe its details to an actor playing a watchmaker. Make your description so detailed and accurate that he can make a duplicate of your original. 10. Create an action using an object. (For example, slicing an apple or shaving with a razor and soap.) Repeat it until you can do it

76 Stanislavsky in America without the physical object, remembering to establish the object’s characteristics of weight, size, texture, etc. 11. In a circle pass on an object, such as a pen or sheet of paper. Everyone keeps the same object for a while, establishing a different imaginary idea of what it really is (a stick, a flute, a snake, a ruler, a thermometer, etc.). Your reactions and use of the neutral object establishes its identity. 12. Feel various fabrics, such as cotton or silk. Sensitize yourself to one of them. Then, without the actual material, act out – in a silent improvisation – a scene that suggests you are handling the specific fabric. Adjustment 13. Clean the room with the following Adjustments:   

there is plenty of time; there is just a short period of time to finish; and while listening to the radio.

14. Hit a nail with a hammer, remembering its weight and texture. Repeat the action without the physical hammer or nail. Then repeat the action with the following Adjustments:  you do not want to wake the person in the next room;  you have just previously hit your finger with the hammer; and  the nail will be used to support the portrait of a revered political figure. 15. With a partner, perform the following scene: a man enters a room as a woman cleans. The man says, “Hello. I didn’t expect you to find you home. How have you been? Would you like to do something? How about taking a walk?” Now add the following Adjustments to the basic scene.   

The couple is engaged to be married. The man has just discovered that he was fired that day. The couple is engaged to be married. The man has just received a raise. The couple was engaged to be married sometime in the past. The man was sent to prison and the woman moved to another town, hoping to avoid seeing him.

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Concentration 16. Facing your partner, strike a pose and hold it. Studying your position, your partner must carefully duplicate it. 17. Outside the classroom, observe a person’s appearance and activity. Re-enact what you have seen. 18. With a specific purpose in mind, observe another person. For instance, look at someone in the subway in order to determine if he is an old acquaintance or watch over a sleeping sick person. Describe your observations. Communication 19. In rapid succession, repeat the following sentences: “I hate you – May I have a cup of tea?” always alternating between your intensely serious and casual feelings. 20. Say the following sentence, “I must see you” – or a line of poetry – in twenty different ways that convey twenty separate meanings. 21. Using the fewest words, ask your partner, who is sitting with you on a bench, for the time, a match, or some other object. 22. Take any scene and attempt to make it understood without using the words of the text. Start with gibberish sounds and fluctuating tones that express your character’s emotional state and needs. Repeat the exercise several times, occasionally replacing some of the gibberish sounds with individual words as they occur to you. Now perform the above scene, without any words. Imagination 23. Choose an animal, like a pigeon or an ape, and enter into its private psychology before you begin to imitate it physically. 24. Recite a line from a poem that stimulates you – say, one by John Keats, Walt Whitman, or e.e. cummings. Then let your group decide on the character and circumstances of your dialogue. You may be directed to recite it in an entirely ridiculous or surprising situation – as a prostitute, who is entering a bar at dawn, a shy clerk taking a shower, or as Sir Tony Belch (from Twelfth Night). 25. To the accompaniment of classical music, such as that of Bach or Beethoven, improvise a twentieth-century activity that will seemingly clash with the musical mood. (For instance, performing surgery.) 26. Choosing your own music, create a dance (or pantomime) based on a famous painting or drawing, like one by El Greco. Begin in a

78 Stanislavsky in America stationary pose, imitating an image, expression, or gesture in the painting. At the end of the dance, everyone in the classroom should select a favorite gesture or movement that you created and explain what he or she liked about it. Group improvisations 27. With another actor, create an improvisation based on the words, “news,” “Indian,” or “mosquito.” Now play the same scene in (gibberish) Russian, Chinese, or French. Allow the mock language to change your thinking, rhythm of movement, and physical interaction. 28. Enact a pantomime of a barber with different customers (for example, a mad barber and a society woman.) Affective Memory 29. “Take an exercise” of – that is, privately relive or imagine – of a time in your life when you received extraordinarily bad news. Close your eyes and begin to recall that moment – the room you were in, the time of day, the voice of the person who brought you the message – in short, the entire sensory history of that event. Remember each detail in the sequence that it occurred. 30. Remember having to do something unpleasant, like writing to a feared uncle or employer. Bring into your mind’s eye as many sharp and stimulating details as possible. The chair beneath your body, the weight of the pen, the despised portrait before you – each of these sensory objects should bring you imperceptivity into the proper mood. 31. Now take an exercise of having to do something pleasant, like receiving a check or a love letter. Body contact 32. Six actors form a circle. The first picks up a chair and tosses it to his partner on the right in one count. The chair is rhythmically caught and tossed around the actors’ circle in a single beat pattern. Now the chair is thrown around the circle a second time but to a varied rhythm, established by the beat of a drum. 33. On the stage are two chairs. Seated on the first chair, you are about to be pursued. Only when you reach the second chair will you be safe. Before you get to the second chair, however, you must first execute the following activities: leap over a bench, crawl underneath a table, pick up a flag, react to a loud booming noise, and turn a somersault.

4

Russian Émigré Teachers

I want my money back! I heard one of the actors speak English! Cartoon caption from The New York Evening Mail, 1923

Beginning with the Moscow Art Theatre’s 1923 American tour, the Stanislavsky System, its teachers, and Russian acting in general, were subjects of parody in Manhattan nightclubs and popular Hollywood comedies. With the mad Viennese psychotherapist, the coquettish French chambermaid, and the prancing Italian gigolo, the nutty Russian acting coach entered into the nation’s gallery of wacky comic ethnic stereotypes. The Russian teachers mainly came in three waves in 1922–24, 1925–26, and 1935–39, a consequence of defections from Soviet or Russian émigré touring companies. These displaced actors sought new stage and films careers in the United States but were soon reduced to teaching. To a large degree, they mimicked what they had learned in their Moscow studios initially, and then quickly adapted their regimens to suit their personal strengths and the vastly divergent “American tempo.” Interestingly, each migration corresponded to one of the three separate schools of Stanislavsky Technique in Russia. The first were the ChauveSouris performers and MAT actors who remained in New York after Stanislavsky’s 1924 tour. Stanislavsky and Sulerzhitsky at the First Studio had personally tutored most of them. A handful had left Mother Russia during the Civil War or just after and spent time in Europe before their American arrival. The Vakhtangov-trained performers were stragglers from the 1926 Habima tour. Some stayed with the messianic hope to build a Hebrew-language theatre in the United States. The last set of teachers emerged from Michael Chekhov’s troupe, the Moscow Art Players in 1935, or the Michael Chekhov Studio. The bulk of the Russian instructors were little known during their life times. Their classes were small and existed mostly through word-of-mouth

80 Stanislavsky in America enrollment. Yet the influence of the émigrés was as significant as that of the American Lab and the Group. Two generations of American actors, many of them future Hollywood stars, were exposed to the Stanislavsky System under their mentorship. THE FORMER MAT ACTORS

The Chauve-Souris During the Lenten season in Czarist Moscow, all theatres had to close by government decree. Many of them, including the MAT, used this time for private merry-making and recreation; they celebrated with elaborate “cabbage-parties.” These became increasingly theatrical with musical parodies, dance contests, colorful rhymed sketches, and masters of ceremonies to lead them. At first, they were so exclusive that it was rumored that Moscow’s Head Prefect could not obtain a ticket to them. Nikita Balieff, a young Armenian stockholder in the MAT and allaround prankster, had organized the MAT’s madcap Lenten evenings for several years. With Nemirovich-Danchenko’s consent, he opened a formal MAT cabaret in 1908. Reportedly, he called it The Bat because one of the airborne rodents felling into his hand during a rehearsal. More likely, its name was a Russian copy of the internationally known Viennese institution. The Bat, later given the French name Chauve-Souris, captured the imaginations of entertainment-starved Muscovites. Avant-garde designers were employed to design its unique “drunken poster” look, featuring Petrushka and doll-like costumes and Cubist set pieces. Its humor turned the MAT’s solemn, bleak mood inside out. Instead of ignoring his audiences, the pudgy-faced Balieff invited the spectators into the Chauve-Souris anything-goes, childish atmosphere. There he juggled up-to-date versions of folkloric Russian and Gypsy marketplace comedy with risqué German and French variety acts. Negligible oneacts and skits from the repertoire of Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov and, astonishingly, Maxim Gorky were slotted into the evenings of Glinka ballads and contemporary Russian sketch comedy. Balieff divorced his Bat cabaret from the MAT’s governing board in 1912. Tamara Daykarhanova, a First Studio graduate who excelled at dance satire and makeup, became one of Balieff’s reigning starlets. Engaging and versatile, she created parts that jumped from disgruntled babushkas to racy chanteuses to hard-pressed village mothers. When the

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Bolshevik forces overtook the counter-revolutionary defenders of Moscow in 1918, Dayka and her husband, Sergius Vassiliev, an engineer and playwright, made plans to immigrate. They found their way to Paris two years later. Balieff also went into exile. After journeying to the Caucasus Republics and Constantinople, he found his way to Paris in 1920. With Dayka, Soloviova, and six other MATniks, he remounted the ChavueSouris. He rounded up stray Russian artists from Meyerhold and Tairov’s pre-Revolutionary theatres, and formed a loyal ensemble. It was a sensation. His invented French–Russian prologues alone produced merriment among the unsettled Russian refugees and French public. The Chauve-Souris received invitations to perform in London and New York, where it broke all records for comic spectacle. It soon inspired Russian and American imitations. Balieff’s “March of the Wooden Soldiers” routine became the first sound-and-color short ever filmed in the New World. President Calvin Coolidge even greeted Balieff and his troupe in an evening of amusing Russian–English malapropisms.

Tamara Daykarhanova After the Chauve-Souris concluded a triumphant third American tour in 1923, Daykarhanova decided to stay in New York. She found seasonal employment at other Russian nightclubs and occasional parts on Broadway. In 1931, following the path of Maria Ouspenskaya, Dayka began to privately coach in her Manhattan apartment. She theorized that Stanislavsky had devised his System to rein in the abundant emotions that Russians naturally brought to acting. In America, the opposite was true; performers had to be coaxed emotionally to expand their range of feeling. And they needed to learn physical control. Dayka developed her specialty, the application of makeup and costume to create character. In a series of articles in Theatre Arts Monthly and Stage Magazine, she articulated the interconnection between the actor’s appearance and the psychological molding of the role. Instead of slapping on grease-paint and then playing the part, the performer should leisurely combine these functions. In the summer of 1934, Daykarhanova mapped out an eight-week program in Stanislavsky Technique at Mount Kisco. Her forty pupils received instruction in movement and pose in the morning, sensory work and solo improvisation in the afternoons, and in the evenings, group improvisation and scene study. Dayka emphasized corporal relaxation, which was accomplished vocally. Students yelled or shrieked

82 Stanislavsky in America in the outdoor green while Ouspenskaya taught Sense Memory and Emotional Recall inside a barn. The contrast could not have been more jarring. Dayka’s sessions were purely physical; students lined up for drills in balance and expressive movement. Madame instilled a quietism and religiosity indoors. Typically, Tamara would have her students carefully walk a straight line while balancing a book or a glass of water on their heads. Then they would have to do the same with an imaginary book. Ouspenskaya began a class as if the group were young priests or nuns in a Buddhist monastery. Individually, they were instructed to confess their sins. In the late afternoons and evenings, both Madams watched the improvisations and critiqued them. (In the second summer, in 1935, when Ouspenskaya was acting in Dodsworth, her assistant Irene Stuart taught the Affective Memory classes.) In the fall of 1935, Daykarhanova announced the opening at her own studio. It was called the Tamara Daykarhanova School for the Stage. It lasted for eighteen years in New York. For the first five years, Andrius Jilinsky replaced Ouspenskaya as the instructor of acting fundamentals; Vera Soloviova, his wife, conducted classes in Scene Study. In 1940 when the Jilinskys set up their own school, Dayka hired Bobby Lewis and Benjamin Zemach as substitutes. The following year, she dropped all references to Stanislavsky in her advertising. Instead, the School for the Stage offered “Modern Techniques for the American Stage.” During the 1950s, Daykarhanova returned to the theatre and started to act in live television. She involved herself in the Actors Studio’s Directors’ Unit and appeared in Strasberg’s ill-fated The Three Sisters in 1964. Curiously, Dayka and Strasberg worked well together. She acknowledged his skills as a director and he expressed his gratitude for her dramaturgical assistance. Dayka continued to coach actors and work in film until 1969. She died in 1980 aged ninety-one.

Leo and Barbara Bulgakov Lyoff Bulgakov (anglicized to Leo) was a First Studio graduate and decorated combat veteran in the Czarist army. After the Revolution, Nemirovich-Danchenko asked him to join the MAT’s permanent company. Bulgakov worked in four Soviet studios concurrently as a teacher, producer, and business manager. He headed the MAT’s Third Studio (later the Vakhtangov Theatre), where he met and married Varvara Petrova (Barbara Bulgakov). Both became important character actors on the MAT’s main stage.

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Stanislavsky brought the Bulgakov family with his troupe on the 1922– 24 tours. In New York, with Ouspenskaya and Akim Tamiroff, the restless thirty-five-year-old and his young bride made the decision to defect. Gest at the end of 1923 invited Leo to perform in Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle. He clowned his way through five Broadway shows between 1927 and 1931, mostly in roles as a befuddled immigrant. Critics esteemed his emotional depth, proclaiming that it registered a “steel-like strength of authenticity,” but had problems deciphering his thickly accented English. A skilled playwright and producer, Bulgakov turned to directing and staged both Russian classics and romantic American dramas. Altogether, Leo oversaw twenty-nine Broadway productions between 1926 and 1938. He transformed himself into an ersatz American Stanislavsky but without an endowment or financial backing. Bulgakov often cast Barbara, a stunning blonde ingénue, in his productions and navigated his way unscathed into Manhattan’s fractious theatre scene. His first success was an English-language staging of Vakhtangov’s Princess Turandot. Working with the Provincetown Players in 1926, Leo enlisted Joe Bromberg, Eunice Stoddard, and Lewis Leverett, future Group performers, as go-betweens. Barbara played the ravishing princess. Two years later, he staged The Cherry Orchard in Yiddish to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the MAT’s founding. In 1929, he created Sam Kaplan, the Jewish Lothario, in Elmer Rice’s smash-hit Street Scene. The single-set melodrama ran for 801 performances and closed three months after the Wall Street Crash. Just before and during the first two years of the Depression, Bulgakov established the Westchester Repertory Company and the Bulgakov Theatre Associates, which produced a half dozen sex farces on Broadway as well as Chekhov’s The Seagull in two back-to-back seasons in 1929 and 1930. He again cast Barbara in the lead with three to-be Group members – Bill Challee, Ruth Nelson, and Leverett. Interestingly, a fourth Group actor, Phoebe Brand claimed to be in one of The Seagull productions and Bulgakov threw a fit when the Group acolytes started their Method preparations, using Personal Substitutions and Affective Memory. According to Brand, Bulgakov raged: “Don’t do that! Stanislavsky toss it away long time ago. Very, very bad for you. Never do it!” Morris Carnovsky and Brand repeated this anti-Strasberg jeremiad for decades. Remarkably, neither Carnovsky nor Brand were listed in The Seagull playbills and both of Bulgakov’s revivals were mounted before the Group Theatre was founded or Strasberg began to teach his Method. In 1935, the Bulgakovs followed their winning strategy to Hollywood. Leo directed three women’s films: White Lies, I’ll Love You Always, and After the Dance. But he was destined to return to New York. In 1938, a

84 Stanislavsky in America year of constant activity, he directed Prologue to Glory, the Federal Theatre’s most substantial patriotic, biographical salute (with an ensemble cast of sixty) and several domestic comedies. The year 1938 was also the time that Leo began to teach Stanislavsky Technique in an American setting. With Barbara, he opened his Bulgakov Studio of Theatre Art at the Old Cosmopolitan Club on Times Square. Their goal was to train actors to develop a capacity for “living” the role, instead of “acting” it. Students who completed two years of classroom work were to be inducted into their Players Company, a prestigious summer stock theatre in Maine. About one-hundred-andfifty American actors completed the Studio’s regime. The wartime draft emptied the Bulgakov Studio of male students and caused its sudden demise. Hollywood now required Russian types for its propaganda epics. Both Bulgakovs appeared in five cinematic potboilers, including the pro-Soviet Song of Russia, where they comically portrayed music-and-tractor-loving villagers. In 1945, the Bulgakovs returned again to the East Coast. Leo taught acting and directing at The American Theatre Wing, a new institution that was responsible for the Tony Awards. When he died of heart failure in 1948, Barbara took his place and instructed pupils in acting and mime for another eleven years. Like her late husband, Barbara was long remembered for her no-nonsense and inflexible teaching methods. She continued to perform on Broadway and local television.

Ivan Lazareff and Maria Astrova One of the few English-speakers at the MAT, Ivan Lazareff, a founding member and film star, also elected to stay in New York in 1924 in order to secure a stage career in the United States. His only Broadway credit was in the 1925 Actors Theatre production of the opera-pantomime Pierrot the Prodigal. Lazareff enacted the grown-up, unrepentant trickster in the second act after Laurette Taylor’s adolescent Pierrot decides to abandon his wife. The following year, Lazareff married Maria Astrova and moved to Chicago. There, they founded the Chicago Art Theatre. The peripatetic Astrova had left The First Studio during the Revolution and toured with the Prague Group. She briefly touched down in Paris before settling in Chicago. Lazareff and Astrova also taught at the Chicago School of the Theatre, offering a capstone course entitled the “Russian Naturalistic Method of Acting and Producing.” It is difficult assessing the fortunes of Lazareff’s instruction. Ivan died in 1929 aged fifty-two. Maria returned to Paris and in 1931 married a

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wealthy businessman and producer. She continued to act under an assortment of stage names in a Russian-language troupe. The couple moved to Brussels and, as war approached, on to London. They finally immigrated to America in 1940. Astrova became the featured female performer in Vladimir Zelitsky’s Theatre of Russian Drama. A vanity theatre ensemble, it produced Russian classical fare throughout the 1940s and the early 50s in New York City. The company issued a luxurious commemorative book in 1946. But Astrova dropped out of sight in 1952 after her portrayal of Grushenka in Zelitsky’s highly praised Brothers Karamazov. She died in Florida in 1968.

Lasar Galpern Galpern’s connection with the MAT was the most tenuous of the Russian teachers but his integration of Sulerzhitsky-like ideas in acting with choreographic movement brought him into contact with Russian, Central European, and American directors who sifted around for bona fide physical training that could bond with Stanislavsky’s System. During World War One, Galpern taught interpretative dance at the First Studio. And in 1917, with the avant-garde ballet master Kasdan Goliezovsky, Galpern was credited with inventing a “Sixth Position” for international ballet. Galpern then began to combine modern dance with acting. At the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (GOSET), he served as Alexis Granovsky’s Movement Teacher. For four years, from 1919 to 1923, he was responsible for the dazzling, super-expressive displays of the GOSET productions. Critics everywhere were taken with Granovsky’s pictorial compositions and Galpern was invited as a guest artist in Germany, Italy, and France. In 1932, “Roxy” Rothafel procured Galpern’s services to inaugurate the Radio City Music Hall’s lavish opening. Galpern mounted a series of ostentatious ballet pieces in Radio City’s first season. He also taught at the Washington Conservatory of Dance, the Theatre Collective, and later for the Group Theatre and New Theatre League. Strasberg found Galpern’s eclectic dance-movement approach useful and energizing. Not only could Galpern pontificate on the wide array of Soviet “body mechanics” in actor-training, but also he knew Rudolf von Laban’s Eukinetic work from personal experience and several Asian systems of movement. In fact, Galpern was among the first to teach Kabuki and Tai Chi to American performers. A typical Galpern session started with simplified ballet exercises, interspersed with vigorous calisthenics. That would last fifteen minutes.

86 Stanislavsky in America Next was another fifteen-minute tutorial in Eurhythmic movements that corresponded to rhythmic beats in four quarter time. Looping and zigzagging arm movements followed this. The next section was devoted to improvisational exercises. These began with repeated hand and arm gestures, which turned into realistic miniature scenes or physical labor, like swatting at flies or sawing through cords of wood. Students would then be placed together to enact a pantomime, usually a life-threatening event, like miners in a collapsing shaft or prisoners trapped in a cellblock where the walls slowly moved towards them. The last part of the seventy-five-minute lesson ended with instruction in a traditional dance, like the polka or a Viennese minuet. In 1936, Galpern opened his own Chamber Art Studio and turned his hyperactive attention to performing Jewish character dances, a spectrum of movement scenarios and types that stretched from ecstatic Hassid rabbis to hardy Palestinian kibbutzniks. Galpern moved to Northern California four years later and presided over the San Francisco Academy of Allied Arts. This was a transitory organization that forged the practice of movement, music, acting, and the graphic arts into an amalgamated program. It was said to be the first of its kind in America. Galpern died ten years after the Academy’s founding. THE FORMER HABIMA PLAYERS

Habima The Habima theatre was among the oddest theatre experiments to surface in early Soviet Russia. In 1917, its creator, Nakhum Zemach, sought to create a scenic platform for an invented vernacular language, Modern Hebrew, which was less than forty years old. Biblical Hebrew had fallen out of practice over two thousand years ago. For Jews in their long diaspora across Europe and the Muslim world, it was a Holy Tongue, kept alive in their liturgical services and sometimes used as a lingua franca for itinerant Jewish merchants. During the nineteenth century, secular East European intellectuals attempted to revive it as a new national language to replace Yiddish, which they denigrated as a lowly jargon or a vulgarized German patois. Only in Ottoman Palestine in the 1880s did Hebrew arise as a spoken language. It was the most radical strategy of the Zionist enterprise to resettle Jews in their historical homeland. Zemach saw Hebrew as a modernizing tool for Russian Jews. Unfortunately, at the time of Revolution, the vast majority only knew

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Yiddish or had some fluency in Russian or Ukrainian. Hebrew was a strange Semitic tongue without a natural community of spectators, performers, or writers. It existed mostly in Zemach’s theatrical imagination. But he was persuasive. Soviet authorities approved Zemach’s curious project in 1919 and Habima (“The Stage”) was born. Evgeni Vakhtangov, an Armenian with a Jewish wife, helped advise the first recruits, numbering fewer than ten. When he dropped out due to declining health, Vakhtan Mchedelov, a MAT director, rushed in. The Habima amateurs had great difficulty learning the rudiments of the System. Yet they persevered. Despite the indifferent climate, the tiny Habima expanded. They had the support of Stanislavsky and Gorky. In 1921, the twentyfour-year-old Raikin Ben-Ari was admitted to the troupe, and Serfima Birman from the First Studio worked with them. Stanislavsky had received a script titled The Dybbuk from Solomon Rappoport, or “S. An-Sky.” It dealt with Jewish mysticism and soul possession, a dramatization of folk-story that An-Sky had recorded in his ethnographic research before the war. Stanislavsky suggested to An-Sky that a Jewish theatre group should stage it. An-Sky translated the Russian script into Yiddish. A revitalized Vakhtangov returned to Habima and was determined to mount The Dybbuk in Hebrew. The script was read out loud in Russian and analyzed. Next the actors had to mime each scene with expressive movement and improvise dialogues around it. Every distorted gesture and character pose they created had to be based on a personal reality for the actors – individual activities that were separate from the play’s content. Vakhtangov called this Justification. He encouraged his young pupils to match their real biographies to those of their roles or to invent amusing backstories. Many of the Habimaniks found this part of the rehearsal pointless; others loved the playful environment. The overall effect was surprising. The complex stagy exoticism of the play increasingly became individualized and emotionally candid. Inside the grotesque web of stock Jewish types and perfectly composed pictures was a simple realism. The contrast visually shocked. Here was truthful human desperation covered in a shell of twisted shtetl fantasy. Vakhtangov’s inspired direction produced a new and fascinating theatricalism. Stanislavsky attended a few of The Dybbuk rehearsals (although he never saw the completed production) and delivered twenty-five lectures that the Habima performers and other allied studio members attended. According to Benjamin Zemach, these were heart-thumping climaxes to the manic preparations. At the beginning of the first lecture,

88 Stanislavsky in America Stanislavsky felt the tense, overly respectful mood. He saw a piano and asked if anyone could play a waltz tune. A terrified student raised his hand and Stanislavsky pointed to the piano bench. Next, the six-footplus grand master picked out a tiny actress and signaled for her to stand by his side. As soon as the frightened girl stepped to the front, Stanislavsky nodded to the piano-player and the elegant Artistic Director, and the under-five-foot-tall pupil began to waltz. The class roared in astonished laughter. Immediately, Stanislavsky stopped the dance and sent the volunteers back to their places. The mood had utterly transformed; his lecture could start. When The Dybbuk premiered in January 1922, Moscow’s critics and theatrical elite were overwhelmed. The production looked like a nightmarish rendering of a lost primitive culture but delivered a powerful contemporary-naturalistic punch. Vakhtangov had merged Meyerhold’s “Theatrical October” with all its visual agitation and scenic flamboyance with Stanislavsky’s sense of emotional authenticity. The Armenian First Studio genius had immeasurably elevated Habima’s status – the Commissariat for Culture upgraded it to a State Theatre – but the studio’s celebrations that followed were shortlived. Vakhtangov died of complications from stomach cancer in May 1922. Mchedov and other MAT directors worked with the nascent troupe. They mounted four new Hebrew-language productions between 1923 and 1925: The Eternal Jew; The Golem; Jacob’s Dream; and The Flood. None of these were as successful as The Dybbuk, which played exactly three hundred performances in Moscow and Leningrad. The Habima Players had developed an identifiable style yet had no permanent Artistic Director or devoted reservoir of spectators. Worse, the Russian political environment had slowly turned hostile to linguistic Zionism and other manifestations of Jewish nationalism. And not every member of the group itself agreed with Zemach’s high-handed leadership or his original mission. Some had already departed to America. In January 1926, the “Moscow Theatre Habima” began its first European tour. It played to Jewish audiences in Latvia, Poland, Austria, Germany, and France. Only in Berlin did it find encouragement among assimilated Jews and Gentiles. The Habima Players arrived in New York City, the demographic center of world Jewry, in November 1926. The Yiddish press warmly welcomed their Dybbuk. But commercially Habima failed. The productions in the alien language baffled both Jewish and non-Jewish theatregoers. The Habima Collective continued to perform in New York and Boston until June 1927, when internecine bickering split them into two factions. Nakhum Zemach and his brother, Benjamin, wanted to

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form an American Habima. Most choose to return to Europe or immigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. After the breakup, Zemach’s pensive aspiration dissipated. The new Habima mounted only one production, Jacob’s Dream. The remaining Habimaniks scattered across their adopted country, looking for new opportunities and livelihoods.

Raikin Ben-Ari Ben-Ari in 1928 implored Boleslavsky to direct him as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. After a few introductory rehearsals, the project was abruptly cancelled. There was little commercial or artistic value that could justify the effort. Ben-Ari immediately found another Russian director, Boris Glagolin, to stage Vakhtangov’s tried-and-true workhorse Turandot in Yiddish. The colossal production, which opened in January 1929 at the Manhattan Opera House, proved disastrous. Glagolin had only a brittle knowledge of Stanislavsky technique, Habima’s craftsmanship, or American Yiddish theatre. He plied one style of acting over another in quick succession. It was an unintelligible mess. Ben-Ari struck out on his own. He went to Atlantic City and worked at the Toy Theatre, where he schooled the actors in Vakhtangov-like improvisations. Ben-Ari performed in Yiddish and English in New York and Philadelphia. In 1933, he assistant-directed and starred in Meyer Weisgal’s Romance of a People. Two years later, Ben-Ari opened his own acting studio and in 1938 directed East Side Doctor at the proletarian-inclined ARTEF (a Yiddish acronym for “Workers Theatre League”), the only Yiddish or radical theatre securely housed near Times Square. In 1940, Piscator invited Ben-Ari to guest teach acting fundamentals at his Dramatic Workshop at the New School of Social Research. Piscator assembled a wide range of theatre practitioners, mostly European refugees, to educate American performers in a new kind performance regimen. The two-year program consisted of courses in Acting, Rhythmic Movement, Gymnastics, Folk Dance, Voice, “Ear Training,” Phonetics, Histories of Style, Theatre History, Playwriting, Makeup, Publicity, Radio Drama, Costume and Scenic Design, Directing Technique, and the “March of Drama,” a scene study class that melded left-wing political thought into the enactment of classical plays. Piscator and his Viennese wife, Maria Ley-Piscator, despised most aspects of the Stanislavsky System. They declared that it was oldfashioned and inimical to the avant-garde and socially provocative plays that Piscator wanted to mount in New York. In its place, the Piscators

90 Stanislavsky in America promoted something called Objective Acting, a decidedly presentational approach. But they had no one to teach it. Instead, the Dramatic Workshop hired Stella Adler and Ben-Ari to conduct instruction in basic acting. Ben-Ari’s work mostly involved Sense Memory (which he called Centers of Attention) and improvisation. Without fail, he began his classes with a meditative Silence Exercise, part spiritual contemplation and Relaxation-Observation grounding. Students were instructed to quietly listen and orient themselves to the space. Then Ben-Ari suggested simple activities, like lighting a cigarette, and started to add context to the Action – this will be your last cigarette before you stop smoking. Ben-Ari called these Need Exercises. Every stage pursuit, no matter how trivial, had to have significance for the actor. Mostly he set up improvisational scenarios for the students and critiqued their sensorial and imaginative skills. He stated that they had to display their reality, not that of their characters. Ben-Ari’s classroom guidance was oblique and sociable. He never taught Emotional Recall, possibly because of Maria Ley-Piscator’s dissatisfaction with it or because he felt it was inappropriate for the course. Ben-Ari’s courses soon became flooded with a wave of newly decommissioned GIs. They found the social atmospherics to their liking. Actor and director Walter Matthau once quipped that his friends referred to the Greenwich Village Workshop as the “New School of Sexual Research.” In 1942, Piscator directed Ben-Ari in two wartime epics: an adaptation of War and Peace; and Daniel Lewis James’ Winter Soldiers. The two émigré artists got along well and three years later Ben-Ari was put in charge of the Dramatic Workshop’s Acting Division. Also in 1945, Ben-Ari formed the first Hebrew-language theatre in the United States, Pargod. He directed three productions there. When it closed in 1948, Ben-Ari moved to Southern California, instead of Israel, which had just gained its independence. He was appointed Drama Director at the Brandeis Institute in Simi Valley. In 1960, he appeared in his only Hollywood feature, Gangster Story, directed by Matthau. Ben-Ari died in Moscow in 1968.

Benjamin Zemach and Benno Schneider When the Habima splintered in 1927, Benjamin Zemach stayed (as expected) with Nakhum, his older brother, and Miriam Goldina, his sister-in-law, in New York. But after Jacob’s Dream flopped, Nakhum and Goldina drifted westward to Los Angeles, where they taught at the Yiddish theatre and music school, Yidteg. Benjamin looked for work at Maurice Schwartz’ Yiddish Art Theatre but the Hebrew Actors Union

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restricted his employment there. He quickly joined the modern dance scene that was coalescing around Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and the Japanese solo artist Michio Ito at the Neighborhood Playhouse. While at the Moscow Habima, Zemach had studied ballet with a former Bolshoi dancer, Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics, and “dramatic plastiques” at Inna Chernetskaya’s experimental Studio of Synthetic Dance. Chernetskaya, who once danced in Isadora Duncan’s Russian company, attempted a union of abstract movement, acrobatics, and Stanislavsky character development. She used a shop lathe to measure the effects of “inner experiences” on her dancers’ legs and backs. During his stay in Berlin, Benjamin learned from the various practitioners of Ausdruckstanz and Duncan technique. Now in New York, Zemach performed Spanish and Jewish folk dances in small venues. He wedded his ecstatic dances to eccentric characters within conflicted or ambivalent spiritual settings: Satan, ignoring the pleas of God’s Angels, tries to corrupt Jacob and snare his soul; a hollow-eyed Beggar searches for sustenance in the heartless city; Talmudic scholars argue over a holy text; the Sabbath Queen fails to bring everlasting tranquility and bliss into the world. Beginning in 1930, Zemach choreographed several shows for the semi-professional ARTEF. Led by the former Habima actor, Benno Schneider, the ARTEF was founded in 1927 and modeled itself after the Moscow GOSET, replicating much of their indigenous Soviet repertory. Schneider added vivid Vakhtangov-like theatricality and flair to the undemanding comic, Naturalistic, and melodramatic agitprops. His skill in rescuing productions with inspired blocking and grotesque characterizations during final rehearsals was legendary. Besides directing, Schneider taught at the New Theatre School in 1934 and founded an acting institute, the Workers Acting Studio, where English-language classes were given in Vakhtangov Technique. Despite a declining audience pool, his Yiddish ensemble was featured in Life magazine in 1938. But political infighting caused by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact the next year further reduced its Jewish and liberal backing. The ARTEF folded in 1940. Before the war, Schneider directed several Broadway extravaganzas for the Theatre Guild and in 1943 left for Hollywood. During an uninterrupted period of thirteen years, he headed Columbia Pictures Talent Department. He died in Los Angeles in 1977. Zemach had already preceded Schneider’s West Coast move by a decade. Between 1932 and 1935, he staged Jewish-themed productions at the Pasadena Playhouse and the Hollywood Bowl. Zemach choreographed

92 Stanislavsky in America and performed in two Hollywood costume fantasias, She and The Last Days of Pompeii. He received an Oscar nomination for Best Dance Direction for She in 1936 but had already returned to New York City before the Academy ceremony. Zemach continued to work in the nether world of dramatic movement and modern dance. He lectured on the internal preparation of the dancer, and gave solo performances at the New School and the 92nd Street Y. In 1937, Zemach took over the direction of Max Reinhardt’s epic Jewish spectacle The Eternal Road. The mammoth production required so much floor space for Zemach’s dancing teams that the orchestra pit had to be masked and RCA piped in, for the first time, recorded high fidelity sound of Kurt Weill’s score. When Zemach’s name was accidentally omitted from the program notes, the actors wrote an emphatic protest to The New York Times. Later that year, Zemach choreographed the Labor Stage’s Pins and Needles, the longest running musical revue in Broadway’s history. All the performers were full-time garment workers from the ILGW (International Ladies Garment Workers) trade union and, by definition, non-professionals. He also directed novice actors at the American Negro Theatre downstairs in a Harlem basement. In addition to training fledgling dancers at Unity House’s Labor Stage, Zemach taught at the Tamara Daykarhanova School for the Stage – that amenable haven for Russian émigré instructors. He used music to stimulate the student-actors and, in advanced classes, had them move without it. Simultaneously, Zemach’s actress wife, Elizabeth Lynn, had enrolled in Michael Chekhov’s Professional Class, and her sessions there greatly influenced Zemach’s future work. In 1942, Zemach and Lynn returned to Southern California, where they conducted lessons in movement and acting in their tiny living space. After the war, the Actors Lab hired Zemach to teach Advanced Acting and he directed Yiddish productions at the Los Angeles Folksbiene. When Ben-Ari resigned from the Brandeis Institute (retitled the University of Judaism) in 1960, Zemach was appointed Director of their newly formed Department of Drama and Dance. Twelve years later, he immigrated to Israel. In a village south of Jerusalem, Zemach co-founded the Yiddish Art Theatre and finally reconciled with the National Habima Theatre, appearing in its 1988 production of The Cherry Orchard. He died in 1997, still vigorous and gleefully upholding the Vakhtangov traditions of Fantastic Realism.

Miriam Goldina Benjamin Zemach’s sister-in-law, Miriam Goldina, one of the leading ingénues of the Moscow Habima, found considerable work on Broadway

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and in Hollywood beginning in 1925. She was attractive and had an excellent command of English. At the Theatre of the Four Seasons, a Long Island repertoire house sponsored by the Federal Theatre Project, she met Maurine Hogaboom in 1935. They formed a creative partnership that flourished for more than twenty years. Goldina continued to act professionally as she developed a system of actor-training that utilized the core teachings of Vakhtangov and Stanislavsky. She insisted that offstage action was as important as the activities that took place in front of the house. “All must be conveyed in the voice,” she harangued her pupils. The sound, the inflection, and the pauses in dialogue had to be imaginatively expressed and lucid in order to secure the emotional state and psychology of the character. Her students remembered Goldina shouting from her kitchen unit, “I don’t see it!” when they weakly delivered their lines. In 1949, Goldina played opposite Mae West in the Broadway restaging of Diamond Lil and opened her own acting studio in Manhattan. She balanced a frenzied career of television acting, Broadway coaching, and academic teaching for seven years. The Miriam Goldina Studio folded in 1956. After accepting a post at University of South Florida in Tampa, she visited the Vakhtangov Theatre during a trip to Moscow in 1963. Reuben Simonov, the Artistic Director, inscribed to her his biography of their mentor, Stanislavsky’s Protégé: Eugene Vakhtangov. Goldina’s translation of the book appeared in 1969. She passed away a decade later in New York, having outlived her husband, Nakhum Zemach, by forty years.

David Vardi and Zvi Friedland Vardi came to the Moscow Habima in 1918 after serving in the Russian Army. His initial education included both traditional and secular Yiddish study. At twenty-five, Vardi was something of an old-timer, and he quickly assumed the role of Habima’s resident intellectual. Vardi was immediately drawn to Vakhtangov’s teachings and transcribed every word of the master. Vardi also attended Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s lectures on the new theatre, always trying to make practical sense of their densely worded methodologies. Vardi was an ideal spokesman for Habima and gradually climbed the rungs of its staid hierarchy. In 1923, he was promoted to play the omniscient wonder-rabbi who exorcises Leah’s soul in The Dybbuk. Technically a Lithuanian national, Vardi and his wife, Khava Yoalit, managed to relocate to New York the next year and obtain American citizenship. They joined the avant-garde Yiddish troupe Unser Teater in

94 Stanislavsky in America the Bronx but its location and uninviting experimentation quickly stymied its commercial ambitions. Theatre Arts Monthly (December 1925) later ran a feature on Vardi’s hand gestures, declaring them to be ethnologically superb. For the inauguration of Neighborhood Playhouse’s 1925–26 season, Vardi directed the first English-language production of The Dybbuk, with a nearly exclusive Gentile cast. Vardi proclaimed his exotic and mystic adaptation was a correlative to Vakhtangov’s Marxist version. But when the touring Habima offered their Moscow production to New York audiences the following year, the press unanimously preferred the Hebrew original. Across the Hudson River in Newark, New Jersey, David and Khava founded the Vardi-Yoalit Theatre Studio in June 1927. Pure Vakhtangov Technique was now taught in Yiddish. Children of working-class Jewish immigrants were inculcated in the basic menu of Vakhtangov scenic truth: Relaxation, “Lightness,” Action, Objectives, and Justification. The secret of matchless acting, Vardi explicated to his young devotees, entailed the discovery and amplification of the character’s “kernel.” Once they unearthed the psychological essence of their part, all their acting choices will imaginatively surface. For instance, during a troublesome Habima production in Moscow, Vardi realized his character encompassed “Book,” that is “Civilization,” as its human core or kernel. Overnight Vardi’s rigid behavior and lack of appeal vanished; his enactment proceeded unerringly. Defying conventional wisdom, the Vardi-Yoalit Theatre Studio thrilled the metropolitan critics. Between 1927 and 1930, it mounted four soulful Yiddish-language showcases. Theatre Magazine (January 1929) hailed the studio as one of America’s most remarkable children’s theatres. Like so many artistic venues of the late 1920s, however, the Great Depression brought it down. In 1932, the Vardis appeared on Broadway in an English-language two-person show that David wrote, directed and co-produced. It was titled Lenin’s Dowry and dramatized the 1925 dilemma of Habima under Soviet patronage: in what city should the Jewish company domicile? Lenin’s Dowry closed after four performances. The failed production issued its own private salvo. The Vardis moved to Palestine, where they rejoined their Habima comrades. David performed on the New York stage one last time in 1959. He created the character of the old synagogue Sexton for Tyrone Guthrie’s The Tenth Man. Paddy Chayefsky’s creaky who-done-it ran for 623 evenings and matinees. Zvi Friedland also briefly relocated to Manhattan from Tel Aviv after the war. Unlike the Habima Players who stayed in America following

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the Zemach split, he trudged to Hebrew-speaking Palestine in 1927 with the majority of the company, retreated to Berlin, and then back to the Jewish homeland. Not only had Friedland become one of Habima’s leading performers, but also he staged most of their Mandate productions, directing more than fifty dramas between 1931 and 1948. He also taught acting privately at his house in Tel Aviv. Friedland had twice attempted to establish a formal studio connected with the theatre in 1939 and 1946. But those enterprises faltered. In May 1948, Habima revisited New York for the first time since 1926. It had settled into the Broadway Theatre for a six-week engagement. The reasoning behind its tour was obvious: to shore up support for their embattled state. But before Habima concluded its run, Friedland decided not to return to Israel. During the summer, he founded the Studio of Theatre Arts in New York and gave himself the exalted title of Chief Artistic Director. In December, Friedland mounted a dashing production of Phedre with many fresh faces and much fanfare. (A toothy Charlton Heston played Theseus.) Unfortunately, neither his studio nor Phedre fulfilled its artistic promise. Like a tragic hero from antiquity, Friedland had to abandon his New World dreams and sail back to his untranquil home.

David Itkin Still another Habima member who stayed in the US after the division of the Collective in 1927 was David Itkin. He staked out a new and uncontested acting venue midway between Broadway and Hollywood. In 1929, he settled his family in Chicago and directed an Englishlanguage production of The Golem at DePaul University, despite his stuttering fluency in the language. Maurice Gnesin, an experienced director from the Duluth Playhouse and an advocate of the Little Theatre Movement, had been recently appointed head of Chicago’s marginal Goodman School of Drama. (Erroneously described as a “thoughtful Russian,” Gnesin was in fact an American-born Jew.) He invited Itkin to teach acting at the School. Itkin skipped over much of Vakhtangov introductory work and devised lessons that forced his students to behave with simple emotional logic. “Be native!” he frequently barked when scenes slowed to a lackluster conclusion or backfired from too much actorly intellection. Mostly, Itkin’s classes involved improvisation; he gave selected pupils their character types and then announced a situational or relationship conflict. For instance, after being mocked by his drinking buddies because of the unsuitability of his girlfriend, a cabbie telephones her in

96 Stanislavsky in America order to annul their impending date which, unbeknownst to him, involves the girl’s apprehensive family members. Sometimes, Itkin himself would enter into the improvised sketch, pushing the emotional reality even further. By 1940, the Goodman School had received national recognition as a noteworthy municipal institution. Gnesin and Itkin decided to expand their acting program in the footsteps of European models, by adding courses in stylized movement and etiquette, voice production, elocution, theatre history, ballet, folk dance, lighting, stagecraft, set and costume design. The two functioned as an inseparable team until Gnesin’s death in 1957. That year Itkin retired and his daughter, Bella, was chosen to fill his vacated position. THE FORMER MICHAEL CHEKHOV PLAYERS

Michael Chekhov Of all the Russian émigré teachers, only Michael Chekhov achieved a contemporary following abroad. He created his unique method of actor-training in Moscow and continued to refine it during his European and American exile. And wherever he performed or directed, Chekhov inspired like-minded teachers. He even managed to publish the philosophy of the Future Theatre and practical rudiments of the Michael Chekhov Technique during his lifetime: O Teknike Aktera (New York: Privately printed, 1946); and To the Actor (New York: Harper & Row, 1953). These were among the first workbooks by a performing artist to be printed in America. At the Moscow Art Theatre Born into a middle-class St. Petersburg family in 1891, Michael Chekhov was marked for his entire professional life as the nephew of the playwright, Anton Chekhov. A character actor at the Maly Theatre, Misha was invited by Stanislavsky in 1909 to join the MAT. Trained by Vakhtangov, Chekhov appeared as a walk-on in various MAT productions. During a performance of The Imaginary Invalid, Stanislavsky reprimanded young Chekhov for “having too much fun with the part.” While professing perfect belief in the Stanislavsky System, Chekhov found himself in trouble from the very beginning. Cast by Boleslavsky in the First Studio’s “test” production, The Wreck of the Ship “Hope” in 1913, Chekhov created another disturbance. He took the minor role of Kobe, the idiot fisherman, and metamorphosized

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him into a creature of pathos and intense lyricism, altering the character, through movement and makeup, from a low-comedy type into a sincere and morbid seeker of truth. When criticized that his notion of Kobe was not what the dramatist intended, Misha replied that he went beyond the playwright and the play to find Kobe’s true character. There is no doubt that Stanislavsky and others appreciated Chekhov’s onstage products. What concerned the MAT crowd was his erratic means of creating character and feeling. One semi-apocryphal story may explain their theatrical conflict. Asked by Stanislavsky to enact a true dramatic situation as an exercise in Emotional Memory, Chekhov recreated his wistful presence at his father’s funeral. Overwhelmed by its novel detail and sense of truth, Stanislavsky embraced Misha, thinking that this was yet another proof of the theories. Unfortunately, Stanislavsky later found out that Chekhov’s ailing father was, in fact, still alive and Misha’s performance was based on a feverish anticipation of the event. Reprimanded once again, Chekhov was dropped from the class due “to an overheated imagination.” Between 1913 and 1923, Chekhov appeared in twelve MAT and independent productions, usually as a lead or in important supporting roles. His reputation as an actor and as later an independent thinker in the theatre increased dramatically despite bouts of depression brought about by the deaths of family members, war hysteria, Revolution, and alcoholism. Chekhov’s psychic condition and aesthetics were inalterably transformed by his discovery of Rudolf Steiner’s “Scientific Religion,” Anthroposophy. The Anthroposophical demonstrations of Speech-Formation and the modern dance-like Eurythmy were said to be manifestations of otherworldly correspondences that linked sound, movement, and feeling. Marrying the inner truth and emotional depth of Stanislavsky’s system with the beauty and spiritual impact of Steiner’s work now became Misha’s obsession. In 1920, Chekhov opened his own studio in the Arbat district of Moscow. It was the first of several such attempts to pass on his singular form of acting. But, as always, financial considerations forced him back on the stage. Early in 1921, Chekhov starred in Vakhtangov’s gloomy, proto-Expressionist Erik IV by August Strindberg. Playing a young but impotent King in a corrupt court, Chekhov discovered the character’s nature by internalizing a handful of startling images. Inspired by the lessons of Eurythmy, Misha “found” his role by experimenting with the shape and quality of the character’s movement and rearrangements of his body size. Only when he “saw” the character could Chekhov begin his embodiment, or incorporation, of the role.

98 Stanislavsky in America The Second MAT By 1923, during the MAT’s celebrated tour, Stanislavsky rewarded Chekhov with the directorship of his own theatre, the Second Moscow Art Theatre. Freed of other worries, Chekhov began to experiment in earnest. Exercises in rhythmic movement and telepathic communication filled the members’ crowded schedules. In preparation for a controversial Hamlet, Chekhov taught his actors to use Shakespeare’s language like a physical property, tossing balls as they rehearsed their lines. Neither the actor’s personality nor stage clichés of the director or playwright were allowed to form the basis of any role. He claimed that Stanislavsky went from the detail of the character to the whole; reversing that process, however, delivered a better result. Misha spoke of finding the archetype, or the “correct” image, of the character. Although Chekhov was recognized more as a leading actor than an Artistic Director, his approach soon became subject to severe criticism. Denounced as an “idealist” and mystic in 1927, Misha quit the Second MAT. With his wife, Xenia, he departed for the West. In exile Invited by Max Reinhardt to perform the next spring in Berlin, Chekhov started a second phase of his career, a series of “wander years” in voluntary exile across Central, Western, and Eastern Europe. For seven years – most of them filled with disappointments – Misha pursued his life-long quest to create his own troupe and method of actor-training. In both Austria and Berlin, Chekhov starred in German-language comedies and silent films. He slowly gathered a following of ex-First Studio and Second MAT actors. In November 1931, Chekhov and his Russian acolytes came to Paris and premiered a mystical pantomime, The Castle Awakens, created by and starring Chekhov. Although acclaimed by much of the international press, opening night difficulties with the six disgruntled musicians and the play’s occult theme damaged the reception of The Castle Awakens with the theatregoing public. Chekhov received an invitation to work with the Latvian State Theatre in Riga. In Lithuania, he formed a Russian-language company with the Jilinskys. Again, the vicissitudes of local politics and failing health forced Chekhov and his troupe westward. In 1935, the impresario Sol Hurok brought the Moscow Art Players to New York. The company’s name infuriated the Soviet government. They felt Chekhov’s ensemble would be confused with their MAT and

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refused to exchange ambassadors with Washington until it retitled itself. The contentious transatlantic dispute was resolved when the Moscow Art Players completed their rocky Broadway season of Russian classics and disbanded. At Dartington Hall and Ridgefield Now a free agent, Chekhov found at long last a sensitive and talented benefactor, Beatrice Straight. She brought Chekhov to Dartington Hall, the site of her family estate in Devon, England. Straight and Chekhov recruited instructors and students worldwide for the study of the Chekhov Method. Atmospheres, the Awakening Exercises, Centering, Incorporation, Psychological Gesture, and Radiation – nearly the entire pantheon of Michael Chekhov Technique was set at Dartington. The training there was thorough and deliberate, lasting two full years. More than anything else, Chekhov’s work became associated with the use of imagination. Since the theatre’s power is in its ability to communicate through imagery, rather than in literary concepts, Chekhov sought to uncover the appropriate actor-training devices. His improvisations advanced the notion that scenic space could have a special, almost magical, character filled with combustible or intoxicating Atmospheres. Where Strasberg’s Emotional Memory exercises played upon the actor’s sensory recall of an actual event, which then had to be used as a substitute in a similar occurrence in a script, Chekhov schooled his students in finding imaginary, external stimuli to fire their emotions. Chekhov believed, for instance, one had only to visualize and viscerally experience the presence of a huge Gothic cathedral to feel true awe or amazement. Always known for his detailed and unusual dramatic interpretations, Chekhov gave particular attention at the Studio to the creation of character, which he broke down into precise steps: finding the character’s Center; imaging his body; and discovering his Psychological Gesture, the internal movement that revealed his secret personality. In 1939, British expectations of war with Germany caused the Chekhov Theatre Studio to relocate across the Atlantic in rural Connecticut. The Ridgefield Studio physically resembled Dartington in certain ways, yet its proximity to New York City changed Chekhov’s way of thinking about his school and instruction. First of all, Chekhov directed – with George Shdanoff – his first English-language production on Broadway, The Possessed. It ended in failure. Secondly, Misha began to think about the development of classes for working, experienced actors. In the fall of 1941, the Chekhov Theatre opened a New York studio on 56th Street. The twice-weekly two-hour classes for professional

100 Stanislavsky in America actors, however, were of special importance for Chekhov. Here Misha hoped to perfect and summarize all of the features of his Technique. During this period, the Chekhov Theatre Studio had succeeded in one aspect. They created a touring company, whose classical productions were highly praised in New England, the Midwest, and the Deep South. Yul Brynner (whose stepmother was a member of the Second MAT) played in their experimental King Lear. But the fiasco of The Possessed and other difficulties at Ridgefield weighed heavily on Misha’s mind. In Hollywood Chekhov spent the last thirteen years of his life in California. He began his Hollywood career as a character actor in The Song of Russia (1942). An idealized, pro-Stalinist depiction of life on a Soviet collective farm, Misha played opposite the Bulgakovs and Vladimir Sokoloff, his rival teachers in Los Angeles. Misha feared becoming an “accent clown” in American films but he excelled in those parts and was a secondary character in a wide range of comedies and features. Chekhov garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 Spellbound. In 1944–45, Chekhov gave formal twice-weekly classes in a downtown studio. He coached Marilyn Monroe privately at the beginning of the 1950s and taught at the Stage Society with Akim Tamiroff. After his manual To the Actor appeared, Chekhov led classes for selected professionals in his living room. Although Misha spoke at length about his long stage career, he goaded his bevy of film performers to fully emote, from their Higher Egos, but view the camera lens as a mysterious veil that had to be pierced. When they attempted to explain or intellectually defend themselves, Chekhov stopped them dead in their tracks: “Don’t think about it. Don’t talk about it. Do it!” Many of Misha’s star pupils, like Mala Powers and Hurd Hatfield, continued to teach the Michael Chekhov Technique in the decades after his death in 1955. In 1980, Straight opened a Michael Chekhov Studio in mid-town Manhattan, not far from Stella Adler’s Conservatory of Acting.

Andrius Jilinsky and Vera Soloviova Jilinsky and his wife Soloviova devised the only intentional blending of Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov, and Michael Chekhov in their American performance work and teaching. Both of them joined the MAT before

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the First World War while they were in their late teens and trained at the First Studio. Occasionally, the pair appeared on the MAT and First Studio stages in the same evening. Interestingly, the Affective Memory preparations that Suler had schooled them in for his A Cricket on the Hearth had opposite effects. Soloviova claimed that she was able to feel true pain and cry in each of the 600 performances; Jilinsky said that he could only evoke real tears four times. In 1916 when Vakhtangov took over the Studio, Jilinsky resigned from the MAT and joined the Czarist Army. Months after the Revolution, Jilinsky and Soloviova married. They were repatriated to Jilinsky’s native Lithuania in 1920 in exchange for Leon Trotsky’s family. For one year, they performed at Balieff’s Chauve Souris in Paris and in 1922 enlisted with the Kachalov’s Prague Group. In 1923, Jilinsky and Soloviova returned to Moscow and joined Michael Chekhov’s Second MAT. Each was highly praised for their outstanding psychological depth inside Chekhov’s super-theatrical stagings. Although both subscribed to Chekhov’s attempts to replace personal Affective Memories with his intuitive Imagination exercises, Jilinsky and Soloviova thought most of the Second MAT students lacked proper internal development. Their stage acting was leaden, lifeless. According to Soloviova, this was because the Second MAT students had not yet “swallowed” basic Stanislavsky Technique. One year after Chekhov defected in 1928, Jilinsky and Soloviova followed suit. Jilinsky was appointed Director of the Lithuanian State Theatre, which in addition to its main theatre had professional companies in opera, experimental drama, and ballet. Soloviova began her new career in Kovno as an acting teacher. They invited Chekhov to direct Hamlet and perform his one-man show of Chekhov Sketches. When the political situation soured in 1934, the peripatetic couple moved to Paris in order to assist Chekhov in his creation of the Moscow Art Players. Jilinsky and Soloviova attained renown as an acting sensation when the company toured America in 1935. The New York and Boston press hailed Jilinsky as “an actor of great power and glorious speaking voice.” Even non-Russians could detect truthful characterizations in productions mounted in an unfamiliar language. Hurok attempted to cajole the trio of Chekhov–Jilinsky–Soloviova to Hollywood for screen testing and a re-engagement with Boleslavsky but they wisely refused. Everything was moving too fast. Instead, Jilinsky accepted the position of Art Director for a new ensemble, the New York Troupe, which was badly underfunded and much depended on his commercial savvy. The Troupe mounted exactly

102 Stanislavsky in America one Broadway show in 1938 – an obscure Strindberg play called The Bridal Crown – and then went under. With Soloviova, Jilinsky also taught at the Tamara Daykarhanova School for the Stage from 1935 until 1940 and, during the war, an opera class for the American Theatre Wing. Jilinsky’s experience in musical theatre was extensive, and he assiduously championed the rhythmic and percussive phrasing of movement as a natural expression of character and psychological motivation. Many of Jilinsky’s technique exercises were accompanied with improvised piano music. According to Horton Foote, the playwright, the pianist guided and inspired the pupils. For the most part, when not directing, Jilinsky taught introductory acting classes. He was long remembered as being unfailingly polite and patient with his Broadway aspirants. The American Actors Company, an enthusiastic band of Dayka graduates, formed after the New York Troupe debacle and solicited Jilinsky’s artistic leadership. He directed them in three independent productions that starred Joan Fontaine and Mildred Dunnock. Jilinsky and Soloviova’s most celebrated achievement was the establishment of Andrius Jilinsky’s Actors Workshop, which heroically persevered from 1940 until 1942. After they folded it into the Gellendre Theatre Studio, Jilinsky’s health rapidly deteriorated. The couple’s collaboration entered into a period of immense struggle. Both of them wanted to fashion a purified regime that resembled their First Studio and Second MAT practice. It meant simplifying many of the Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov, and Chekhov exercises, and sweeping aside the extraneous theoretical explanations. Three years after Jilinsky expired from heart disease in 1948, Soloviova opened her own Studio of Acting. It lasted into the 1960s but could not compete with more highly promoted Russian acting schools in New York, such as Sonia Moore’s American Center for Stanislavsky Theatre Art. (Like other First Studio graduates, the intensively modest actress-cum-teacher often berated Moore as a self-aggrandizing charlatan. Her relationship with the MAT was said to be tangential and vastly overstated.) Soloviova died at a nursing home in New Jersey in 1986.

George Shdanoff Shdanoff arranged to meet Michael Chekhov in Berlin during the summer of 1928. At first it seemed that the sparkling-eyed twenty-twoyear-old actor was merely another adoring fan among the two-million strong Russian–European diaspora. But Shdanoff studied at the MAT

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in the early Twenties and, after immigrating with his family to Germany, had performed with various Russian-language troupes and, atypically, been cast in major Berlin theatre houses. Shdanoff’s status seemed assured after he played the lead in Igor Stravinsky’s Tale of a Soldier at the Kroll Opera House. Chekhov and Shdanoff immediately bonded when the master registered his displeasure with the quick and normally jagged German rehearsal process. It utterly ignored the deliberate creation of character and the actor’s necessarily slow but sturdy development. Moreover, both were vehemently opposed the MAT’s training in Affective Memory. Misha had planned to create a Russian Theatre Company that would be based on his Second MAT aesthetic: an eccentric-classical repertoire mounted by Russian actors schooled in the Michael Chekhov Technique. The thirty-seven-year-old director offered Shdanoff the part of Horatio in his first non-Soviet production of Hamlet. Shdanoff demurred. The ensemble would begin its protracted work in Bavaria, far from Shdanoff’s Berlin professional prospects. Maria Germanova had already invited the dashing juvenile to join her Prague Group but he refused because of its isolated locale. Financial obstacles caused Chekhov to abandon Germany altogether and Shdanoff continued to perform in Berlin and with national touring companies until anti-Semitic and xenophobic agitation exploded across the country. Shdanoff’s steady employment on the German stage had greatly diminished and suddenly ceased. He began to consider other options. In 1931, Shdanoff wrote and co-directed the pacifist feature film No Man’s Land. It was one of the first multi-lingual motion pictures of the sound era. Actors, playing trapped inductees from four different armies during the Great War, spoke and reminisced about carefree civilian life in their native tongues: English, German, French, and Yiddish-Russian. The anti-war allegory should have found a large international audience but its message was badly timed. National Socialism had transformed the European landscape. In 1933, Shdanoff escaped with his physician father to Paris. He authored a stage adaptation of Crime and Punishment, which was mounted at the A. Bogdanov Russian Theatre. Nonetheless, Shdanoff found the Parisian ambiance stifling. He was classified as “stateless” and followed other German exiles to London. There he resumed his career as a screenwriter and film researcher. When Chekhov started his school and theatre in Devonshire at Dartington Hall, Shdanoff joined him after six months of correspondence. Their quaint friendship renewed, Shdanoff was invited to write a whimsical political satire for the troupe. Male Russian companionship was really what Misha required. So Shdanoff became Dartington’s resident

104 Stanislavsky in America playwright and started to adapt Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. As soon as the Chekhov school prepared to set up shop in the New World, Shdanoff wed his Viennese sweetheart, Elsa Schreiber, and they trailed off to America, to the Chekhov’s Studio’s rural setting outside New York City. Shdanoff was put off by the American troupe’s intellectual naivety and wholesale distrust of him, especially after he was named Artistic Co-Director. Still he pushed forward with The Possessed project. It opened on Broadway in 1939 and received withering reviews. Walter Winchell savaged the languorous show as “The Dispossessed.” The Chekhov Theatre’s Twelfth Night fared little better two years later. In 1943, Shdanoff and Schreiber drove cross-country to Los Angeles. They appeared in a few independent features until Shdanoff was swept up in the wartime draft. His time at Fort Mac automatically resulted in his procurement of naturalization papers. Within the year, Shdanoff was discharged and Morris Carnovsky brought him into the Actors Lab as an acting teacher. And like his patron, Shdanoff taught his own brand of Chekhov Technique. It was a fast-paced blend of Misha’s Inner Visualization and the Imaginary Body with Reinhardt-like presentationalism. Actors were cautioned to avoid mawkish sentimentality and not to mumble. They had to take their time onstage and move with confidence. Unlike the ex-Group member’s philosophical exhortations that most Lab regulars assented to, this was undeniably useful industry guidance. After his time at the Lab, Shdanoff and Schreiber began to coach young film actors at their West Hollywood apartment. The word-of-mouth among colony insiders was heartening and their business steadily grew. Even professionals, like Lilli Palmer and Rex Harrison, swore by the couple’s Central European theatrical instincts. (Patricia Neal often bristled when Gary Cooper derided her acting avatar as “Doctor Stroganoff.”) Shdanoff held informal Master Classes in his mixed Chekhov– Shdanoff Method for three decades. Finally in 1974, after a nostalgic and inspiring Moscow tour, he decided to open a school with apprentice teachers. It was advertised as the George Shdanoff Acting Training Center. Its founder died twenty-four years later. STANISLAVSKY-BASED TEACHERS

Tamara Daykarhanova exercises Sources for the exercises: H.M., “They Learn to Act,” The Stage (September 1934); Marjorie Mears, “Actresses Are Made Not Born,” Mademoiselle, vol. 1., no. 5, (July 1935); Laurence Senelick (editor),

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Wandering Stars (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992); Horton Foote, Beginnings A Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2001); interviews with Phoebe Brand, Alice Rickel Carnick, Joanna Merlin, Sylvia Miles, Beatrice Straight and Benjamin Zemach. Relaxation 1. 2.

Open your mouth widely and shriek. Do this as long and as loudly as you can in a single breath. This will free your throat muscles and help relax your entire body. Sit in a chair with your eyes shut. Allow your muscles to relax and concentrate on your sense of touch – the feel of your skin and muscles against the chair. Try to deeply feel through your clothing, your skin, so your muscles directly make a contact with the wood or steel of the chair.

Physical work and emotions 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

Now, while seated, cross-fade to your sense of smell or taste. Smell (or taste in your imagination) any food in the room. Listen for any sounds, Try to separate sounds coming from your left or right sides. Count them. Finally, open your eyes and find an object to concentrate on. To learn proper equilibrium and expressiveness, learn to walk in a straight line with a book balanced on your head. Once you have mastered that, recreate your walk with an imaginary book. Now walk across the stage with a real (or imaginary) book on your head and a mask on your face. Through your stride only, reveal the dominant emotion you feel. Repeat the above exercises, using a glass of water in the place of the book. Sit on the floor with your legs doubled at the knee. Let your arms drop gently to the floor. Without moving your arms or any part of your body below the waist, stretch and twist your head and upper torso until they feel totally flexible. Now without speaking express the emotional states – such as love, anger, hate – suggested by your teacher. Create an emotion without any facial expression. (You may wear a mask when you start this exercise.) Only through walking, express sadness or joy. Choose a scene to perform. While your partner reads the dialogue for your character, physically enact the character’s actions. (Divorcing the words from the action should give you a strong emotional release.)

106 Stanislavsky in America Imagination 10. Change exactly five things about yourself. (For instance, if you are a blonde, act as a redhead.) Increase the number of changes to eight. 11. Let your body react naturally to the following situations: 

a stranger jumps in front of you and points a pistol to your heart;  another stranger places a thousand-dollar check in your hand. 12. As your partner erratically turns the pages of a newspaper, attempt to really read them without interrupting him. Now repeat the activity as a specific character in a given situation. For instance, you are in a subway car watching your partner laughing madly at the news. Your sense of curiosity struggles with innate etiquette. You must discover what your partner is reading. Justification 13. Move around the room freely. When your teacher shouts, “Stop!” freeze into a position. Now justify your pose. 14. Repeat the above exercise but now move with a partner. When he freezes, justify his position as well as your own. Communication 15. Repeat a sentence, emphasizing a different word each time. For example, say, “Then THIS is goodbye.” “THEN this is goodbye!” “Then this is GOODBYE!” Notice how it changes the meaning. Affective Memory 16. Substitute an emotional memory of yours for a character in a scene. If the character’s emotional state is new to you, like being in love, find a similar memory. VAKHTA NGOV-BASED TEACHER S

Raikin Ben-Ari exercises Sources for the exercises: 1928 notebook of Herschel Bender; Judith Malina’s 1945 Dramatic Workshop diary; interviews with Sabell Bender, Judith Malina, David Nevel, Maria Ley-Piscator, and Benjamin Zemach.

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Center of attention 1.

2. 3.

The Silence Exercise: With your classmates, lay down on the floor. Completely relax. Now try to become totally still and silent. Become aware of every motion and sound that exists around you for two minutes. How many noises did you count? Which can be identified? Practice entering the room from a storm in order to warm yourself. As you take off your coat, feel the coldness of the room. As a mother, enter your baby’s room, cover the sleeping child, and depart.

Need exercises 4. 5.

6.

Converse to students around you as you listen to sounds in the room. Now repeat the exercise but remember in the next room is the corpse of your beloved teacher. Without looking, describe an object on a table, like a stage pistol. Now endow the object with a personal meaning – for example, it belongs to a murderer, you are selling it, or have to buy it for protection – and then describe the object again. Look for a needle (or a watch) in the room. Freeze. Now look for the needle as if it were crucial to your existence. For instance, your first date is about to pick you up and you must have a needle to mend the run in your only pair of stockings.

Improvisations 7.

8. 9.

Open an imaginary letter from a soldier who has not written to you in weeks. Let your audience see every word you are reading through the expressions on your face. He writes that he is imprisoned in a German prisoner of war camp. Now go to a church, light a candle, and pray. With a partner, improvise a scene where he fails to recognize you. Do everything to make him remember you. Play the same scene with more concentration as a tragedy. Now play it in a changing tempo for comedy. Knock on an apartment door, looking for your lover. You unexpectedly meet his wife, who is nasty to you. Now you decide to shake her up by telling her the truth about you and her husband.

Benjamin Zemach exercises Sources for the exercises: Interviews with Sabell Bender, Phoebe Brand, Joanna Merlin, and Benjamin Zemach; and classroom observations.

108 Stanislavsky in America Mutual awareness 1.

2.

3.

On a count of four, rise slowly together from your circle, synchronizing your legato (flowing) movements with one another. Then sit down sharply with staccato gestures, on the first beat of the second measure. Once again, get up sharply on the third beat of the second measure. Reverse the order now, sitting down slowly, rising and then sitting sharply. Now, without the help of a voiced count or other cue, rise together, step forward, back, and sit down. Vary this gradually, using legato and staccato movements. Develop your own rhythm, using your legs and body. Let the action develop naturally, sensing what your partner will do without looking. When you become settled and sure in your movement choices, allow yourself to be influenced by other pupils – if their gestures appeal to you. After two or three minutes of “give and take,” everyone in your group should instinctively follow the same motions and rhythms without a great deal of physical effort.

Inner Movement 4. 5.

6.

Imagine a drop of mercury rolling from the tip of a finger to your shoulder. Start again with the mercury going from your hand into other parts of your body. Legato movements require continuity of motion from one part of the body to another. They should flow like water and you should be aware of that slow moving continuity. Begin with the area between ribs and hips. Place your thumbs on your ribs and your middle fingers on your hipbones. Slowly pull the bones together. When all the bones “meet,” start to stretch them away – far away from each other. Point to a chandelier or a spot on the ceiling. Feel the gradual development of your outstretched arm up to the ceiling as if it were all attached to a thin invisible spider’s web. (In the words of Vakhtangov, “Feel yourself drawn on the backdrop of the stage.”)

Justification 7.

Without thinking, make a dozen short staccato movements. Now give each movement a meaning, or Justification. For example, pat your head. Now repeat the action to see if you need a haircut. (This should help to release any excess tension in your body.)

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Relate your staccˇ ato movements to any object: a chair, a table, the ceiling, the space around you, or your partner. Now give a different Justification. “I am” exercise 8.

Choose any episode from your own life that made a lasting impression on you. Tell it to those around you in the present tense. You “enter” into it as if it is occurring now. You relive the place, the time, the situation, and activity, returning intermittently to your listeners. (The three main ingredients of the exercise are imagining the circumstances, physically reliving the experience, and holding the audience’s contact. All three of these aspects are equally important.)

MICHAEL CHEKHOV-BASED TEACHERS

Michael Chekhov exercises (1941–55) Sources for exercises: Deirdre du Hurst’s transcriptions of Michael Chekhov’s lectures given at the Actor’s Service and Labor Stage in New York (1942); Tonio Selwart’s notes from Michael Chekhov workshop in the Hollywood Plaza Hotel (1944); interviews with Mala Powers, Joanna Merlin, Tonio Selwart, George Shdanoff, and Felicity Mason. Awakening exercises 1.

2. 3.

Soul Throwing: Thrust your arms and hands outward, like a hypnotist. Then lunge right, left, forward, back, up, and downward. Imagine that you are throwing your soul across and through the room. Spread your arms and legs out, until they form an “X.” Let them fill the room. Then contract your body into a ball. Repeat this two more times. Breathing Circle: Holding hands in a circle, look into your classmates’ eyes and breath. Then take two steps inward.

Emotion/Contact exercises 4.

Four Brothers: Walk around in a circle. First, mold the air by your body as you pass through it (Earth). Then flow through the space

110 Stanislavsky in America

5.

6. 7.

(Water). Now radiate your presence (Fire). Finally, walk with a flying or levitating sense (Air). Eurythmy: Articulate the following vowel sounds with these movements and sensations – Aaah (limbs spread out; the feeling of awe); Aaa (arms crossed in front of the torso; the feeling of protection); Eee (one arm stretched to the sun; the feeling of power); Ooo (embracing gesture; a receptive feeling); and Uuu (arms out and parallel; the piercing of life’s mystery). Now begin a simple conversation, retaining one of these sounds. In a circle, hand your partner a chair in one of these styles: Tragedy, Drama, Melodrama, Comedy, and Clowning. Set a table in twenty different ways (i.e., your last day as a waiter, and so forth).

Ensemble exercises 8. 9.

In a circle, toss a ball. Agreeing on a theme, like months of the year or colors, shout out one example of it, like February, as you throw the ball. Living Statutes: Using a pictorial image, like a car crash, create a stationary figure as each pupil enters the scene one at a time.

Character work 10. Toss an imaginary object in the air or play with it (stick, ball, veil, and chair). Let the object enter into your body. See how it changes your body shape, psychology, and movement. Use this as the basis of any character. 11. Ages of Man: Set four chairs in a semi-circle. In the first chair, you are an infant; in the second, a teenager; in the third, an adult; and finally, in the fourth, an old person.

Andrius Jilinsky exercises Sources for the exercises: Andrius Jilinsky, The Joy of Acting (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); Mary Hunter Wolf, “Reminiscences of Andrius Jilinsky and His Teaching,” in Laurence Senelick (editor), Wandering Stars (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992); Horton Foote, Beginnings A Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2001); interviews with Robert Ellermann, Horton Foote, Margarete Knicely, Vera Soloviova, and Mary Hunter Wolf.

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Relaxation 1.

2. 3.

Sit upright in a chair. Imagine an invisible “center line” aligning your head and spine. Focus on each part of your body to relax it. Practice “falling asleep,” without actually drifting off. Then stand and lift your arms in the air. Leading Center: Walk around the room, drawn by three invisible strings that attached to the small of the back and the shoulder blades. Silently recall a vivid episode in your life. Think of it in steps without parading the emotion that may accompany them. Move freely and allow the inner feelings to naturally arise in your body.

Sharpening the five senses and concentration 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

Study five cigarettes arranged in a particular pattern. Memorize their placement. Now take the cigarettes and replicate the pattern. Remember the first sound you heard in the morning and the last one at night. Watch five students as they walk across the room. Listen to their movements. Now close your eyes and identify which one is walking in front of you. Closing you eyes, sit at a table and touch three objects. Like a blind person, familiarize yourself with the items by handling them and moving from the table instinctively. After two more objects are placed next to the first set, identify which are the originals. Sitting in the center of a circle, visualize driving through the countryside. Allow the imaginary sights and sounds to stimulate your senses. The class then will guess your surroundings and location. The Thirty-nine Steps: This is an intense step-by-step enactment of 39 linked sensory activities. You snooze in an armchair, awake to the sound of an alarm clock, walk to a table, sit down, start to read a book, clean the table counter, place a mint in your mouth, listen to the clock again, fall back asleep.

Creative imagination 10. Take a common object, like a wallet, handkerchief, pocketbook, or wristwatch. Using your five senses, explore it in order to discover as many new aspects about it as possible. A new relationship between the object and yourself should develop, simulating your inner state.

112 Stanislavsky in America 11. Continue to explore your object, allowing it to transform itself – in your imagination – into an entirely new thing. For instance, a pocketbook could metamorphosize itself into a hat or bird. Let the transformed object arouse your emotions. That is, find amusing or disgusting features in it, and react to your discoveries. 12. Throw an imaginary object to your partner. First, a baseball, then a hot potato, a ball of feathers, a golf ball, a large balloon, and a solid piece of lead. Change the environment; toss it straight up into the sky, then underwater. Interaction between partners 13. The Typewriter: Each actor is assigned to play one letter-key on a typewriter. When the instructor reads a word or sentence, it is “typed” out by the group. The pupil-as-letter steps forward, claps his hands, shouts out his letter as he tosses it forward, then returns to the neutral position. 14. Thought-Pictures: With two partners, put together words given in sequence: “bridge,” “morning,” “It’s rainy,” “old women,” “It’s windy.” Visualize the images. Then let each phrase become one act of a play. Improvise the plot in its entirety. The objective 15. Everyone in the class is assigned the same Objective – “to leave the room.” Each actor has to invent an Inner Justification for doing so (i.e., he cannot be late for work). Second, each actor has to perform three different given activities – two physical and one mental – before walking through the doorway. All of this must be completed before the instructor paces from one end of the room to the other. 16. The Department Store: An actor is chosen to play a salesperson in a department store which sells valuable antique items such as jewelry, or watches. The rest of the class is secretly divided into customers (including some with no means), thieves, and store detectives. During this improv, everyone has a hidden Objective (i.e., to persuade the clerk to sell them a watch on credit, which the department does not allow). After the scene, the salesperson has to guess who were the thieves, what they took, and so forth.

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Physical acting 17. Show how you feel about a large object (i.e., a sofa) or action (i.e., dusting) through movement. Take your time and allow your inner states to guide your Actions. 18. Starting with an imagined physical disability (broken arm, blindness, etc.), move around the room. Demonstrate in your Actions whether or not the disability is congenital, merely temporary, or something that has plagued you for an extended period of time.

5

The Actors Lab in Hollywood

The Lab basically inherited the best ideas and ideals of the Group Theatre. The Lab was never formally planned. It simply grew. Morris Carnovsky, Theatre Arts (June–July, 1948)

Of all the major Stanislavsky-based schools in America, the Hollywood Actors Laboratory (1941–50) continues to be the most neglected or unfairly treated by theatre scholars and historians. Despite its longevity – it lasted nearly as long as the Group Theatre – and enormous influence on postwar film acting, the Actors Lab is chiefly remembered today as the first institutional victim of the Hollywood Blacklisting and political suppression of left-wing organizations during the McCarthy era. Although the Lab can be considered the most direct and obvious link from the Group to the Actors Studio, its status as a serious West Coast theatre forum and innovative acting school has been overshadowed by its sudden and untimely demise. During its heyday in 1946, the Lab not only managed three independent theatre companies in Los Angeles, it modernized the competing American interpretations of Stanislavsky training under a single roof. Former Group Theatre members developed an eclectic program in combination with teachers from the Vakhtangov tradition (ARTEF and Habima), and with Michael Chekhov and several of his disciples. The result was a broad assortment of Russian techniques for American film actors. If anything, the “Red Hunt” ultimately removed the Lab’s practicing screen actors from gainful employment in film into backstage instruction. This unintentionally ensured a third generation of professional Stanislavsky teachers in America.

The founding of the Actors Lab By 1941, the epicenter of American performing arts culture had shifted inexorably from Broadway to Hollywood. But many of the East Coast’s

The Actors Lab in Hollywood 115 most celebrated stars found themselves stranded or lost in that unfamiliar sun-drenched terrain. Typically, major film projects that engaged these once hotshot New York writers, directors, and actors were delayed, postponed, or abandoned without warning or notice. Although stage performers experienced such disappointments in film industries throughout the world since the turn-of-the-century, only in the United States was the cinema capital separated from its theatre hub by thousands of miles. It meant that there were no easy stage alternatives to the whims of film producers or studio heads. Even Manhattanites with constant work complained about the rigid casting selection in Hollywood, rarely inching beyond physical stereotypes; substandard scripts; mechanical rehearsal preparation; and indifferent direction that was frequently diverted into mending technological and scheduling problems. Many Broadway denizens felt that they had been shunted into a lucrative but arid cultural landscape. The Actors’ Laboratory announced its formation in January 1941. Six actors and two directors met in a Los Angeles auto-repair garage one night and decided to create an organization that resembled the old Group Theatre. In fact, three of them – Bud Bohnen, Joe Bromberg, and Mary Virginia Farmer – had been charter Group members. Jules Dassin had studied with Benno Schneider at his Workers Acting Studio and acted with the ARTEF ensemble. The others – Lloyd Bridges, Jeff Corey, Dick Flake, and Danny Mann – received their professional training in Federal Theatre units or at small left-wing theatre companies. The initial goals of the Actors Lab were simple: to create a Stanislavskybased curriculum for young actors; to provide a flexible conduit for established performers to perfect their craft; and to produce an “artful” repertoire of classic plays and topical modern dramas. Unlike the Group, the Actors Lab had, more or less, a wide-open playing field for serious theatre. There were only a few competing acting studios in Southern California that emphasized internal technique and almost no outlets for experimental or serious live performance. Of course, Los Angeles was not a natural theatre-going town. But the Lab founders thought audiences could be nourished under the proper conditions, especially when stage-hungry film stars could be dropped into their ensemble productions. The first semester of classes naturally reflected the diverse backgrounds and personalities of the Lab’s faculty: Bromberg instructed the beginners in the basic regimen of First Studio-like exercises; Farmer led a Scene Study workshop that encouraged Clurman-like analysis from the non-participants who watched; and Dassin organized an Advanced Acting course that emphasized external Vakhtangov-like psychology

116 Stanislavsky in America for student études and their extended scenes. Following in the footsteps of Schneider, Dassin eschewed what his ex-Group colleagues felt were chronological and elemental acting foundations. Instead, Dassin’s lessons were intentionally unsystematic and freewheeling. He hoped this would help establish an indigenous experimental theatre company. Other classes in movement, vocal work, stagecraft, and acting were added to the curriculum. And, as soon as Hollywood actors and professional directors began to deliver lectures at its evening sessions, the Lab’s reputation rapidly expanded. By the end of 1941, more than one hundred students had registered for the studio’s Workshop. The Actors Lab in its inaugural year had become a center of serious art practice. It formed a Board of Directors, filed a school charter with the State Board of Education, and started its own theatrical showground that unabashedly mimicked the MAT’s First Studio.

The war years One day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harboˇ r, December 8, 1941, the Lab initiated a public exhibition of its work. Before an audience of eighteen spectators, Bohnen staged the Second Act of Odets’ Paradise Lost. The makeshift production, according to Bohnen, was not an attempt to display a “finished presentation” but a demonstration of the Lab’s “conscious approach to acting.” His direction required each actor to utilize his or her “personal experience” to evoke a “truthful performance.” By the spring of 1942, the Lab’s Board of Directors had organized an extensive plan to assist in the war effort through a dizzying schedule of itinerant and moral-boosting entertainments. The Lab members joined the USO (United Service Organizations) and other volunteer agencies, like the Russian War Relief. Under the auspices of the Hollywood Victory Committee, they staged performances at California’s army air force and naval bases, in veteran hospitals, and at military encampments in Europe and the South Pacific. Besides sending out all-girl revues to bases and staging areas in Alaska and the East Coast, Lab acolytes taught acting classes to disabled GIs in sickbays, rehabilitation clinics, and at convalescent homes. In March 1943, the Lab bedded down in a more suitable location near Sunset Boulevard, directly behind the fabled Schwab’s Drugstore. Other New York-trained actors, including many from the Group Theatre such as Art Smith, Howard Da Silva, Ruth Nelson, Bobby Lewis, Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, and his wife Phoebe Brand, joined the Lab’s faculty or directorate. Mary Tarcai, a graduate of the old American Lab Theatre and instructor at the New Theatre School, was hired to head and reorganize the Actors Lab school.

The Actors Lab in Hollywood 117 Tarcai understood that Stanislavsky-trained actors required like-minded directors. A more actor-friendly director would have to be fashioned or coaxed into existence for the Lab’s aesthetic philosophy to succeed. And the school would also have to address the special problems of motionpicture acting. (Many Hollywood practitioners thought Stanislavsky’s innate distrust of film production had unwittingly contaminated much of his American disciples’ teaching.) Production work at the Lab continued through 1944 and 1945. Its One Act Series – a mix of traditional sketches and contemporary pieces – received glowing reviews in the trade journals and excellent word of mouth praise. Many of the new playwrights – Irwin Shaw, Ben Bengal, and Sam Locke – like much of the Lab faculty, were old leftwingers from New York. Their work signaled a return from wartime and community service to a more politically progressive course of action.

The Actors Lab Workshop In the fall of 1945, while the Lab was heavily involved in all manner of production work, Tarcai instituted an independent training program called the Workshop. Its goal was to integrate discharged veterans with contract trainees sent from the Fox and Universal movie studios and private students. The weekly course load consisted of twenty-seven hours of acting classes, three hours of lectures (film history, play analysis, and script reading), two hours of speech, one hour of fencing, and one hour of body work. Brand and George Shdanoff conducted distinct and technically divergent classes in Fundamentals of Acting: Brand emphasized sensory work but, unlike Strasberg, she tied it to specific circumstances (i.e., smelling a lemon in order to determine its suitability as a condiment for a dinner party). Shdanoff blended movement exercises with physical characterizations. They agreed on little but both shunned Emotional Recall. Allegedly, this was to avoid dealing with traumatic episodes in the classroom that many of the wounded GIs had experienced in combat. Although virtually the entire Actors Lab Workshop faculty started their schooling on the stage, they were acutely aware that the most of their graduates hoped to pursue a livelihood in motion pictures. The Lab’s two-and-one-half-year program did not always reflect the students’ long-term desires. Courses directly related to film acting were haphazardly inserted into the curriculum. For the most part, basic acting classes led to improvisation and scene work in the second year and then to play production and apprenticeship on one of the Workshop theatres in the third.

118 Stanislavsky in America Carnovsky and Smith oversaw the intermediate acting classes. Like Shdanoff, Carnovsky was still captivated by his previous sessions with Michael Chekhov and dutifully replicated many of the Russian’s lessons. Carnovsky’s students began their character work by inventing a multitude of individual Centers and Physical Gestures. He also worked on textural analysis, linking Beats of scenic activity to the character’s internal motivation, the “Main Action” or “Spine.” In advanced sessions, Carnovsky layered secondary – and sometimes contrary – impulses over the students’ primary intentions. These competing desires were known as “Double Actions.” Smith’s classes consisted of one-hour group improvisations, followed by group discussion. Usually five actors were assigned character roles and a dramatic premise. Each of the performers had to answer these questions before they began: What do I want to do? (Action); Why do I want to do it? (Motivation); and How am I going to do it? (Adjustment). Other pupils had to momentarily interact with them. The second hour was devoted to analysis of the “truthfulness” of the scenic activities. Bohnen, Danny Mann, and Sam Levene incorporated the most practical aspects of Method within a Scene Study format. For them, everything had to manifest itself into compelling Character and Action. Overtly coy or imperceptible internal acting choices were explicitly discouraged and restaged in their classes. Much of their efforts focused on improvisational monologues and the background excavation of character and text. Aline MacMahon offered a course in Cold Readings. Students were given unfamiliar texts and had twenty minutes to prepare evocative interpretations. She counseled them to read aloud newspaper columns, telephone books, and can labels. The most nonsensical texts could be invested with variety, significance, and individual meaning. Even the tiniest of film scripts could come to life with proper passion and commutative skills. Only Hume Cronyn openly rallied against basic Stanislavsky and Chekhov technique. (He had briefly studied with Lee Strasberg in 1939 and felt the Sensory Work had little scenic value.) The reason to explore the pre-text background of a role, he pontificated to his pupils, was not to find emotional parallels but differences. Actors had to subjugate their finite personalities in order to form strong and enduring character types. The Lab never achieved a unified style of actor-training – the teachers were divided by generation and culture as well as by practice. Most of the students, however, claimed that the ample variety of acting philosophies and direction was useful. It allowed them to pick and choose

The Actors Lab in Hollywood 119 among the three or four contentious webs of technique. Yet all shared one counter-Hollywood aspect of the Lab work: the creation of an organic, spontaneous, and appealing expression of character.

The showcase of “un-Americanism” Beginning in the winter of 1945, the “un-American” politics of the Lab became a subject of concern. The Hollywood Reporter (November 9) labeled the organization’s founders as “red as a burlesque queen’s garters.” A wildcat writers’ strike had erupted at Warners Brothers’ two months before and many of Lab’s faculty rotely supported it. The film studio responded promptly by withdrawing its association from the Lab. The Lab’s Old Guard, mostly ex-New Yorkers, had badly misread the political moment. The Lab’s Theatre Wing, in their thinking, had already thrived with its classical and socially pertinent repertoire and was singled out as the West Coast’s superlative theatre venue. Young screenwriters started to craft noirish, tough-guy dramas, pining for a Lab showcase. Moreover, wartime celebrities, like Audie Murphy, America’s most decorated combat veteran, raved about the Workshop training. It seemed that the Actors Lab’s cultural cachet in American culture was finally assured. In the spring of 1946, a professional crisis with the contract students from Fox and Universal began to surface. Pupils who failed to be admitted to the Theatre Wing’s apprentice program were also dropped from the studios’ talent stables. Unwarranted critical approval salvaged budding careers but also threatened the high caliber that the Lab productions demanded. The question of professional ethics consumed much of the Board’s energies. A new obstacle arose when Michael Chekhov, under Stella Adler’s recommendation, started to rehearse The Inspector General in October 1946. Most of the senior Lab members found Chekhov’s direction Reinhardt-like autocratic and weirdly mystical. The performance’s cartoonish tableaux vivants satisfied neither the reviewers nor the active performers, who were accustomed to a slower, more personal and natural process. Besides political divisions, the Lab faculty now found itself pulled into Stanislavsky/Method and anti-Method fiefdoms. The vast majority of the one-hundred-and-twenty actors preferred the initial Stanislavsky approach, despite the fact that two new and much liked Lab instructors, Marc Lawrence and Benjamin Zemach, continued in the Michael Chekhov tradition. By and large, the Lab’s productions resembled the Group’s Odetsian mode. They were loose and dynamic, hot-blooded and filled with

120 Stanislavsky in America snappy anti-corporate tirades. They also spoke to the angry pacifist, and anti-racist spirit of its youthful audiences. The Sunday evenings drew demobilized vets, screenwriters, teenage bobby-soxers, and a flock of Hollywood wanabes, including a twenty-year-old Marilyn Monroe and a twenty-five-year-old ex-seaman Joe Papirofsky (Papp). Gossip columnists insinuated that Red marching orders were issued and proselytized nonstop in the Lab’s lecture halls; Communist overtones could be detected in the fiery conclusions of their just-off-thepresses’ melodramas. In early 1947, just as the Cold War emerged as a defining issue on the national front, the frightened film studios excised all their links with the Lab. The Civil Rights movement too became a Lab focal point and an identifying feature. White and black radicals had jumpstarted their decades old struggle for federal and statewide integration immediately after the war. The Lab responded by inaugurating an exclusive Negro class and production unit. Some of the Theatre Wing’s classical productions, like Volpone, consciously placed black actors into their otherwise Caucasian casts. In Los Angeles, where virtually all of the schools, union halls, and theatres remained sharply segregated, this created additional difficulties for the liberal Board of Directors. Reactionary showbusiness radio reporters headlined that Dorothy Dandridge, the black actress, had been seen in the arms of Anthony Quinn at a Lab benefit dance. The California Legislature reacted to the national anti-Communist hearings in Washington in 1947 by forming their own investigative division. It was called the California Senate-Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. The energetic and wildly unstable state senator Jack B. Tenney was appointed its chairman. From 1948 until 1950, Tenney conducted an endless series of semi-legal tribunals and court proceedings against left-wing and formerly pro-Soviet artists. His official goal was to inspect, expose, and root out Communist influences in Hollywood’s economically shaky film industry. The Tenney Committee’s mission was daunting; the American Communist Party and its many front organizations had practically disappeared from public view, gone underground, or disbanded during the postwar era. The Actors Lab was one of the few established institutions that continued to hawk a progressive agenda and employed a host of radical-minded teachers. In a town where perception was at least equal to substance, the Lab became a remarkably obvious political target. Tenney subpoenaed over a dozen Lab members, which obliged them to testify under oath. Although many thought they acted heroically by

The Actors Lab in Hollywood 121 defying the Committee outright or pleading their Constitutional rights against self-incrimination, the local press took another point of view: only guilt-ridden witnesses or people concealing a treasonous past would refuse to answer the Committee’s frank inquiries. These Lab instructors had to be involved in either duplicitous Stalinist activities or card-carrying affiliates in secretive anti-American associations. Myron C. Fagin, a rabid right-wing screenwriter, claimed that he had evidence that the Lab’s founders had once sworn allegiance to the conspiratorial “Russian Art Group Theatre” during the 1930s. It was led by the “great Stanislavsky” – presumably a senior Soviet operative. It was downhill from then on. The vilification and harassment of the Actors Lab quickly snowballed. The school and theatre soon lost all its means of financial support. The Veterans Administration cancelled its contracts and students stopped attending classes. Despite Tenney’s discomforting rants and increasingly anti-Semitic proclamations – in 1952, he ran as the Vice Presidential candidate in the xenophobic and segregationist Christian Nationalist Party – the Lab had shockingly few allies. The North Laurel Avenue academy closed its doors in February 1950. Many of the Lab’s full-time professionals, like Corey and John Howard Lawson, could find no work anywhere. They retreated into private practice, teaching acting in their living rooms or writing under pseudonyms. Others, like Da Silva and Carnovsky, attempted to relaunch their careers on Broadway. Failing that, they resumed their former vocations as acting coaches and instructors in New York City. ACTORS LABORATORY EXERCISES ( 1941 – 5 0 ) Sources for the exercises: The unpublished “The Actors’ Laboratory, Inc. Prospectus” (1945); unpublished transcriptions from the Actors Lab Film Series (1946); “Actor’s Laboratory,” Salute (February 1947); Salvi Nora, “The History of the Actors Laboratory, Inc. 1941–50” (Unpublished Dissertation: UCLA, 1969); and interviews with Phoebe Brand, Morris Carnovsky, Jeff Corey, Michael Gordon, Jay Leyda, and Benjamin Zemach. Sensory impressions 1.

Recreate hearing the sounds of: (a) fog horn; (b) train whistle; (c) jazz music from the radio; (d) election returns from the radio; and (e) footsteps outside your apartment building.

122 Stanislavsky in America 2. 3. 4.

Recreate seeing a framed painting in your room. Recreate tasting a: (a) lemon; (b) banana; and (c) sip of Champagne. Recreate smelling a: (a) damp cellar; (b) rose; and (c) gas from an oven jet. 5. Recreate the tactical sensation of putting your hand into a glove. 6. Now make the imaginary objects heavier or lighter. 7. Take an awkward or uncomfortable position. Feel the strain and tension in your body. Then change your position so the strain disappears. 8. Recreate the movement of: (a) an animal; (b) an older or younger person; and (c) a person at work. 9. Feel the movement of: (a) standing on an escalator; (b) standing in an elevator; (c) riding in a canoe; and (d) riding on a merry-go-round. 10. Re-enact your first moments of awakening in the morning. Start with getting out bed, dressing, brushing your teeth, and drinking coffee. (Not only must your actions feel real, they must elicit a similar feeling in the audience.) Concentration and connection 11. Form a group circle. At first, all face inward, then turn out. Move only when another student moves. Now move with different intentions. 12. Repeat the above exercise, but with your eyes closed. 13. Describe any personal situations where the following phrases were used: “How quiet it is!;” “Leave me alone!;” “Maybe tomorrow!;” “Shut up!;” or “It’s the last time!” 14. Whisper the above phrases. Now relay in the same information in a single word. Then as a full sentence. 15. Silently read a newspaper. Your partner will now give a personal description of you. As you start to read aloud, your partner will explain how he feels about you. Environment 16. Describe a physical environment, like an Alaskan wilderness or an oceanside resort in summer. Add to this description different human responses, based on scenic conditions and personal motivations. 17. Now describe a building, such as a museum or church. Adjust your depiction of it by explaining its function for different individuals.

The Actors Lab in Hollywood 123 Internal And external physical obstacles 18. Practice getting into a house when the doors are closed and you are injured. 19. Create a scene where you are unable to help a dying person. 20. Add the following adjustment to the above situation: you cannot save the individual because you yourself are sick. Imagination 21. Pretend an object is something complete different. For instance, let a handkerchief be a flower, a rat, or a diamond. Use a chair as a harp, a ladder, or an axe. 22. Start a random movement and stop midway. Now justify it as a different but meaningful pose. 23. Create a dramatic image from a given word or subject such as “Main Street,” “fog,” “balloon,” or broken window. 24. Create another dramatic image based on a phrase such as “dog tied to a leash,” “the desire for food,” or “cat walking on a fence at midnight.” 25. Create a character based on a single word such as “timid,” “shallow,” “piggish,” “neutral,” or “possessive.” Weekly assignments 26. Select a newspaper item. Identify the major conflict in the story and then develop a beginning point, middle, and resolution to it. Use any form to dramatize the event as a monologue. 27. Choose a photograph or drawing of a person from any publication. Construct a story about him or her with a beginning, middle, and end. Activate your character by giving the person a simple intention. 28. Superimpose the outline of a plot with a beginning, middle, and end over a poem. Using only the poem’s words as dialogue, make your intention, action, and motivations clearly understood. 29. With a partner, dramatize the news item, photograph, or poem. Group improvisations 30. Improvise a scene around an epigram such as “All that glitters is not gold,” and “A stitch in time saves nine.” 31. Improvise a conflict around a physical ailment, like a wounded soldier who insists on returning to his vocation.

124 Stanislavsky in America 32. Improvise a scene around an occupational conflict, like a striker’s demands that all work cease on the factory floor. 33. Create a scene that reflects some classical or jazz music. Use the mood, tempo, and rhythm to stimulate character, action, and emotional truth. 34. Improvise a scene that deals with a transformed emotional relationship. Allow the personal conflict that has taken place in public to recede in private. 35. Enact a scene where GIs have unexpectedly discovered Hitler’s secret castle. Divide the scene into playable units, or beats, where each character has set motivations that have to change because his interactions with other soldiers.

6

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio

The Studio is a cavern where mysteries of acting are invoked in soul-shifting states of ceremony. Norman Mailer, The New York Times, 1958

Lee Strasberg, the Method, and the Actors Studio have long been conflated in the minds of journalists and cultural historians since the 1950s. Yet the founders of the Studio – Cheryl Crawford, Bobby Lewis, and Elia Kazan – agreed to exclude Strasberg from their idealistic venture as soon as they concocted it in the summer of 1947. All past members of the Group, they had different and undeclared motives for this indelicate measure. To be sure, Strasberg was a persistent and difficult authority figure. He took advice from no one and was undeviating in his pursuit of authentic emotional performance. Delighted, baffled, or unwelcoming responses from spectators, critics, casts, and production associates were normally immaterial to him. Lee only cared about more far-reaching concerns which, for him, meant unadulterated truth-in-art. His firstnight postmortems were rarely complimentary or outwardly supportive. Strasberg often rankled all but of the most devoted of his followers. And even Method zealots bridled at their teacher’s ferocious criticisms and later broke with him in stagy fits and denunciations. In October 1947, when Kazan extemporaneously welcomed the first class of Actors Studio pupils, he defined the institution as a “homeland” for unattached performers. It was a timely but curious analogy. The State of Israel had just launched its diplomatic campaign for independence as a refuge for displaced Jews. For some old-timers, Kazan’s choice of words and his initial Studio improvisation – based on the word “Israel” – were either coincidental or subconscious references to his freelance and nomadic tutor, Lee Strasberg, born “Israel Strassberg.”

126 Stanislavsky in America

Strasberg’s inspiration Strasberg came to the theatre later than any of his future colleagues. His was twenty-one when he joined the Students of Art and Drama at the Chrystie Street Settlement. In 1922, Lee was still a bookish autodidact. His family background was typical of the generation of impoverished East European Jews who immigrated to New York before the World War One. Strasberg’s father worked in a factory loft as a pant presser, and assumed his children would find affluence and stability in their adopted homeland. Strasberg was easily distracted and practically without prospects during his teens. He worked as a mere shipping clerk in a Lower East Side wig-manufacturing firm. At night, he read books from the public library about history and culture. One book mesmerized him inalterably: Gordon Craig’s On the Art of the Theatre. It called for a reformation of stage design and acting. Lee wanted to be part of Craig’s movement, which had few adherents in the English-speaking world. Only foreignborn practitioners in New York’s Yiddish theatre seemed to have responded to Craig’s clarion call. But the revolutionaries from the Silver Age of the Yiddish theatre had little success among their insular and dwindling audiences. Through the 1920s, many opted for Broadway or the amateur Little Theatre movement. Lee second-acted or purchased cheap tickets to Broadway shows. Occasionally, individual actors excited him but the productions that featured them were almost always mounted in shabby or divergent styles that promoted one lead or another and never achieved a unified artistic vision. When Strasberg saw the MAT’s The Cherry Orchard from the upper balcony of the Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre in January 1923, he was thunderstruck. Here was a company that produced a seamless theatrical reality. Every actor – even the dowdy walk-ons – radiated personality and believable character. They did not have to strut or bellow to signal the spectators how to feel or how to follow the heartbreaking mechanics of the plot. Lee dragged his friends from the School of Art and Drama to witness the MAT’s entire repertoire. New York’s theatre reviewers had it absolutely right: there was no need for posting the names of any celebrities above the marquee; the entire MAT Russian ensemble was the star. In front of their tattered backdrops and stagy furniture, they had created perfection in acting – acting in a whole manner of styles. Finally, Strasberg had discovered a troupe that manifested Gordon Craig’s elusive concept of the New

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 127 Theatre. In fact, the MAT’s Artistic Director, Stanislavsky, had once co-directed a production of Hamlet with Craig. Lee was determined to speak with or personally compliment Stanislavsky for his stunning accomplishment. As he ambled up Fifth Avenue towards Stanislavsky’s hotel off Central Park, Strasberg practiced a few salutary Russian phrases that he memorized during the week. But striding straight towards him was the unmistakably regal and imposingly tall Russian in the flesh, taking his morning stroll. Lee was so astonished and so unprepared to greet him just then that he turned away and hid in a telephone booth. It was one of two occasions that Strasberg could have interacted with Stanislavsky but failed to do so. This time, it was because the budding American director was so overwhelmed by his idol’s eminence. Eleven years later in Moscow, a second chance beckoned. Then, according to Lee, he politely turned down an invitation to dine with the ailing MAT Artistic Director at his residence. The Group Theatre emissary had viewed Stanislavsky’s latest productions and found them uninspired and, in places, embarrassingly amateurish. A strange revelation flashed across Lee’s mind in 1934: he had overshadowed his mentor in stage practice and teaching.

Strasberg on Broadway In the immediate years after Strasberg resigned from the Group, his role as a director and theatre personality was greatly reduced. Between 1937 and 1940, he mounted a slew of minor Broadway dramas such as Many Mansions (by Jules and Eckert Goodman), Roosty (Martin Berkeley), All the Living (Marty Albright), Dance Night (Kenyon Nicholson), Summer Night (Vicki Baum and Benjamin Glazer), and The Fifth Column (Glazer’s adaptation of a Hemingway play). Most of these ventures utilized castoff actors from the Group and barely ran or evoked animated reviews. Lee’s career and reputation had stalled beyond recognition. Boris Aronson, the Russian-born artist who designed and lighted many of Lee’s shows, regaled his anti-Method colleagues for years that Strasberg and his wife Paula survived the Depression’s end by toiling as caterers for assorted social and theatre events. And Aronson was not alone in his disparagement of the Method teacher. Yet Strasberg soldiered on. He was a director who had training and experience as a performer. Even in the 1940s, most Broadway directors had come into their positions from the production side of theatre. Their commercial deliberations were often fixated elsewhere. When

128 Stanislavsky in America these directors were confronted with slow-to-respond or recalcitrant actors, they frequently told them exactly what they wanted or simply replaced them with more compliant types. Lee tried to teach as well as direct his actors. That was his creative Method approach. Sometimes it worked. Successful or not, Strasberg the director always required additional rehearsal time. In December 1941, Lee staged Odets’ Clash By Night, a kitchen-sink love triangle that starred Tallulah Bankhead and Lee J. Cobb. It did not have much staying power but it nearly reinstated Strasberg’s role on Broadway. Between 1944 and 1947, he tried his hand in Hollywood. 20th Century Fox hired him as a lowly screen-test director. Strasberg returned to New York in 1948 and directed John Garfield in Skipper Next to God, one of the first Broadway dramas to deal with the Holocaust. It played for three months. One year later, he staged The Big Knife, another of Odets’ tormented-artist-versus-the-corruptsystem encounter. It was a delicious diatribe against Hollywood. Again, Garfield was featured and this psychological melee ran even longer. In 1950, Strasberg broke his own legit record. He co-directed Odets’ The Country Girl and it remained at the Lyceum Theatre for 236 performances. The following year, Strasberg staged Ibsen’s Romantic epic Peer Gynt. Although Garfield played the titled character, it flopped miserably. The McCarthy Hearings had indirectly derailed Strasberg’s Broadway calling. Odets, who testified as a “friendly witness” for the House of Un-American Activities Committee, creatively imploded and never wrote another play. Garfield refused to inform against his Party comrades and, within a few months, died of heart failure aged thirty-nine. Lee stopped directing altogether for a decade. As he had since the downcast days of 1937, Strasberg privately coached needy actors and, in the late 1940s, taught classes at the American Theatre Wing.

The king-makers Three people talked the Actors Studio into existence, but four claimed credit for it. The triumvirate of Kazan, Lewis, and Crawford in 1947 officially led the free-for-all, restricted guild; Harold Clurman asserted that he proposed the idea for it. No matter. All of its certified organizers had already established themselves in the far-reaching and inner circles of Broadway. American show business had smiled appreciably on Kazan. The crafty Greek had leaped from Group apprentice and bit-player to

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 129 radical playwright, stage director, teacher, and film documentarian during the mid-1930s, the Reddest years of America’s Depression. In the final two years of the Group, Kazan, known as “Gadge” because of his inventive use of backstage gadgetry, directed three shows for them. At the end of the Thirties, the indomitable Kazan migrated to California. A studio head suggested that he change his name to “Elia Cezanne.” It sounded more artistic. Gadge played low-life ethnics, pretty much what he excelled at in the Group, in two Hollywood B flicks. By 1941, he was back in New York and resolved to slash his way through the entanglements of the Great White Way jungle. Kazan started to direct. He chose a negligible comedy, Crown Café. Its setting was a sentimental stand-in for the old Yiddish theatre hangout, the Café Royale on Second Avenue. Gadge turned the restaurant-talk marathon into a folksy sensation. Hyman Kraft’s play theatricalized the old familial dilemma of Stella Adler, who decides to renounce the bickering conviviality and indigenous artistry of the Lower East Side for the glamour and professional uncertainties of Broadway stardom. It was also a symbolic retelling of the Group’s enduring crisis of membership and the lure of the Hollywood Medina. Kazan followed with Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. This was an experimental extravaganza that parodied all realistic conventions and starred Tallulah Bankhead and Frederic March. This homespun allegory with numerous Brechtian touches proved to be a box office and critical triumph. Life magazine especially praised the newcomer Montgomery Clift. Gadge demonstrated a bona fide talent for wacky Epic stylistics and burlesque rompery. In 1943, Kazan staged Kurt Weill’s musical One Touch of Venus, an erotic spoof about the vacuities of suburban life. S.J. Pearlman wrote the book for Marlene Dietrich but Crawford’s current romantic interest, Mary Martin, played the lead. Two years later, Gadge applied his directorial skills to his first Hollywood feature, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. A coming-of-age tearjerker, situated in a turn-of-the-century tenement house, the film firmly laced underclass domestic hardship to movieland salvation. Kazan, the Strasberg surrogate, fueled the popular melodrama with affecting outbursts of authentic emotion. (Before one mournful scene, Gadge pulled the young ingénue aside and inquired in a soft paternal whisper about her father, who was serving in an overseas military zone. As soon as tears welled up in the girl’s eyes, Kazan nudged the camera crew into action.) Gadge had eked out a new occupational niche; he became known as Hollywood’s latest director of “actors’ films.” In the waning days of the Group, two young playwrights, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, submitted jejune one-acts to the Play

130 Stanislavsky in America Committee. Williams received a cash reward, and Clurman maintained contacts with both authors after the Group’s dissolution. He was intrigued with their brio and jaunty skepticism of the widely proclaimed Century of the Common Man. Beneath the patriotic fanfare of Americanism, something bleak and dismal simmered. The writings of the Brooklyn rebel and Mississippi poet would soon be seminal touchstones for a new model of protest art in the theatre. In January 1947 Kazan mounted Miller’s All My Sons, a shocking, contemporary rendering of an Ibsenian corrupt society/oedipal-struggle drama. It not only exposed the sniveling intrigues and corporate irresponsibility inside FDR’s long fêted “arsenal of democracy,” it also grippingly depicted the collision of two generations: those who profited at home by virtue of their age and those who served in uniform. More than anything, the production reinstituted the power of theatre-aspulpit on Broadway. Miller dedicated his script to Gadge, and its riveting combat between guilt-ridden son and feckless father resonated deeply with the ex-Group go-getter. The show’s message and unsparing presentation taped into the angry and socially discordant mood. All My Sons ran for the better part of 1947. Williams too had devised an innovative strategy for unmasking the anguish and hysteria lurking behind routine middle-class life. But Williams’ plays were vastly dissimilar from Miller’s. They were achingly poetic – even his stage directions read like a lyrical prologue presiding a Wordsworth sonnet. Through the 1940s, Tenn perfected the theatrical character of the doomed “mad heroine,” a staple of nineteenth-century opera and Southern Gothic fiction. For him, the emotionally overwrought, lost-in-the-uncaring-paternal-world female was no stagy archetype but a living incarnation of his beloved sister Rose. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic, the fragile debutant spent most of her life incarcerated, sedated and, after a prefrontal lobotomy, immobilized in state mental wards. In 1945, Williams’ The Glass Menagerie brought him overnight acclaim. Despite its offbeat cinematic structure and epic-style narration, the Depression-era tale registered as fully modern. Menagerie played out the heart-rending story of Rose’s failed courtships and her mother’s unremitting attempts to disguise and deny its psychological source. A Method favorite, Laurette Taylor enacted the part of the misguided and befuddled matriarch. The curious and tragic melodrama transfixed Broadway for 563 performances. In April 1947, Irene Selznick – the daughter of infamous MGM film mogul Louis B. Mayer – sent Williams’ newest play, A Streetcar Named Desire, to Kazan. Gadge was preparing to direct Gentleman’s Agreement, a

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 131 20th Century Fox exposé of country club anti-Semitism, starring Gregory Peck and John Garfield. Both Williams and his playscript fascinated Kazan. He thought about it all summer long. Williams’ Streetcar was a poetic tragedy, wrapped in a weird erotic web. Its heroine attempted to veil her battered girlish soul and ominous past from New Orleans’ workaday world. Kazan felt the infusion of hyper-realism might overpower the play’s Expressionistic core. It could be a masterpiece of violence and unfettered desire, where the gauzy wraps of feminine self-delusion were shredded by steely and brutal male action. Gadge loved working with young or inexperienced performers; they took direction easily. He could find his Broadway cast and male lead at the Actors Studio classes that he was planning for the fall. One sexy possibility was a Stella protégé, Marlon Brando. Back in 1945–46, when Kazan co-produced Clurman’s ill-fated Truckline Café (which one critic called the worst professional play that he ever had to review), Brando was the novice standout. Barely audible in rehearsals, the unpredictable and physically imposing Midwesterner proved to be absolutely electrifying by opening night. There was something about him. The stars had risen for Crawford and Lewis as well in 1947. Their names filled the entertainment columns of New York newspapers. Brigadoon, Lerner and Loewe’s musical – produced by Cheryl and directed by Bobby – was playing to sell-out crowds. Both ex-Group associates were inundated with future projects. Exactly why they organized and publicized the Actors Studio made no financial sense. It was a mammoth undertaking and, after a few months, brought them totteringly close to Blanche Du Bois-like despair.

The birth and pangs of the Actors Studio The launching of the Actors Studio was both auspicious and troubling. Cheryl secured the top floor of the Labor Theatre, where Boley had delivered his lectures on the Stanislavsky System in 1923. The first night – October 5, 1947 – quivered with high energy and bohemian allure. At the doorway, greeting the invited guests was John Garfield. Miller and Williams mingled with the eighty-odd attendees and listened to the founders pontificate about the Studio’s artistic aims, parameters, and schedule of classes. Gadge’s Beginning Acting course would be held midday on Tuesdays and Thursdays; Lewis’ Scene Study sessions on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Cheryl … well Cheryl, would keep the whole thing running.

132 Stanislavsky in America Kazan reverted to his Theatre of Action off-the-cuff lesson plans. Although meticulous as a teacher – students had to be in the classroom exactly at eleven or risk being locked out – Gadge worked swiftly and instinctively (as he directed). He conducted exercises in Concentration and Sense Memory. For arouse and bolster his actors’ imaginative skills, he invented fast-draw Object Exercises. For example, Kazan flung a ring of keys at a student and asked him to improvise a new use for them; the actor hooked them on his shirt pocket and let them dangle as a gaudy ribbon of military medallions. On another occasion, an actor transformed a woman’s hat into an injured bird; a second student next to him handled it like nursing infant. Gadge savored Animal Exercises and frequently had the class imitate quadrupeds, birds, or marine life. James Whitmore received applauds for his accurate impersonation of a circus seal. After the étude, Whitmore ashamedly admitted that his animated portrayal was supposed to be that of a dachshund prancing around his master. Central to Kazan’s teaching was Action and Subtext. Actors had to know what they wanted to ultimately achieve as a character and which scenic actions would help them accomplish it or, failing that, internalize it. Any line of dialogue could be delivered in a variety of ways, with different inflections, vocal tones, rhythms, and physical expressions. All of these must be based on their character’s overall psychological intention. Gadge directed his Studio pupils to enact twenty alternative ways to express the same phrase, like “Am I late?” Each time the question was asked, it had to register a new meaning. That was Subtext. Simple improvisational setups concluded many of Kazan’s sessions. But the performers’ creative impulses needed to be rooted to the moment-to-moment realities of the scene. Their instinctive yearning for amusing resolutions and clever banter was regularly subverted by Gadge’s insistence on true human behavior and logic. Students did not have to produce anticipated laughs or compelling interactions; they merely had to live inside the proposed situations and execute their tasks accordingly. Lewis only accepted experienced actors in his Advanced Acting course. For the most part, they played characters outside their normal casting ranges or in scenes that challenged their assumed abilities. The rubber-faced comic Tom Ewell repeatedly proclaimed his innocence as mildly retarded Lennie from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Eli Wallach did a monologue from Chekhov’s The Seagull. During one of Bobby’s critique sessions, Williams, who happened to be in the audience, whispered something to a Studio member. Lewis halted his

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 133 lecture and told Tenn to leave immediately. When the courtly Williams started to apologize, Bobby stopped him again. Tenn got up in a puff and exited. It was an ill omen. Some of the junior members from Streetcar began to show up in Lewis’ class, during rehearsals and after the play opened in December 1947. The Williams–Kazan production beguiled the theatregoing town and promptly drew national attention. British sensation Jessica Tandy played Blanche, the tragic Southern belle at the wrenching heart of Williams’ saga. Tandy had attained recognition as an elite actress, working with some of the top London and Hollywood directors; yet it was Brando, the unknown Kazan discovery, as the villainous Stanley Kowalski, who received the bulk of the lustrous notices. His vigor, raw athleticism and sexuality, maniacal humor, complexity, and swaggering realism utterly upended Tandy’s finely crafted performance. Spectators at the Ethyl Barrymore Theatre found themselves unwittingly cheering for and laughing with Brando, Tenn’s vainglorious, beastly and marginally human rapist. Streetcar, to Williams’ shock, had become the “Marlon Brando Show.” Gadge, the new kid on the block, Brando, and now the Actors Studio were newsworthy features. For Lewis’ Scene Study class, Brando prepared a startling characterization. He chose to enact Rudolph Maximillian von Hapsburg from Robert Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna, a creaky drawing-room farce. Brando, playing the debonair Austro-Hungarian Archduke, even dressed the part; he rented a beribboned nobleman’s outfit from a costume shop. During the ballroom scene when elegant Maximillian retires to a sideroom, Brando slid his boot off to reveal a rotten, threadbare sock with his filthy toes jetting through. It was Brando’s not so sly commentary on fine aristocratic mores. By Christmas 1947, Kazan and Lewis realized that the Studio classes had grown beyond Cheryl’s expectations or their capacity to monitor them. They decided to weed out the lesser talents or insufficiently committed. Many of the members vehemently protested the directors’ verdict. No one had been prewarned and the by-laws, such as they were, never stated any elimination policies. The era-of-good-feelings ended before New Year’s. In April 1948, Bobby proposed the Studio’s first full production, The Seagull. It would be a public demonstration of the Lewis Technique. Studio actors worked on it for months; the show was cast and recast. But when it was finally mounted neither the press nor the public were invited. As a Studio experiment, the audience had been limited to members and their friends. It was only performed twice. Bobby was

134 Stanislavsky in America deeply disappointed by the Studio’s restrictive decree. This classical show lacked nothing in terms of artistic talent. Maybe, in Lewis’ thinking, it was his arrogant personality and high-handed manner that some members actually wanted to foil. After a flare-up with Gadge, which Cheryl tried to referee, Bobby resigned from the Actors Studio for good. Kazan also wanted to stage his own Studio dazzler. His wife, Molly Day Thatcher, passed along a play, Sundown Beach, about the end-ofthe-war travails between shell-shocked combat pilots and their sweethearts and spouses. The entire plot unfolded near a government psychiatric hospital on an isolated island off the Florida coast. The straight-from-theheadlines topicality, large number of youthful characters, and emotional dynamicism by a first-time playwright, Bessie Breuer, ensured a substantial Broadway draw. This, not Seagull, would be the ideal Studio exhibition of Brando-like acting. While Crawford raised the funds, Kazan selected his Studio crew and cast. During the summer, Sundown’s playable text took shape through endless improvisation and script revision. Gadge mounted it at the Westport Playhouse as part of their summer stock season. He previewed it in Boston, where the press lavished unusual praise on this timely reminder about the nation’s traumatized veterans. Only The Christian Science Monitor roundly picked at the performance. The reviewer had problems understanding the actors’ words; too many of them mumbled or swallowed their lines. It was a complaint that would reappear by rote. When Sundown Beach opened in New York in September, it suffered from a storm of horrific reviews. Some wags negatively compared it to Truckline Café. After smarting from the Sundown debacle, Kazan and Crawford had to find a quick replacement to teach Lewis’ Advanced Class. Clurman’s name topped the list; then came Sandy Meisner and Strasberg. The Board chose Joshua Logan but his familiarity with the Stanislavsky System or actor-training in general was vestigial. In the end, Strasberg and a few Studio members intermittently conducted the Advanced Acting sessions. Between 1948 and 1951, a spate of professional opportunities arose for the Studio and its members. Kazan was back on Broadway with another Weill hit, Love Life. In 1949 he astonishingly set the Fabulous Invalid ablaze again with Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Hollywood also snared Gadge to direct a film adaptation of Streetcar with most of the original Studio cast. In 1948, CBS engaged the Studio workshop for a Sunday television broadcast series. Over an eighteen-month period, they produced fifty-six live dramas. The Studio actors’ candid facial

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 135 close-ups were captured on CBS’s primitive cameras and then channeled to the city’s tiny screens better than those of any conventionally trained stage performers. The Broadway types had been taught to project their emotional states and words until they reached the upper balconies. In the fall of 1951, Crawford and Kazan had reached an impasse. The Studio lost its most mature professionals to Broadway, Hollywood, and now television. In part because of its success, there was no reliable teaching staff or stable leadership. Without delay, they implored Lee Strasberg to become the Artistic Director of the Actors Studio.

Strasberg is crowned Exercises in Emotional Recall were shunned during the honeymoon years at the Actors Studio. Lewis and Kazan assiduously avoided the subject of Lee or his Method altogether. For them, internal and backstage planning never openly required the actor’s living through past memories only intuitive, unspoken uses of it. Lewis encouraged his pupils to make conscious personal choices in their work and Kazan motivated his actors through his knowledge of their intimate emotional lives. Their technique classes, however, emphasized Given Circumstances, creative choices, Adjustment, and stage Action. To a certain degree, Strasberg respected the Studio’s previous work. He rarely imposed Method exercises on unwilling members or instituted a rigid list of scene selections. Lee’s schedule – two-hour critique sessions on Tuesdays and Fridays – even mimicked Gadge’s. But Strasberg was Strasberg. Lee questioned Studio performers about their scenic goals and technical means of preparation. He quickly erupted in anger when actors defended their microscopic inadequacies or failed to accept his oftenunsparing criticism. Strasberg had a “jeweler’s eye” for deflects and character imperfections. Many Studio actors were asked repeat their scenes for future sessions or perform basic Method exercises in their place. Almost half the time, Lee’s suggestions resembled those of other practiced acting teachers – holding a flower or cleaning a pipe to overcome stage jitters. But ten percent of his analytical correlatives called for additional personal or private emotional preparation. These tense sessions also included the performers’ public acknowledgement of their shortcomings or panicked confessions. Frequently, Strasberg’s commentary produced more dramatic conflict than the miniature sketches that were rehearsed for his viewing. Most of the three-hundred-plus members accepted the changes in Studio habit and said they profited by Strasberg’s Method. After the

136 Stanislavsky in America Friday sessions, observers heatedly argued and rehashed Lee’s assertions for countless hours. Even Norman Mailer, who publicly took issue with the Method guru’s sour priestly disposition: admitted: “By the time Strasberg finished discussion, the separate pieces of the actor’s performance had been taken apart, and one was no longer confused by the performance. One knew its faults. It was possible to acquire some real part of the actor’s culture in those years merely by listening to Strasberg at the Studio.” (Marilyn: A Biography [NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973]) Two exceptional aspects of the Studio work piqued the interest of the Broadway intelligentsia and were widely paraded in the tabloid press: an extra-theatrical realism that occasionally fuelled the action of the scenes and a sub-theatrical presentation, which exhibited neither character nor plot. Since its inception, the Studio allowed or encouraged its members to approach their scenes with a novel and more visceral logic. Actors sometimes resorted to violent bouts or bodily exposure, instead of miming such activities. In Lewis’ classes, there were several episodes involving unscripted physical engagement and even fisticuffs. Monologues, as well, acquired hyper-realistic, if unruly, shapes. For example, a Studio member reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy stopped himself midway, apologized to Lee, and pleaded to start again. After he repeated this stratagem several times, the irritated monitor inquired why the scene was being staged in such an unprofessional, ambivalent manner. The actor explained that he was attempting to perform the Shakespearean monologue the way the actual Prince might. Method training also mined undisclosed or clandestine life experiences. Like Vakhtangov at his Third Studio, Strasberg asked Studio members to create “A Private Moment” on stage. This had to be a secretive pursuit that actors only carried out privately, usually in the seclusion of their rooms. They brought personal objects and set them on the stage. It might begin with a simple activity, like undressing or the clipping of toenails, and then unfold in a step-by-step series of otherwise concealed deeds. None of the behavior was meant to indicate or display imitative actions. The overall activities had to be confidential, significant, and have embarrassing repercussions if discovered. Some restive Studio members during the 1950s fumed at Strasberg’s leadership for reasons that had little to do with technique. For them, the Studio sessions did not manifestly promote their viable commercial standings. In fact, Broadway and Hollywood producers, even those who helped fund the non-profit institution, were dissuaded from attending the workshops. The short Studio performances were private forums, Lee maintained, not audition pieces. On the other hand, outside practitioners were accorded the professional curtsy to observe the twice-weekly sessions.

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 137 Other Studio actors harped about Strasberg’s inclusion of Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s newest erotic phenomenon, into the serious preoccupations of the workshop. This appeared to violate the hermetically sealed experimentation of their New York sanctuary. Of course, some of the Studio’s notoriety and allure was in its beatnik-like quest for submerged emotional truth. This involved the young performers’ exploration of subterranean sexual longings and motivation. With Marilyn, a kind of reverse process needed to be designed. Beneath the blonde’s breezy sexuality, Strasberg detected a genuinely talented and sensitive performer. Her nascent comic and dramatic abilities had been gravely overlooked because of her stunning erotic appeal. But Marilyn, the manufactured Hollywood goddess from America’s hardscrabble heartland, thirsted for artistic respectability and acknowledgement. She was more than willing to abandon her current sex-kitten status to learn the rudiments of Method acting at the Studio. In the past, Lee seemed to be immune to the corporal charms of the bevy of attentive voluptuaries and movie starlets who crossed his path. Now Lee and his wife, Paula, were giving private lessons and guidance to the nation’s number one pinup girl.

Hollywood’s Methodman Through the 1950s, Kazan reconfigured the “New York Style” of acting for Hollywood’s era of unabashed realism. Jules Dassin had already supercharged the crime and suspense genres with gritty enactments filmed in on-location sites. His Lab associates – Bud Bohnen, Morris Carnovsky, Lee J. Cobb, Jeff Corey, Hume Cronyn, Howard Da Silva, and Sam Levene – even starred in them. But Gadge took a different approach. Kazan fearlessly accepted two historical scripts penned or co-written by John Steinbeck and four adaptations of Williams’ dramas, set in his flamboyantly unsavory Southland. Beginning with MGM’s Streetcar, Gadge cast Studio members, some of whom he worked with on Broadway – notably Brando, Mildred Dunnock, Julie Harris, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Rip Torn, Jo Van Fleet, and Eli Wallach. Later he imported yet another crop of Studio graduates – Carroll Baker, Jimmy Dean, Lou Gilbert, and Rod Steiger – to the New Hollywood. Almost overnight, they indelibly inscribed their rebellious personae on the mindscape of the dormant postwar generation. Kazan’s Actors Studio was altering the face of American culture. Streetcar alone garnered twelve Oscar nominations in 1952, winning an unprecedented three awards in the acting categories. Besides scoring

138 Stanislavsky in America unerringly in America’s movie palaces during the 1950s, Kazan mounted three landmark productions of Williams’ plays on Broadway: Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Sweet Bird of Youth. If the contagion of Cold War politics had not intervened, Gadge would have attained his miraculous ambition to be the unassailable chieftain of his country’s performing arts. The California investigative committee that pushed the Actors Lab into economic oblivion in 1950 rarely poked beyond seditious activities of the previous decade. They had neither the means nor charter to do so. The national House of Un-American Activities Committee had no such limitations. Their research bureau was propped up by numerous covert government agencies and the House of Un-American Activities Committee’s suspicions were more deeply entrenched. Anyone with a “proven” connection to anti-American or totalitarian associations during any period of their adult life – even if the affiliation were merely nominal – would suffer the lawful consequences issued by the Committee. Former radicals, who may have once foolishly supported one or more of the several hundred Red organizations or front groups, by attending a politically related function, participating as a card-carrying member, sending funds, signing a petition, or subscribing to one of their journals, could recant and patriotically reaffirm their allegiance to the American Constitution. After that, they had to “name names” of other subversives or sympathizers they knew or viewed at any meeting. Treasonous charges against the cooperating witnesses would be excised from their FBI files. HUAC organizers felt their stated plan would finally fracture the unity and internal workings of the Soviet conspiracy. Like many Group members, Kazan had briefly joined the Communist Party during the middle or late Thirties. He soon resented the Party’s unquestioned disciplinary and underhanded tactics. Neither appealed to him characterologically – he wanted to direct, not be directed – and the Stalinist functionaries certainly did not advance his fledging career. Gadge, after inducing several Group actors into his hush-hush pro-Kremlin unit, resigned from the Party. Like Lee, whose brother lectured the Group on Marxist theology, Kazan and his political beliefs veered to the left of Roosevelt’s New Dealers. In other words, the former Red firebrand’s sentiments were akin to many of his fellow New Yorkers in Hollywood. The McCarthy Hearings shook the reputable theatre and film communities. The middle-aged progressives had seen what happened to the Actors Lab and were uncertain how to respond. Most hoped that they would not be subpoenaed to testify. Some of the ex-Group members,

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 139 however, had become too large a target for HUAC to ignore. Kazan, Odets, Garfield, and Cobb were beckoned to Washington. All but Garfield who died before the proceedings, testified as “friendly witnesses.” Behind closed doors in the HUAC’s executive chamber, Gadge identified eight Group members as confirmed Communists. One day later, he defended his disgraceful stance, which ruined several livelihoods, in a paid advertisement in The New York Times. At the Studio and elsewhere, Kazan was condemned as a disloyal, self-serving coward. But Gadge transmuted his guilt into art. Two of his films, Viva Zapata! and On the Waterfront, dealt headlong with political deceit, the ethics of personal betrayal, and moral redemption. Yet the controversy followed Kazan back to California and New York, and through his early 1960s’ tenure as Artistic Head of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center. To both his many critics and film-industry insiders, Kazan’s spirited accommodation with the Washington witch hunters and his startling directorial work in Hollywood were part and parcel of the same personality. Gadge was the consummate trickster. He enjoyed combing performers from esthetically opposed backgrounds: tradition-bound stars with reckless Studio types and off-the-street amateurs. Instead of building on-set cooperation, Kazan let his actors’ private distaste for one another, which paralleled those of their characters, play out in front of the camera. These real-life emotional clashes and backstage frustrations were spectacularly captured on celluloid. Gadge continued to pick up directing and writing awards in Los Angeles and New York, and at film festivals in Cannes and Venice. In 1999, however, Kazan had to contend with his decades-old HUAC testimony. Jeering crowds picketed the artistically-endowed director outside the entrance of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, when he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award. (Abraham Polonsky, a blacklisted screenwriter, stated publicly that he hoped Gadge would be assassinated that night during the on-air broadcast.) Despite his adversaries’ wishes, Kazan died four years later. Why the dozens of other performing artists, like Odets and Cobb, who disavowed their left-wing pasts and informed on their colleagues, were so graciously forgiven or forgotten might be explained in a curious Method way. The other turncoats presented themselves so inauthentically or with such painful reluctance that it as obvious they were merely reciting a prepared script or coached by an anxious agent or legal advisor. Kazan’s delivery and defensive posture, however, was charged with righteous sincerity and truthful passion. One could sense that there was

140 Stanislavsky in America no pretense in his words or tone. When Kazan spoke of his leftist infatuations from 1934 and the Party’s manipulations of them, something deep in his psyche stirred. Emotional Memories of his Depression struggles had apparently resurfaced and these, in turn, transformed Gadge into his old role of Agate. Once again, he was the renegade prol in Lefty, who harangued the Group’s pro-union audiences to strike. But Kazan, until the end of his days, was now rooting for the other side.

The Studio expands its reach During the 1950s, Strasberg’s Method seeped beyond the Actor Studio walls and Kazan’s backlot movie sets. In 1953, Jack Garfein helped pioneer the Off-Broadway movement when he mounted End as a Man at the Theatre de Lys. The young Studio cast, starring Ben Gazarra, portrayed the antics of a sadistic cadre of cadets at a Southern military college. The unsettling drama re-opened on Broadway a few weeks later and was then brought to Hollywood with its original cast and director. Another unofficial Studio production, A Hatful of Rain, directed by Frank Corsaro, premiered on Broadway in 1955 with some of the End as a Man performers. Written by Michael Gazzo, it played out the confessional story of a secret drug addict and his middle-class family on the Lower East Side. The timely and shocking kitchen-table melodrama won two Tony awards for acting. It also cemented the link between Method acting and outlaw behavior. Jerry Robbins, the Broadway choreographer, applied classic Method preparation to his direction of the Leonard Bernstein–Stephen Sondheim 1957 musical West Side Story. Robbins conceived the idea of updating Romeo and Juliet when his lover Monty Clift was rehearsing Shakespearean scenes at the Studio in 1949. The Arthur Laurents/ Robbin’s adaptation was eventually relocated from Verona to Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen; the Capulet and Montague families muted into two New York street gangs – one Puerto Rican, the other of native whites. Robbins had the dancers painstakingly improvise many of the play’s scenes and invent individual backstories for their characters. Actors playing the Sharks and Jets had to maintain their gang identities backstage, never interacting with the rival group of gypsy dancers. According to Chita Riveria, Robbins insisted that they had to experience the lives of their unruly teenage characters, moving from their feelings rather than any traditional ballet poses. For instance, when Riveria’s character, Anita, was violently assaulted in Doc’s candy store by the Jets, she felt a real sense of physical menace and personal threat. But

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 141 Robbins’ Studio approach was, for the most part, overlooked in the accolades that followed opening night. West Side Story’s immensely popular success in Broadway and later Hollywood was largely credited to Bernstein’s complex romantic score and Sondheim’s clever lyrics as well as Laurents’ slangy dialogue. Robbins’ innovative choreography received recognition and America’s highest awards – a Tony and Oscar – but discussions of his original Method-like direction were consigned to quirky Broadway folklore. The Studio itself had finally found a permanent home on West 44th Street, the site of a renovated church, in 1955. During the next five years, a Playwrights and Directors Units were added to the acting work. Strasberg endorsed the teaching of Tai Chi Ch’uan, a Chinese system of psychophysical exercises, and other movement and vocal regimens. In 1962, the Ford Foundation granted the Studio’s Production Committee funding to begin the Actors Studio Theatre. Their first production, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, was staged by José Quintero, an outside director, and starred Geraldine Page and Franchot Tone, the former Group lead but non-Studio member. The production received mixed reviews. Many critics found the acting uneven, less an ensemble evening than an over blown jumble of styles. The Studio took the criticism to heart. The next four productions varied in dramaturgy and scope. They were not the theatrical marvels, however, that the Studio Board had hoped for. Strasberg decided to direct The Three Sisters. He remembered the MAT 1923 production vividly and it still had haunted him. Stanislavsky portrayed Vershinin, “the Lovesick Major,” as a heavy-lidded, historyweary soul. That gloomy Long-Distance Mood enveloped the entire set. Lee even brought in Russian-language audio recordings of the MAT production and played them to the cast. But the actors struggled with Strasberg’s multi-layered vision – he demanded inner truth, Russfied resignation, spontaneity, and an elevated theatrical mode. The rehearsals were fraught with troubling signs. Some of the performers instinctively found their way into Chekhov’s nineteenth-century bell jar; they were familiar with scenic environment. Others had to be given line readings. When The Three Sisters finally premiered in New York in June 1964, the reviewers had wildly divergent responses. For some, it was a brilliant display of internal longing, delusional impulse, and heart-rending pathos. Strasberg had proved that Method could inhabit and energize the classical repertoire. Several theatre critics, however, thought the Studio acting was woefully disconnected; the host of character styles never really congealed into an intelligible unity. Logan berated it

142 Stanislavsky in America ruefully as “slapstick Chekhov.” But the star-studded curiosity continued to draw audiences. In London, the World Theatre Season invited the Actors Studio Theatre to represent the United States for its international festival. In May 1965, the Studio brought James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie, an all-black production directed by Burgess Meredith, and The Three Sisters. Both went up under-prepared – the indigenous house crews ghoulishly sabotaged the lighting – and received appalling reviews from the British press. The Times of London condemned the Baldwin Black Power play as “demagogic oratory” and derided its acting as infantile and coarse. Strasberg’s Sisters, which had undergone lastminute replacements, was even more lambasted. Opening-night spectators roared their disapproval before and after the curtain call and the newspaper reporters scornfully echoed their boorish reaction. The Studio management fixed the illumination quagmire and the actors railed after their stumbling premiere. But the calamity could not be undone. As one critic savagely declared, the American theatre company had publicly staged its own hara-kiri. Lee, as Artistic Director, stoically accepted the blame and folded the Actors Studio Theatre project.

Aftermath The Studio refused to die. In fact, against all odds, it thrived after its luckless Theatre experiment. A new Board of Directors revitalized its financial patronage. And a new generation of performers sought training at the Studio. Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, Bruce Dern, and Robert De Niro – the next Brandos and Deans – made it their clubhouse and early point of contact. In 1966, Garfein opened an Actors Studio West in Los Angeles. Long-time members like Arthur Penn flourished as independent filmmakers as the Haye’s Code moral strictures faded and America’s CounterCulture mandated more realistic and youth-oriented cinema. Strasberg lectured across Europe and America, delving deeper into teaching acting fundamentals and began to systematize his Method. In 1969, he opened Lee Strasberg Theatre Institutes in New York and Los Angeles. Lee composed special classes for his teachers and they taught courses in film acting, daytime television acting, directing, musical comedy, speech, dance, and stage combat. The basic instruction in Method now required six months of Relaxation and Sense Memory exercises, then concentrated work in Affective Memory, Private Moments, Character Work, and Song-And-Dance Exercises. When the Studio members from the 1960s skyrocketed to Hollywood’s highest tiers of bankable stars, Strasberg was in sudden demand

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 143 in California. In 1973, Francis Ford Coppola beseeched Lee to act as a Meyer Lansky-like character in his Godfather II epic. To almost everyone’s surprise, Strasberg accepted the challenge. A poor performance could have easily blighted Lee’s heralded status as America’s eminent acting sage. Playing a duplicitous father-figure opposite Pacino’s Michael Corleone, Strasberg was extolled as a major stand-out. In fact, he won a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Lee appeared in six more films. Before his death in 1982, Strasberg completed A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1987), the first of a proposed series of books on acting and directing. He was also preparing a production of Odets’ biblical play The Flowering Peach. Lee hoped Peach, like Vakhtangov’s Turandot, would be a theatrical display of his final discoveries.

Method controversies Few figures in twentieth-century actor-training have engendered more acrimonious contention or debate than Strasberg. From the moment Lee gave a name to his Stanislavsky-based work, The Method, it had been continuously ridiculed, denounced, and attacked by an diverse tableau of journalists, actors, theatre VIPs, acting teachers, and academics as misunderstood Stanislavsky, psychoanalytic claptrap, indulgent play, anti-theatrical, or sick classroom machination. And every new translation of a Stanislavsky acting treatise or anthology appeared to strengthen the anti-Method proposition. (1) The fundamental question surrounding the dispute: what were the origins of Strasberg’s Method and did they differ from accepted notions of Stanislavsky’s System? The System, of course, evolved over a period of time (1909–38) and went through many twists and turns. (As did the Method.) No one claimed that Strasberg studied with Stanislavsky or was heavily influenced by Stanislavsky’s first published text An Actor Prepares, which appeared in 1936. Strasberg learned acting from Ouspenskaya and later added Vakhtangov exercises to formulate his basic Method Technique. (Neither Stanislavsky nor Boleslavsky studied with Madame.) Although Lee was greatly stimulated by Boley’s lectures on acting, he came to them with an unparalleled understanding of psychology, religion, and history and made connections that other American Lab members could not. To a large degree, the Method was permeated with Vakhtangov’s practical thinking. Even more than his First Studio colleagues,

144 Stanislavsky in America Vakhtangov believed in the efficacy of Sense Memory and Emotional Recall. Also, Vakhtangov adjusted his actors’ Substitutions so the performers could activate emotions expressively that matched what the director needed, instead of merely experiencing what their scripted characters perceived or felt. Strasberg only intermittently spoke about the MAT performances that he observed, but often recalled, in fine detail, acting from the Vakhtangov Theatre and Habima. Once, toward the end of his life, he wrenched himself out of a sick bed to recreate the grotesque poses that he so acutely recollected from the Beggar’s Scene in Vakhtangov’s The Dybbuk. In 1964, Richard Burton starred in John Gielgud’s smash, highconcept Hamlet on Broadway. (It was staged as a dress rehearsal.) A reporter asked the Welsh bon-vivant about his opinion of the Actors Studio. It was a game question since it was widely known that Burton had an illicit on-and-off relationship with Susan Strasberg, Lee’s daughter. Burton, as expected, scoffed teasingly at the Method’s resolute seriousness. He claimed that, each night, during Hamlet’s chilling soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” he transformed it into an internal inquiry whether to dine at a Chinese or Italian restaurant after that performance. Strasberg responded to Burton’s intended mockery in an unexpected way. He gleefully pronounced Burton’s Substitution as “pure Method.” In Lee’s thinking, Vakhtangov’s use of personal Justification was one of the essential elements of Method practice. The Actors Studio detractors were partly correct. The Method was not a good facsimile or interpretation of Stanislavsky’s teachings. What they, and even Lee’s most vocal supporters, did not know, however, was Method’s crucial foundation: Strasberg’s reading of Vakhtangov Technique. (2) Common objections to the Method’s reliance on Affective Memory, or Emotional Recall, were its needless intricacies to evoke emotion, personal invasiveness, and potential psychological harm. Yet Strasberg, like his Russian forbearers, never made his actors sensorially relive any past experiences when they could emote naturally. Emotional Recall was reserved for the correction of inauthentic or inadequate feelings. Or in the words of Carnovsky, a bitter critic of it, “only when we were in a jam.” Lee repeatedly told his actors: “The aim of Affective Memory is not to feel or see or touch something. That is a kind of hypnosis or hallucination. Its goal is to recall the memory of a situation that will stimulate a proper mood.” During his tenure at the Group and at the Studio, Strasberg consciously avoided prying into the life experiences that kindled his actors’

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 145 Affective Memories. According to Eunice Stoddard, Group members did not reveal the incidents that evoked their personal emotions directly to Lee or even inside the classroom. They walked off into the countryside to “take an exercise” and practice Emotional Memory in seclusion. Stroking or reliving traumatic episodes in the actor’s past has been cited as a prime danger in Studio work. That is, Strasberg was frequently accused of practicing “psychiatry without a license.” But no documentation has ever been produced that proved Emotional Recall unleashed some hidden mania or obsession that had been securely fettered away in a normal, socially functioning actor’s psyche. The truth is some previously troubled students were congenitally attracted to Method, as others were to psychotherapy. The work in Affective Memory did not cause or promote their internal conflicts. In fact, the sustained ability to fully emote or freely express welled-up feelings frequently unblocked the creative barriers that prevented certain actors from attaining their artistic goals. For them, Affective Memory was inadvertently therapeutic. (3) The Method was said to be a replacement or bulwark against the actor’s unbridled tide of imagination or fantasy. Most performers could envision images and scenarios far more exciting than events from their limited real-life biographies. Strasberg countered that all imagination had to have some personal reality beneath it; otherwise the artist’s fantasies were merely a bad fabrication of make-believe. The most affective myths and tall-tales consisted of a re-assemblage of verifiable human activities, deeply felt desires, and base fears. Creativity, like dreams, was grounded in the shuffling, projection, and amalgamation of remembered experience. (4) For many actors, training in Method appeared to unfold at a maddeningly slow pace. Strasberg’s exercises in Relaxation, for instance, could take up the better part of a twelve-week course. A normal session to release physical and mental tension lasted between thirty to forty-five minutes. The remainder of the first-year classes was devoted to Sense Memory. Why Strasberg taught these rudimentary lessons in such an unhurried and measured fashion could be explained in several ways. As Artistic Director, Strasberg had almost unlimited time to test out his experimental work with the Group actors. The summer rehearsal periods provided him with daily morning sessions over numerous weeks for acting exercises. He never rushed this aspect of the training. Even the Group play rehearsals were stretched out beyond Broadway standards. Lee recalled: “Before learning the dialogue, actors had to

146 Stanislavsky in America know why they were speaking. First the character, then his thoughts and actions (including the thoughts and actions that he did not express), finally came the words.” Like Ouspenskaya’s Symbol Études and Meisner’s Repetition Exercises, Strasberg’s protracted Relaxation and Sense Memory instruction had another, although probably subconscious, purpose. It shattered his students’ resistance to other interior features of the Method. Pupils had to give themselves over completely to Lee’s critical mission. (5) In the 1940s and 50s, Method was usually given its due when it came to serious film acting or realistic portrayals on stage. Audiences howled at phony or blatantly contrived characterizations. They were on the lookout for inappropriate mannerisms and manufactured feelings. (Comically, the universally reviled filmmaker Ed Wood named Strasberg as his most formidable enemy.) For all other forms of entertainment, critics decried Method as an impediment. No one required Strasberg-educated actors to perform Shakespeare, comedy, musicals, or avant-garde theatre. Again, Lee disagreed. Even Laurence Olivier and Grotowski’s super-athletic ensemble, the Polish Theatre Lab, lacked truthful emotional preparation. As good as they were physically, Strasberg maintained, Method training would have deepened their character bond to spectators. (6) Method Acting was generally synonymous with Strasberg or the Actors Studio although some critics have applied it to the instruction of other teachers or performers who prepared their roles through a frantic over-identification with their parts. This broaches a different question: can or should Method be uncoupled from Strasberg, its creator? Some opponents of Method have directed much of their fury at Strasberg’s tactics or personality rather than at its true practice or results. For instance, Brando abandoned and vilified Lee (as well as Kazan) while continuing to work in an obvious Method style. With effort, the Method can be disentangled from the steadfast figure of Lee Strasberg. True, he devised it, fostered it, labored mightily to preserve it, and eventually sanctified it. But the Method remains a teachable system of acting with definable precepts and exercises. It is a technique and independent of any single teacher. L E E ST R A SBE R G E X E R C I S E S ( 1 9 3 7– 8 2 ) Sources for the exercises: Tonio Selwart’s notebooks (1939–40); Lee Strasberg, “Acting and the Training of the Actor,” John Gassner,

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 147 Producing the Play (New York: Dryden Press, 1941); Lester Bernstein, “How the Actors Prepare at the Studio,” The New York Times (November 9, 1947); Jean Scharfenberg, “Lee Strasberg, Teacher” (Unpublished Dissertation: University of Wisconsin, 1963); Actors Studio Handbook (NY: Privately Printed, 1965); Robert Hethmon (editor), Strasberg at the Actors Studio (New York: Viking Press, 1965); Edward Dwight Easty, On Method Acting (Florence, Alabama: House of Collectibles, 1966); Strasberg, “Method Project” (Unpublished Transcription, 1975); Jerry Benjamin, Actors Studio Notebook (1960–1964) (NY: Privately Printed, 1976); David Garfield, A Player’s Place (NY: Macmillan Publishing, 1980); Cindy Adams, Lee Strasberg, the Imperfect Genius of the Actors Studio (NY: Doubleday, 1980); Strasberg, A Dream of Passion: the Development of the Method (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987); and Mimi Gina, “The Strasberg Technique,” Callboard (April 1990); materials given to the author and Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute instructors; interviews with Elaine Aiken, Clifford David, Robert Ellerman, Jack Garfein, David Gideon, Ray Gordon, Michael Howard, Bobby Lewis, Tonio Selwart, and Lee Strasberg; and classroom observations. Relaxation 1.

2.

Sit in an armless chair. Slide your body into a comfortable position, where you could easily fall asleep. Resting your neck on the back of the chair, stretch your legs and arms. Check each grouping of muscles – especially areas of special tension (like around the mouth, near the temples, the back of the neck and across the bridge of the nose). While physical tension is being released, open your mouth and in an unforced sound, express a long “Ahhh!”

Sense memory 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Recall drinking coffee or tea in the morning. Lift an imaginary cup off an imaginary table. Relive the feel of the cup or spoon’s weight. Peel and eat an imaginary orange. Practice the acts of shaving or putting on makeup in front of an imaginary mirror. Recall the feeling of two fabrics (like burlap and velvet). Hear, in your memory, a melody. Now hear three different melodies. Re-experience the smell of two odors (like urine in the subway and a rose).

148 Stanislavsky in America 9. Re-experience the bitter taste of vinegar or a lemon. 10. In a seated position, feel the sunshine on your back. 11. Practice dressing with imaginary clothing. Put on underwear, stocks, or hose. 12. In a seated position, feel a sharp pain (like a toothache). Is the sensation dull or sharp? 13. See a painting. Now visualize several paintings. 14. Overall sensations: Recall the sensorial reactions of your body to a total experience such as a sauna, shower, rain, being at a concert, extreme cold, extreme hot, lying in the sun, lying under moonlight in balmy weather. Personal objects 15. Choose an object that has a deep personal significance such as a bracelet or family heirloom. (It should remind you of a relationship or experience that is more than seven years in the past.) Handle it carefully and sensorially observe its qualities. It may or may not arouse a series of feelings and memories. In the classroom, recreate the object and allow your emotional responses to the imaginary item to naturally surface. Affective Memory 16. Describe the sensory background of a personal event. Recall the details of a specific situation or place where you experienced a sunrise or a sunset. You may choose an affecting episode, like witnessing a traffic accident or visiting a seriously ill friend in a hospital. 17. Add a Simple Action to your Affective Memory. You may start with the Action, such as applying lipstick or sweeping the floor, or with the recollection itself. As soon as the emotion is evoked, continue with your activity. 18. Now place your Affective Memory in an improvised or scripted scene. Do not force or unnaturally indicate the stream of emotional responses. Concentrate on the sensorial memories of the past event. Song-and-dance 19. Recite the words of a song that is very familiar to you (like “Happy Birthday To You”). Break the words into uninflected syllables, ignoring its standard melody and rhythm. Then move

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio 149 spontaneously as you repeat the words. Each syllable should be performed with an expansive staccato gesture. Animal exercise 20. Study the movement and behavior of an animal such as a monkey or pigeon. Carefully watch how its physical structure determines its locomotion and response to stimuli. Now, try to intuit its thoughts and impulses. Observe its environment and interactions. When you feel that you can imitate its physical activity and sense its inner life, bring your animal character into the classroom and let it react freely to its imaginary surroundings.

7

Stella Adler

Just as the house lights were dimming on any opening night on Broadway, you could always see Stella Adler, in a stunning black fur or regal outfit, walking down the aisle, searching for her seat. I remember thinking then back in the Thirties: no production could ever compete with the real-life theatre of Stella Adler. Beatrice Straight to the author, 1984

Firmly established in the popular press and within the halls of academia was Stella Adler’s stature as the Grande Dame of American actortraining. No current article or biographical account on Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, or modern acting in general has failed to mention her half-century contribution, engaging personality, study with Stanislavsky in Paris, or public quarrels with Actor Studio-like preparations. More than any of her contemporaries, Adler was accorded the enviable role as the nation’s Counter-Strasberg.

“A waft of perfume” The youngest daughter of Jacob and Sarah Adler, the American-Yiddish stage’s most illustrious theatre family, Stella always felt that she had been reared in a royal dynasty. Literally from her birth in 1901, she was pressed in the service of stage art, bundled and carted (by limousine) from her father’s Grand Street Theatre in Manhattan, where she appeared as a Jewish infant in a comic olio act, to her mother’s Novelty Theatre in Brooklyn. There, her cries and chortling yaps happily concluded another melodramatic rending of the immigrant experience. For Stella, mid-life exposure to riveted audiences continued to awaken memories of those formative years. The sounds of laughter and applause were not only pleasing features of curtain calls but also an emotional connection to her celebrated past.

Stella Adler 151 With her younger brother, Luther, Stella was the reining child prodigy on the New York Yiddish stage. From five years old to fifteen, the wall-flowerish beauty appeared in more than one-hundred-andthree handkerchief weepies and classical plays. Her theatrical colleagues were a curious mixture of family and notables from the Golden and Silver Ages of the Jewish rialto. (After World War One, seventeen Adlers were performing simultaneously in Yiddish and English-language productions in Manhattan.) At a 1919 engagement of Adler’s troupe in London, Stella met an aristocratic Russian-English aristocrat, Horace Elischeff, in a hotel elevator and he was smitten. He described the retiring teen as “a hyper-sensitive girl. Too sensitive to know how to channel her sensitivity.” They married in New York. On Broadway, Stella advanced her American career as a blonde ingénue. She now received top billing as “Lola Adler.” In 1925, Richard Boleslavsky offered Stella free tuition at his American Laboratory Theatre school. One year later, she was accepted as a full member in Boley’s performing unit. Stella gravitated between leading roles in midtown shows and surviving Yiddish repertory companies. She took center stage at Jacob Ben-Ami’s Jewish Art Theatre, then at Maurice Schwartz’ more conservative Yiddish Art Theatre, where she was also appointed as its dramaturge. In one of her last productions with Schwartz in 1930, Wandering Stars, Stella played a naïve Jewish girl who deserts her domestic responsibilities to go off with an itinerate theatre troupe; a simple village maiden desperate to act, to disappear into magnificent stage personae. Her affecting portrayal was described as “a waft of perfume floating across the stage.” It was an accolade that few would forget.

Sad princess in the collective hut One year later, Harold Clurman and her brother persuaded Stella to give up the commercial theatre completely and enlist in the Group. The winsome hellcat was accustomed to the grandeur and potential glories of Broadway headlining, or the security and funhouse ambiance of the Lower East Side. The commune-minded Group offered few assurances for individual fame. Adler was a another trooper among a disparate ensemble of twenty-eight. Worse, Clurman’s unwavering commitment to an enduring art company and his lectures on the Group’s “twenty-year future” resembled the rants of a dozen Union Square nutcases. (Aronson equated Clurman’s rambling sermons to those of Father Divine’s.)

152 Stanislavsky in America At Brookfield Center, Stella lapsed into bouts of despair. In the 1931 communal diary, she speculated about her position there: “Is it possible that I’m a perfect specimen for the Group?” Adler knew Clurman and Strasberg from the Lab days. To her, there were still gawky college types on a presumptuous mission. At least Harold exhibited some courtly flair and presented himself charmingly as an uptown intellectual. Lee, in Stella’s view, was no more than a bitter, single-minded militant. Stella loathed what she considered the amateurish enthusiasms of the Group members. She always thought of the Yiddish stage as “the professional theatre.” The other actors’ stage background was piddling compared to that of the Adler brother-and-sister team. And Stella was chagrined over the Method madness. Emotional Recall could produce long-term serious psychic harm, she believed. Forty years later, she spoke of its injurious effects on Group novices; it “landed them in the booby-hatch and shattered them. You couldn’t be on the stage thinking of your personal life. It was just schizophrenic.” During the Connelly rehearsals, Strasberg appeared to demand an Affective Memory from each actor in nearly every scene. Some of the leads and supernumeraries – especially Morris Carnovsky, Ruth Nelson, and Dorothy Patten – felt stymied or “crippled” by it. Their partners were constantly exiting the barn in order “to take an exercise.” Others, like Franchot Tone, seemed to delight in the whole Method process. Adler did not really understand Affective Memory. Her most heartfelt emotional memories were tied to her stage performances at her father’s Grand Street Theatre. When Stella had to call up tears, she merely had to think of the conclusion of any Jacob Gordin tragedy. Back in her heyday, the frail Miss Adler stared in frozen desolation at a stage attendant in the wings, as the final curtain fell. For Lee, it was quite different. He could sensorially remember the sounds of his dying brother, gasping for breath in the next room of their cold-water flat, just a few walkable blocks from the Grand. In the early 1930s, Stella, despite her physical isolation from roughand-tumble members, was promoted as one of the Group’s featured attractions. She possessed an innate emotive power, could undertake a wide variety of characters, provided theatrical color, and had a real audience following. Yet Adler was torn and conflicted. Strasberg’s relentless supervision and his Method exercises had taken their toll. There was political turmoil as well. The perfectly coiffed Miss Adler appeared to be an unlikely Bolshevik but she sided with Group radicals. One year, Stella joined them at a Union Square May Day Parade, after stepping out of an uptown taxicab. She often joked that she could reside in any Communist country as long as it recognized her as its

Stella Adler 153 queen. In the 1940s, Red Channels included Adler in their list of subversives because, among other activities, she once judged a New Year’s dance contest at a New Masses’ ball. In May 1933, Stella struck out on her own. She starred in an independent misty tenement-drama, Hilda Cassidy. It bombed and Adler was back with the Group. During the 1934 rehearsals for Gentlewoman, Stella’s crisis with Strasberg intensified. Nothing went right. In June, she and Clurman followed Kingsley and Strasberg to Moscow. Unlike Lee, Adler found the MAT productions irresistible. Moscow was charged with rays of theatrical culture. That halcyon vacation and the next few weeks would change her life.

In the Bois with Kostya After Moscow, a great opportunity presented itself to Stella: she was to meet the creator of the System. Adler’s chance encounter with Stanislavsky in Paris would soon displace Strasberg’s position in the Group and the singularity of his Method. Over the next four decades, Stella’s description of her sessions with the paterfamilias of modern acting continued to shake the foundations instilled by the American Lab Theatre and Strasberg in modern actor-training and helped instigate manifold variations of the Stanislavsky Technique in America. Her story had all the trappings of a modern fairytale; and, like the ones that touch its intended recipients most deeply, its plausibility or veracity was never questioned. The first afternoon began in Stanislavsky’s apartment and moved outdoors into a clearing in the Bois de Boulogne. With Clurman and Stella were Olga Knipper-Chekhova (Anton Chekhov’s widow), Stanislavsky, and his French physician. They discussed the state of French politics and the MAT’s latest offerings while they ate. Adler claimed that she declined to shake Stanislavsky’s hand and barely engaged with the other male guests. She regressed to her bashful school-girlish mode. When Stanislavsky enquired about her reticence, Stella replied that before she studied his System, she had promising career prospects and loved the world of theatre; now her performances were trashed and she felt nothing but despondency. “You ruined me,” she blurted out. Stanislavsky chivalrously offered to work with the troubled American. Adler was immediately taken with his genuine hospitality and courteous attention. The seventy-one-year-old Russian had retained his regal bearing and always projected fatherly concern when dealing with foreigners or striking beauties. (Few young actors at the MAT saw this feature of his normally invective personality.)

154 Stanislavsky in America For Adler, the soft-spoken gentleman proffered an ideal father figure. Stanislavsky was a cultural celebrity, tall and elegant, handsome in a soulful Slavic way, generous, confident, and utterly asexual. On a folding chair against a tree sat a dreamlike incarnation of Jacob Adler, Stella’s cherished father. Of course, this Russian radiated considerably more refinement and eschewed the histrionics of the “acting Adlers.” In fact, the primary topic of Stella’s first rendezvous with Stanislavsky was Jacob Adler. The ever-civil diplomat of Soviet culture remembered meeting him in New York during the MAT’s 1923 tour. Several documents preserve Stella’s interaction with Stanislavsky: Stella’s 1934 Parisian diary, an outline of her Ellenville lecture; a Russian chart illustrating the Stanislavsky System and a corrupted English-language rendition of it; and, finally, a transcription of Stanislavsky’s own recollection of the encounter. Each of these tells a different story. This much is certain: Adler hired a French translator-secretary and they reconnoitered in Stanislavsky’s apartment or in the Bois in one to two-hour sessions over the next three weeks, somewhat less than the five or seven weeks of daily work that Stella and her anti-Method cohorts proclaimed. Adler’s secretary jotted down much of the actorly small talk: Stanislavsky’s memories of New York; the best way to die on stage; how idealism in art is necessary for a happy existence; Boleslavsky’s personality; the jogging of memory through hypnotic suggestion and so forth. Stella (or her secretary) translated a few scenes from Gentlewoman into French, and Stanislavsky broke down the Problems and Actions involved. One scene burdened the actress most: when her fickle character, Gwyn Ballantine, learns of her husband’s suicide. Three months before, Strasberg insisted that Adler use an Affective Memory for this emotional jolt in the play. Stella violently disagreed with Lee. The argument still preoccupied her. Why did she need to personalize her dramatic reaction? Wasn’t her craft enough? Stanislavsky wisely counseled that his System exercises were a last resort. They were not necessary when the actor’s natural impulses fulfilled the dramatic moment. He spoke about Gentlewoman’s Circumstances and meaning. Paramount was Gwyn’s bodily response – that is, her physical emotional expression – to the shocking revelation delivered by her husband’s timid secretary. Authentic internal feeling itself could not replace truthful Action. Stella had to engender truthful feeling in Action. This advice to push her monologue back into the author’s dramatic character had a liberating effect on Adler. Her revised performance of the scene satisfied both teacher and pupil. Stella took it as a negation of Emotional Recall. For her, Strasberg’s emphasis on personalization was

Stella Adler 155 in direct conflict with Stanislavsky’s simpler instruction to merely discover the Action of the character. Private emotion could be feigned or ignored and made stageworthy by the implementation of interesting and skillful acting choices. It was the kind of nineteenth-century direction of which Jacob would have approved. Clurman, who observed a few of these sessions, asked Stanislavsky about his relationship to Stalin. The old man glanced around the park furtively and praised the Leader’s cultural acumen. At the time, Clurman was unaware of how much the Purges and Andrei Zhdanov’s imposition of Socialist Realism affected the MAT’s public face. Even Emotional Recall exercises could be linked to the passive, overly individualist, and anti-collective theatrical past. The Soviet stage also had to reflect the super-activist phase of the second Five-Year Plan and Stakhanovism. It is possible that both Adler and Clurman misinterpreted Stanislavsky’s directorial championing of Action over emotional authenticity. After all, MAT students were still being schooled in Affective Memory and Vakhtangov’s Justification in 1934. And what experienced acting teacher would have encouraged a distraught actress to diligently increase the depth of her feelings? The normal response of a sympathetic outsider would be to focus on more manageable tasks, avoiding all personal stimulations that could lead to trepidation or hysteria. Stanislavsky spoke candidly about his sessions with Adler in the winter of 1935: “A completely panic-stricken woman came to see me in Paris. She clutched me and cried, ‘You destroyed me! You must save me! What have you done to me?’ I had to take her on, if only to restore the reputation of my System. I wasted a whole month on it. It turned out that everything she had learnt was right.” (Boris Filippov, Actors Without Make-Up [Moscow: Progressive Publishers, 1977]) The “everything” probably related to Ouspenskaya and Strasberg’s training of Stella in Emotional Recall.

The new Group On August 7, 1934, Adler delivered her famous report at Ellenville about the true Stanislavsky System and her work with its inventor. She stated simply that Strasberg had gotten it wrong: “The basis of all acting is the experience of Action in Given Circumstances.” Affective Memory had long ago been discarded at the MAT schools. The Group’s training was contrary to Stanislavsky’s thinking. On a blackboard, Adler drew a yurt-like house and a series of blocks beneath it to illustrate all of Stanislavsky’s forty elements of acting

156 Stanislavsky in America technique. External Technique filled three-quarters of the yurt space. Above the roof of the longhouse were three peaks: “Internal Feeling,” “Long Action,” and the “Super Problem of the Spine.” Adler graphically marked out the centrality of Action and Text. (According to Lewis, Stella actually had two charts but only presented one of them.) No matter. The anti-Method revolution had begun. The Group onlookers applauded and cheered. Characteristically, Strasberg did not even bother to attend Adler’s talk but he responded to it the next day. If Stella’s words were true, then “Stanislavsky had gone back on himself” and the MAT’s disappointing productions testified to that. Besides, the American director did not teach the “Stanislavsky Method,” but the “Strasberg Method.” Lee’s rejoinder did not quail the company’s discontent. They insisted that Stella teach the real thing. Adler’s first classes, “Problems of Acting,” in fact replicated some of Strasberg’s earliest instruction; there were introductory Relaxation and Sense Memory exercises, called “Work on One’s Self.” Of course, this was not followed by lessons in memory or personalization. Instead Stella went to Script Analysis and how it brought the performer into Action. She compared Stanislavsky to a matchmaker: he brought the potential bride (the script) to the bridegroom (the performer) and made certain that they were suitable for the wedding (acting). Stella used the current reality like a text for a character. Her teaching situation could be analyzed like the Spine of a scene: BEAT

GENERAL BEAT

MOOD PROBLEMS

To introduce the lesson

Watch for malcontented students

Vitality Enter the room Clean the blackboard Arrange the seating Make herself comfortable

Beats were the “bits of Action,” or active responses to the Given Circumstances. Problems were the psychological tasks of the character. Although Affective Memory did help the actor evoke tiny details, Adler wanted it banished from her classroom in its raw form. She claimed, “I use Affective Memory but in a different way. Not as a direct emotional search.” Concrete physical activity that was suggested solely in the text could stimulate truthful feelings and a moment-to-moment reality. As she impressed upon her Group pupils: “Continually do slight, small, true

Stella Adler 157 physical actions to keep from getting tied up inside.” (Two years later, Stella added the Golden Box of the actors’ memories to her notebook columns.) To a large degree, Adler’s approach to character-creation was just as radical and elementary. Character only existed in Action. The play itself and its unique Given Circumstances should stimulate the actor’s internal states. This required a broad knowledge of history, culture, literature, and a biographical investigation of the playwright himself. Not all of Adler’s Group students were entirely satisfied with these late-night sessions. Some grumbled that Stella’s pronouncements were pre-Stanislavskian, virtually nineteenth-century like. The Adlerites, however, were much intrigued and preferred it to Strasberg’s humorless and never sanguine direction. At least Stella was fun and an enthusiastic supporter of the playwright – qualities that no one could accuse Lee of overtly having. Theatrical fate advanced Adler’s mission. Strasberg’s costume epic Gold Eagle Guy flopped hard. The Group had nothing to mount for its spring 1935 season. Odets had toiled over his manuscript Awake and Sing!, composed manifestly for his fellow Group members. Lee refused to consider it but Stella railed to Odets’ defense. Clurman, her doting companion, eagerly offered to stage it. The Adler insurrection gained traction. Awake and Sing! signaled a new Group direction. It dropped leftist rhetoric into a snappy Warner Brothers-like plot. Stella, however, bridled at her part – Bessie, the Bronx Jewish matriarch. This was not a glamorizing or age-appropriate role. Backstage every night, Adler yanked a thick strand of her ash-blonde hair and let dangle from under her unfashionable stage wig. If any spectators missed that, Awake’s playbill explained that Miss Adler wore special padding and makeup to mask her natural age. And, during the arousing curtain calls, Stella pulled off that distasted wig to reveal her minx-like self. Of course, Adler’s livid vanity unintentionally paralleled that of her character. Bessie too, had she performed on Broadway, would have insisted on displaying a more youthful appearance. After Strasberg and Crawford withdrew from the Group in 1936, Stella flew off to Hollywood. Her new name, “Stella Ardler,” first appeared in a girlie film-fan monthly. It sounded less Jewish to her. Miss Ardler played a can-do advertising executive in the romanticcomedy Love On Toast, then a femme fatale in Shadow of the Thin Man. Stella became an Associate Producer at MGM but returned to the Group and Harold. She directed their West Coast and British touring companies of Golden Boy.

158 Stanislavsky in America

Down in Piscator’s basement During the late 1920s, Erwin Piscator was the best-known avant-garde director in Europe, outside of the Soviet Union. In Berlin, he created an entirely new style of performance that borrowed heavily from Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein’s Constructivist productions. Even more than the Russians, however, Piscator relied on the new technologies – especially film and print journalism – to mount Marxist interpretations of the classics and kaleidoscopic historical enactments. Projections, movie clips, archival recordings, and symbolic, flying stage architecture surrounded his actors like a media gale. According to Piscator, this multi-perspective montage of information transformed and modernized theatrical storytelling. Here was political drama aided by layers of scientific expertise and the new spectator’s thirst for antiillusionist entertainment. Piscator’s Epic Theatre shared many qualities associated with his German comrade Bertolt Brecht. Piscator’s star performers were mainstream variety artists and icons of the German stage who excelled in comedy or Reinhardt-like presentationalism. The ensemble corps was trained in an anti-Stanislavsky regime, called Objective Acting. They were schooled to physically demonstrate their characters’ social ranking and to educate their audiences in the unambiguous realities of class struggle. By the time Hitler came to power in 1933, Piscator’s Epic experimentation had declined. The collapse of the German economy, leftist infighting, the effectiveness of cinema propaganda with the introduction of sound, and paternity suits pushed Piscator and his wife, Maria Ley-Piscator, into exile. They traveled eastward to Moscow and then to New York City. In Manhattan, Piscator was invited to head the Dramatic Workshop at the New School of Social Research, a jerry-rigged university that employed noted academics who fled Nazi-occupied and fascist Europe. Many of Piscator’s pioneering innovations, like the “Living Newspaper”, had already been implemented by radical American troupes and the Federal Theatre. In 1940, Piscator and Maria announced the official opening of their school and socially-relevant theatre, the Dramatic Workshop. It offered an endless stream of courses in contemporary political culture, art history, stagecraft, playwriting, public relations, movement, voice, and directing. Stella had slashed her Hollywood associations and returned to New York in 1939 to celebrate her mother’s 80th birthday. Piscator invited Stella and Raikin Ben-Ari to devise courses in Basic Acting. At the Dramatic Workshop, Stella began to teach her first professional

Stella Adler 159 classes. Not only were they at odds with Piscator’s tyrannical directives to his New School neophytes – they were ordered to project the status of their characters and clearly indicate their scenic motivations – but also the impatient and somber German frequently rebuked Stella for her glam-doll persona. (She was almost never on time for her classes and, when she made her showy entrances, was always decked out like an Elizabeth Arden model.) Adler started with Observation and Sense Memory exercises in the dank ground floor of the New School. She had her pupils examine the room’s exteriors in minute detail – to count the exact number of folds in the window curtains, to scrutinize the dust particles on the floorboards. They practiced sewing or brushing imaginary objects. Her improvisations contrasted pantomimic action with real behavior. The class was instructed to hunt for an imaginary lost watch. Then she hid an actual wristwatch in the room and asked them to find it. Tasks that were inspired by real obstacles or objects felt and looked quite different. Stella increasingly varied the improvisation workouts, sometimes using real items or environments to create action, other times purely invisible ones. Actors had to impersonate inanimate objects and animals in Given Circumstances. They performed stationary entities in a busy drug store, articles of clothing blowing off the line during a dust storm. Once Adler instructed her class to portray corralled chickens who just learned that an atom bomb was about to explode over their coop. The students scampered around the room, squawking in panic. One of Stella’s few male students, Marlon Brando, ignored the fluster around him and concentrated on depositing an egg in his nest. He explained later that since no hen could comprehend the concept of nuclear annihilation, he simply went about his normal barnyard business. Stella admired Brando’s scenic logic. She was sweet on him and he was taken with her teacherly eccentricities, flirtatious and unrestrained wit, and theatrical élan. She literarily adopted him, bringing him into her Fifth Avenue apartment and the laughing vortex of the “acting Adlers.” Now Brando had a permanent mentor and the welcoming embrace of an artistically adventurous and unconventional family.

Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting In 1943, Stella married Clurman and trailed back to Broadway as a sexpot lead, small-time director, and acting coach. After the war, she joined Luther in furthering the cause of a “Fighting Palestine,” Ben Hecht’s propaganda arm for the Irgun, the Jewish underground army.

160 Stanislavsky in America In Paris, Stella furtively passed a cache of money and secret documents to the Israeli freedom fighters. Yet, in 1949, Adler acknowledged that her life had come to a standstill. At a swanky French restaurant in Manhattan, one her private students brainstormed a remedy for her doldrums: Stella was a born teacher; why not open an acting school? To the amazement of everyone at the table, Adler straightened herself up and laughingly agreed. The Stella Adler Theatre School was an immediate success. Its student body expanded exponentially during the 1950s. Early on, Clurman arranged a lucrative association with the American National Theatre. And, as more faculty members were added to the Studio roster, Stella’s school relocated six times to accommodate the increased demand. The Adler Conservatory was the most visible counterweight to Strasberg’s Method in New York. Stella formalized her teaching methods and imposed strict classroom guidelines. Male pupils could not participate in her sessions wearing blue jeans; females had to be attired in dresses. Tardy students were instructed to bring flowers (which always made them later). When the Artistic Director entered the studio hall, the entire class had to stand until the master teacher comfortably settled in her front-row chair. These old-world regulations firmly distinguished Adler’s work and her Conservatory from the Actors Studio’s slapdash, nonconformist environment. More importantly, they reiterated Stella’s prime thesis that actors must comport themselves like true upstanding artists, not gumchewing misfits. (In that sense, the Conservatory students had to sit and behave like the polar opposites of Brando, Stella’s star pupil.) Adler’s classes emphasized Imagination and Script Analysis. After basic Sense Memory and improvisation work, students presented scenes, which Stella critiqued. Her Technique was intuitive and sometimes contradictory. Pupils had to embody the playwright’s larger message but avoid cliché-ridden and hackneyed portrayals. It was difficult to please the old pro, especially when Adler demonstrated her finely hued reinterpretations of their characters. The Adler Technique had a strong appeal to star-struck neophytes. It combined First Studio theatricalism and imaginative acting choices that led to well-defined stage Action, by way of Clurman-style intellection. Even experienced actors were stimulated by Stella’s fiery demands. According to Adler, Method’s quiet interior personalizations that erupted into explosive bursts of activity inhabited only the edges of most scenic behaviors. Her approach trained her pupils to work across a more playable spectrum. During the 1960s and 70s, Adler joined Yale and New York University’s theatre departments and established a Los Angeles studio. Her

Stella Adler 161 ageless movie-star looks, disarming persona, and provocative disagreements with Strasberg overcame many of the shortcomings of her Technique. Stella and her classes were journalist ambrosia. She continued to teach until her death in 1992. S T E L L A A D L E R E X E R C I S E S ( 1 9 3 4– 9 2 ) Sources for the exercises: Tony Kraber and Willy Barton’s notebooks of Stella Adler’s Group Theatre classes (1934–36); transcriptions of Stella Adler’s classes in New York and Los Angeles (1962–85); Henry Bannister’s 1968 notebook; Stella Adler, The Technique of Acting (NY: Bantam Books, 1988); interviews with Stella Adler and Pearl Pearson; and classroom observations. The actor’s goals 1. 2.

3.

Take a description from a play and practice “giving it away” to a partner. Share the idea and build from what your partner gives you. (Remember always give something away when you speak.) Paraphrase an essay by Thoreau, a newspaper editorial, a passage from the Bible, or the Gettysburg Address. See how many small sequences are in the essay, and the various ideas the author writes about. Practice finding sequences in topics that are related to each other. Consider the Catholic Church and its relation to society. To take three steps, one might say the Church (1) reduces anxieties and (2) gives hope, and sets standards of conduct.

Seeing 4.

5. 6.

Observe ETERNAL scenes in daily life, such as the wrapping of presents, a sunrise, a boy with a hoop, a Christmas celebration, a dog greeting his master, a lady pushing a baby carriage, a boy and girl carrying home books from school. See objects in different conditions: a tree with leaves, a bare tree under the snow, a tree with blossoms, how the sun makes water glisten, becomes red at sunset, filters through the trees. Go over your whole day and fix each detail in its correct place. (At night, write each detail down as you remember it.) While describing your meals, see the place setting and recall what was served. Recall the themes of a conversation you had. Review the

162 Stanislavsky in America rooms in which you found yourself and remember the objects. Recall old friends, strangers, those you have known who have since died. All this will serve to strengthen your concentration. Imagination 7.

Take ten things that attract your attention and explain why. (If an image leaves you dead inside, don’t take it. Go to the next one.) 8. Be able to see a garden in your mind’s eye and be able to move around the garden. Draw three imaginary gardens: the garden of the French Embassy in Washington; a tiny garden in an Italian neighborhood in Boston; a rundown backyard garden in a Mexican border town. 9. Someone left clothes from the cleaners in your room. Guess what color the suit was? How was the collar made? What was the cut of the pants? The fresh shirt – what was the exact color? In what position did it lie? What was under the shirt? What color were the ties? How wide? How were they folded? Were there initials on the handkerchiefs? 10. Imagine twenty objects in a boarding-house room in Detroit. Describe them in detail. Choose ten objects you like and ten that you do not. 11. Paint postcards on blank 3 x 5 inch cards from your imagination: a picture of a summer house in Maine; the view from the top of Mount Everest; a Grecian pot in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a Chinese Emperor’s sword from the Ming Dynasty on a palace wall; a postcard from Washington, DC; a postcard from a small Siberian village. 12. Imagine that you are in an old attic surrounded by cobwebs and open an old trunk. Take three different objects out of that trunk. Circumstances 13. Walk around your room as if it were the stage. Go from the door to the window to the couch to the table. The exercise is simply to have moved six or seven times from place to place in a relaxed manner, adding the table to the door, the couch to the window, as they go. Each time, absorb more props and features and speak out as you recognize the circumstances, moving in sequence – first, slowly in a relaxed manner and then reversing the sequence in order to retrace the ground again. 14. Your activity is to close the window in different circumstances. Close the window as if there were a storm. Close the window as if

Stella Adler 163 there were a bulgur. Close the window as if dust were flying in. The “as if” substitution should stimulate your imagination. 15. Make a fire in a house in the country, in a forest, at the beach. In each case, use the special circumstances of that location. 16. Choose one of these gardens (French Embassy, Boston Italian neighborhood, Mexican border). Take the garden out of your imagination and place it on stage. Walk in your garden and begin to live in it without words. Move to each area of your garden. Find out how much at takes to move physically from one place to another. Repeat this three times. Establish a special rhythm. Do not linger in one place. Once your body is at ease in moving from one sequence to another, start to see detail. Now you can break up the segments as you add more and more detail. Without words, live in your garden. The garden must make you act. Action 17. Think of six imaginary places and what you can do there. For example, in a hallway, you pick up milk bottles or straighten the rug runner. 18. Perform Actions which have been done for generations – a woman carrying a paper bag, a man reading a newspaper, a boy playing with his dog. Life on the stage has more meaning if you recognize the eternal doability of Actions. Justification 19. Give five reasons why: you leave your job; you take another job; you help someone on the street; a chorus girl leaves her job; a man crosses the street too fast; a mother leaves a package at the desk of a department store. Add levels from light to medium to dark. 20. Give five reasons why you opened the window; why you closed the window. Now add different levels. 21. Justify the following dialogue on light, medium, and dark levels, then build the inner plots. A: Why did you do it? B: You know why. A: It was unfair. B: It didn’t hurt anybody. A: It hurt her. B: She didn’t say anything when I spoke to her. A: She said something. B: Oh, so you know!

164 Stanislavsky in America Sensory truth 22. Imagine that you are in an old-fashioned kitchen. In the kitchen is a turn-of-the-century sink. There are plates beside the sink and a dirty piece of soap. The kitchen table is wooden. Look at the size of it. The top plate is cracked. Go over to the closet. Put your hands in it as if to get a towel, but your hands touch flypaper. You can’t see but you feel the stickiness of the paper. Dead flies are stuck to the paper. One fly is trying to lick its foot; the other feet are stuck. There is flypaper glue on the tip of each of your fingers. Take your other hand off the flypaper, on finger at a time. Don’t get any glue of yourself. Don’t do more than is necessary but get the glue off each finger. The hand is real; the glue is imaginary. 23. Relax the whole body except one hand. Sit and walk in this state. Check to see if you are successful in reducing tension. Lift different objects. Sit in different positions. At the clap of hands, strike some pose, spontaneous or foolish. Relax every muscle except those, which you need for the pose. 24. If you pick up a log and hold it in your arms, the activity requires you to use certain muscles in your hands, your wrists, your arms, and your shoulders. Memorize the effort it takes and what muscles you use. Then pick up an imaginary log. The memory of how to do it, and of how much effort at requires, will remain in your muscles, and it stays there.

8

Bobby Lewis

Bobby Lewis said this to us in class, the better you get, the less credit you’ll get. Because the better you are, the more it looks like walking and talking and everybody thinks they can walk and talk. James Lipton, 2007

Among the Stanislavsky teachers in America, only three – Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan, and Bobby Lewis – had a natural facility for analytical writing and professional venues to disseminate their ideas in full-length books. Of the three, Lewis was, by far, the most droll and self-deprecating. During his lifetime, two of his books on acting and an autobiography appeared in print. His unprepossessing physicality, eccentric interests, love of the grotesque, gay sensibility, and raconteurship all helped shape his unusual understanding of Stanislavsky Technique and unique style of teaching. For instance, when Lewis was asked why he concealed all references to his homosexual lifestyle in his long-awaited memoir Slings and Arrows (New York: Stein and Day, 1984), Bobby replied that he assumed everyone in theatre was queer; there was no particular reason to even mention it. This was classic Bobby. He was the wittiest of the Group but his humor was almost always tinged with sardonic hidden meanings and transgressive invective. Despite Lewis’ gregarious personality and clearly articulated lessons in acting, he left few hardcore disciples or instructors who continued to promote his Technique. His amusing outsider status probably much enhanced his direct connection with students and skeptics who enjoyed Lewis’ public derision of Strasberg’s Method. But Bobby’s cultish aloofness and distain for commercial success also explained why the Bobby Lewis Technique more or less disappeared after his death in 1997.

166 Stanislavsky in America

Brooklyn boy Born into a working-class Jewish household in Brooklyn, Lewis maintained an interest in opera and classical music. He attended free concerts that were presented in Manhattan and took up the study of cello. His role models were not musicians but the bel canto sopranos and actresses who sang well enough to headline at the Metropolitan Opera Company. He was especially taken with Bertha Kalich, a Sarah Bernhardtlike acting sensation from Adler’s Grand Theatre. Criticized for his theatrical ambitions by his teachers and family who regarded him as a “fat-faced fiddler,” Lewis diligently pursued active stage work. In 1929, the teenage Lewis made the rounds, auditioning for the acting troupes in New York and was accepted into Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Company. Short and rotund, Bobby was naturally cast as an apprentice for second-string, comic character parts. Still this was a legitimate theatre gig and he got to rehearse with real professionals. He performed with Jacob Ben-Ami, another star from the Yiddish rialto who made the leap into English-language constellation of Broadway. Not only was Ben-Ami a handsome leading-man type, but also he intuitively created emotionally truthful characters à la Stanislavsky and practiced Vakhtangov-like Substitutions. (When one of his despairing characters had to contemplate suicide onstage, Ben-Ami sensorially re-experienced his dread of stepping into a cold shower. This everyday revulsion furnished the high melodramatic moment with a truthful manifestation that appeared shockingly genuine and could be reproduced every night.)

Group extra Lewis was accepted into the Group as a charter member in 1931. His relationship with Strasberg was strained from the get-go. One of the young performers who never trained with Ouspenskaya, Bobby was totally unfamiliar with the American Lab’s ethos of “authentic emotion” and the personalized means of attaining it. But the Group needed young actors and a gamut of assorted physical types. Lewis looked like no one else and his adolescent enthusiasm made him a suitable candidate. Bobby went off to Brookfield Center, packing his beloved cello and shellacked 78 opera recordings. At twenty-two-years old, Lewis was the baby of the Collective and volunteered to assistant manage. It was a wise decision because Bobby realized that he was unlikely to be cast as a commanding protagonist. In the beginning, no Group performers were ever issued complete scripts. When the directors assigned parts for their plays, actors

Bobby Lewis 167 received only pink sheets of their individual spoken dialogue and lines that cued these. Bobby’s roles were diminutive and required few typed pages of plot-worthy action or dialogue. Once again, Lewis was reduced to the stature of a bit-player. During the long Group summers of rehearsal, he acted the part of camp clown and jack-of-all-trades. Bobby’s adoration of the Yiddish celebrities Kalich and Ben-Ami brought him into close contact with Stella and Luther Adler. The brother-and-sister pair, both former VIPs in the Lower East Side and Broadway, was equally dubious about what they saw as Strasberg’s zealotry and highhanded certainties regarding “truthful” acting. The Adlers had long established themselves as theatrical figures of note. But they were, at least, cast in principal parts within the company’s tony pantheon. For the Group’s first season – House of Connelly and 1931- – Lewis coordinated the hectic crowd pastiches, which were dynamically interspersed between the hyper-realistic and talky character scenes. Bobby possessed an innate mastery of theatrical rhythm and the placement of expressive affects. Yet this aspect of production was secondary to Strasberg’s repertoire. The Group’s raison d’être was in its presentation of new and thematically germane dramas, performed by a troupe that could deliver authentic scenic emotion. In March 1932, Strasberg opened his second season with Night Over Taos, a turgid costume play set in the colonial Southwest. Lewis was given the minor role of a mute Indian slave. Of course, there was no dialogue on his single pink sheet and hardly much significant action. Bobby had only to stand by a cabin door and silently observe the conspiratorial arguments of the American liberators. Like Michael Chekhov in the First Studio’s The Wreck of the Ship ”Hope,” Lewis enlarged his inconsequential character into something of profound interest. With skillful makeup design and disquieting laser-like focus, his portrayal of the old Indian instinctively drew the audience’s attention. After the play’s conclusion, Franchot Tone brought Bobby out to stage center with the leads to participate in the pro forma curtain calls. Although Lewis continued to play walk-ons and minor-league antagonists, he added comic subtlety and variety to the Group’s normally tendentious productions. And when Strasberg incorporated Vakhtangov études into his Method training, Bobby’s star finally began to rise. This presented creative challenges and uncharted opportunities that suited his distinct fey personality. Acting that departed far from newsreel-like imitations of reality allowed him to outwardly express, invent, and explore the fantastic and less somber parameters of performance. It also informed his new interest in directing and teaching.

168 Stanislavsky in America

Beyond Strasberg When Stella Adler returned from her Parisian sessions with Stanislavsky in August 1934, probably no Group member was more delighted with her assault on Strasberg’s Method than Bobby. He recorded her every word and even filched her translated diagram that appeared to graphically shrink and reconfigure the primacy of Emotional Recall in the MAT’s postrevolutionary regime. A tectonic personal and pedagogical shift in the Group had occurred in the course of two afternoons. Strasberg was no longer the sole or unblemished arbitrator of Stanislavskyism in America. According to Stella, he had misconstrued Boley’s theories. The Group’s despotic schoolmaster and his lessons were now disputed. Stella’s revelations rattled the Group in Ellenville but did not splinter it irrevocably. Strasberg, Crawford, and Clurman still maintained their leadership positions. But now there was a wider methodological chasm that could allow for the expansion of its actor-training program and production choices. This might have developed even without the poignancy of Stella’s Sturm und Drang tirade. By 1934, Broadway was proving more and more unsympathetic to symbolic “problem-plays.” A new generation of spectators demanded entertainment that spoke to its changing needs and desires. The Great White Way required a different kind of scenic style and writing. What that was wasn’t yet clear. Strasberg wanted to move beyond stark realism into a brash Meyerholdian sphere. Some members thought that they could conjure up scripts far superior to the mechanical dramas that their Play Committee had commissioned. And tiring of Strasberg’s tight managerial rein, a handful of Group actors sought fresh possibilities, where they could freely cultivate their talents and direct in more audience-friendly modes. Stella began to teach acting classes that summer but, after a few weeks, even Lewis found them insufficiently dissimilar to what the Group had already learned in previous seasons. Bobby envisioned a more radical approach and one that unequivocally supported the non-realistic theatre that so captivated him. In February 1935, he finally discovered it when he watched Michael Chekhov perform in the Moscow Art Players’ Inspector General at the Majestic Theatre. For Lewis, this was a sublime portrayal, a projection of the actor’s “total theatre.” Chekhov (as Khlestakov) moved and spoke flawlessly with perfect rhythmic inflection and timing. His every gesture was a meticulous execution of the demonic Gogol character. Here, secreted within the grotesquely comic was the tangled heart of human misery. Chekhov had imperceptibly fused psychological truth to the visually bizarre.

Bobby Lewis 169 Lewis, who not been cast in Clurman’s first Group production, Awake and Sing!, implored the entire crew to see the Moscow Art Players. Stella also was galvanized by Chekhov’s work but failed to entice him to engage with the Group. He would have been an intriguing replacement for Strasberg, who had been signaling his displeasure with his place in the company. When the Group toured London in 1938, Bobby took time off to visit the Chekhov Studio in Dartington Hall. Lewis’ abiding infatuation with Misha vanished outright after he attended one of the school’s Technique classes. Chekhov’s masterful demonstration of the Psychological Gesture still astonished; however, his classroom instruction of it was sadly off-kilter. None of his pupils could emulate the Russian actor’s internal behavior. To Bobby, Chekhov was a lackluster teacher. He gave his students fascinating reasons to move about the barn but inadequate motivations to act with inner truth.

Group Theatre Studio During his hiatus from the Group in 1935, Lewis taught acting at the Workers Laboratory Theatre. Together with Sandy Meisner and Lewis Leverett, they drilled the Theatre of Action amateurs in Sense Memory, Emotional Recall, and Justification exercises. It was Bobby’s first time out and he enjoyed the work immensely. He guided his pupils through rowdy improvisations, such as fighting to survive on top of the quarterdeck of a sinking ship. Lewis’ critiques were always precise, doable, and never devoid of wit. In the March, April, and June 1936 issues of New Theatre magazine, the first detailed descriptions of Group Theatre training finally appeared in print. The series was entitled “Five-Fingered Exercises For the Actor By Bob Lewis.” Harking back to his Juilliard days, Lewis compared them to the basic lessons that all professional musicians started with and, decades later, often returned to. They were all simple exercises in Sense Memory with one addition: a stretching workout to increase energy. Its function was to assist the actor in voice and body projection. It was not a typical Method acting exercise but one that Bobby probably borrowed from the modern dancer Helen Tamiris. This tiny amendment prefigured Lewis’ future independent path. In November 1937, Clurman acquiesced to Bobby’s persistent pleading to set up an official Group Theatre Studio. This would be a professional outlet to train novice actors in the company’s expanding technique. There had been discussions over its merits for over two years. Now seemed to be a particularly auspicious time. Lewis banked

170 Stanislavsky in America on Golden Boy’s renown. And as soon as advertisements were posted, more than one thousand applicants jockeyed for one of fifty places. Most deemed the courses as both educational and in-house auditions for future Group productions. Kazan led the “Fundamentals of Acting” class, mostly Sense Memory work; Lewis handled “Problems of Acting,” essentially an improvisation workshop (which always opened with the endearing Bobby adage, “Talent cannot be taught, my dahlings!”); Elis Lettings instructed Voice, while Anna Sokolow coached the students in Body Movement; “Application of Technique” was a free-for-all Scene Study class that utilized like-minded Group actors as mentors and critics. Students were assigned monologues that they learned to break into Beats, LongDistance Moods, Problems, and Character. A typical opening part looked like this: BEAT

LONG-DISTANCE MOOD

PROBLEMS

CHARACTER

Working at a desk

Cold, obsequious, efficient

Writing report Military, immobile

In his “Problems” class, Bobby spoke of an innovative “third force” in actor-training. Stanislavsky, Strasberg, and even Clurman worked from the inside out to create character; they started with the actor’s feelings and thoughts. Michael Chekhov’s approach relied solely on physical means. The Bobby Lewis Technique would resolve the mind– body acting riddle by combining aspects of each. Actors schooled in his program would be equally at home in all manner of styles: kitchensink realism, contemporary poetic drama, farce, slapstick, musical theatre, classical tragedy, one-man shows, radio genres, and Hollywood. Unfortunately, Lewis entered a period in 1938–39 when he was being pulled down into too many paths simultaneously. Not only was he performing in the Group Theatre Acting productions, he had opportunities to direct there as well. It was difficult to maintain a uniform teaching schedule under those frantic conditions. The Group Theatre Studio folded after only four semesters. One hundred actors studied this new eclectic curriculum.

Style, style, style Lewis’ desire to direct grew out of his dissatisfaction with both the Group’s play selections and their disinterest in nonrealistic staging.

Bobby Lewis 171 The company had produced comic variety evenings for leftwing benefits and private celebrations, which featured amusing sketches and flippant parody. But no one considered that real theatre. Bobby dreamt of full-length performances of the classics, mounted in arresting styles with colorful makeovers. During the rehearsal summer of 1936, Lewis staged Anton Chekhov’s one-act The Marriage Proposal. Playing the role of a mousey suitor, Bobby shoved all notions of psychological realism into the orchestra pit; he pasted on a spiked moustache that branched out like a rat’s whiskers, bunched his fingers in claw-like poses, and sniffed around his intended as if she were a slice of cheese. All the Groupniks, even Stella, thought his stylized characterization and farcical buffoonery bordered on the infantile. (Although in the serious Paradise Lost, which opened six months before, Bobby fashioned a similar madcap creation: an arsonist with dyed red hair and side curls that tilted upward like flames.) Lewis’ first professional excursion in directing came three years later. Clurman had commissioned a play from the prose writer William Saroyan, who adapted one of his short stories, My Heart’s in the Highlands, for the stage. The fairytale-like plot was strange and lyrical. It had none of the qualities that appealed to a typical Group cast or Broadway audience. Bobby loved it and was determined to direct it. Because it could only be mounted in a heightened poetic style, just one Group actor succumbed to Lewis’ maniac casting requests. Most of the other performers were students from his Group Theatre Studio. My Heart’s in the Highlands received sneering reviews but Lewis was eminently satisfied with his first-time venture. Saroyan also claimed to be happy with the Group’s delicate stylistic touch. (He later savaged it as “virile realism.”) Bobby immediately accepted the Theatre Guild’s invitation to direct a second Saroyan play, The Time of Your Life. This production ended unhappily for all concerned. Lewis resumed his practice of teaching – this time at Daykarhanova’s School. He still proselytized that “acting technique should concentrate on art, not psychology.” When the Group officially dissolved in 1941, Kazan and the irrepressible Bobby attempted to a launch a new theatre-studio, The Dollar Top Theatre. This institution would not only present new plays and offer courses in theatre, it would also broadcast its dramatic renderings and high-minded symposiums on radio. Besides promising new talent, new audiences, new kinds of theatre, its brochure prospectus pledged immense financial rewards for its discerning investors. But it never got off the ground. The theatre’s title revealed its blatant fiscal naïvety.

172 Stanislavsky in America During the war years, Lewis went out to Hollywood and was under contract to MGM and 20th Century Fox. Naturally, he played the parts of comic villains. In Dragon Seed, he camped it up as a sadistic Japanese warlord, swaggering around an occupied Chinese village, boasting about the benefits of collaboration and Tokyo’s Asian Sphere of Co-Prosperity.

Director, teacher, and Method debunker In 1947, Lewis followed many of the ex-Group members back to Manhattan. Through Crawford, Bobby regained his position as a Broadway director. She felt his skill in “poetic staging” could be hitched to seriocomic musicals, the most lucrative Broadway domain in the postwar era. Crawford was prescient. This became one of Lewis’ designated specialties. He staged Brigadoon (1947), Regina (1949), Jamaica (1957), Foxy (1964), and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965). He also earned a New York Critics’ Circle Award for his direction of The Teahouse of the August Moon (1953). But, for Bobby, this was not enough. Walking through Central Park, Lewis jokingly admonished Kazan about their soul-depleting New York successes. They met Cheryl Crawford at her production office. At the end of the day, the trio made plans to establish the Actors Studio. It would be a citadel of modern acting and their generation’s rampart against Strasberg’s Affective Memory. The Studio would verily be a better version of the Dollar Top Theatre. It would educate young actors in Lewis’ evolved Stanislavsky craft, make room for blacklisted and frustrated professionals, promote new playwrights, and give Bobby a legitimate venue to direct. Radio studios in New York were being renovated for television production and they would soon require more stageworthy performers. After all, Dinah Washington could not stop belting, “TV’s the thing this year. This year.” But Lewis’ tenure at the Studio was remarkably shortlived. The students soured on him and its prospects for commercial theatre were bleak or, at best, uncertain. From April to June 1957, Lewis re-entered the Method fray when he delivered a series of eight thematic talks at the Playhouse Theatre in New York. The lectures were free and played to packed houses. Once again Strasberg had taken a center spot in America’s performing arts. He was featured in tabloid columns and magazines. Bobby’s declamations were not a heap of intellectual jetsam washed up on the

Bobby Lewis 173 Manhattan shores or some aesthetic verdict over an archaic dispute. His target was au courant. Yet Bobby only mentioned Lee once during the eight sessions – and then as a young man who attended Boleslavsky’s American Lab. Strasberg was barely credited or linked with the Group or the titled topic, “Method – or Madness.” Anecdotes about Laurette Taylor, Eleonora Duse, Ben-Ami, Michael Chekhov, Meyerhold and, mainly, Stanislavsky percolated intermittently through Lewis’ talks. Oddly, Bobby’s address on “‘Truth’ in Acting” was peppered with fallacious or fabricated stories about Stanislavsky and Vakhtangov. For instance, one historical example that was supposed to verify the System’s disconnection with foreign interlopers had Stanislavsky visiting a rehearsal of a Method ensemble in Paris. Standing right at the edge of the proscenium, the perplexed Russian master was unable to make out a single muffled word. (This was further testimony that Emotional Recall could lead to inarticulate mumbling.) Of course, no Stanislavsky or Strasberg-inspired troupe ever existed in Paris in 1934 or before. And nowhere in his writings did Stanislavsky record such an incident. Bobby’s invented event was a laugh-inducing slap at Strasberg’s Actor Studio. Lewis’ pugnacious series challenged the crucial position of Affective Memory or even the excavation of truthful emotion in the theatre. To Bobby, too much attention on the actor’s inner life was psychologically dangerous and inartistic. “Crying, after all, is not the sole object of acting. If it were, my old Aunt Minnie would be Duse!” In its place, the actor was obligated to find inspiration foremost in the text. Lewis held up Stanislavsky’s Building a Character, which he called the Bible, as scriptural proof. No living playwright who worked with Stanislavsky, beginning with Anton Chekhov, however, would concur with Bobby’s assessment. In fact, they vigorously protested that the MAT productions merely used their scripts as springboards for Stanislavsky’s hypertheatricalism and literary-inert System. (The Russian reportedly proclaimed, “An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of dialogue.”) Nonetheless, the Playhouse audience and the local press gobbled up the wilily correlative to the Actors Studio’s solemn rectitudes about actor-training. (Even Strasberg praised the lectures when they appeared in print but complained that Bobby had conflated the actor’s “work on himself” with rehearsal preparation.) Still, Robert Lewis was back on the map. His teaching opportunities swelled. He conducted classes at the Lincoln Center Theatre Repertory Workshop and was hired by the Yale School of Drama as an Adjunct Professor. In 1967, Bobby was appointed the chairman of the School’s Acting and Directing Divisions. He also directed at the allied Yale Repertory Company.

174 Stanislavsky in America Ten years later, Lewis resigned from Yale and formed the Robert Lewis Acting Company in New Rochelle. Its mission was to establish a resident Equity company in Westchester County. Bobby hoped to train an American troupe that could work within a stylized repertoire of plays from “the Greeks to the avant-garde.” Despite the participation of Maureen Stapleton and other Lewis aficionados, it stumbled out of existence. Lewis returned to private teaching, writing, and occasional directing engagements. Until the bitter end, he upheld the concept that Strasberg had glammed on to an isolated and immobile facet of the System: “Method it may be, but Stanislavsky it ain’t.” Bobby died in 1997. In his many books and interviews. Lewis never clearly stated why exercises in Affective Memory so personally repelled him. It might have been related to his closeted homosexuality. Strasberg mandated that remembered experiences had to be at least seven years in the past. This would have situated them for Bobby, during his Group days, at the time of puberty and his first sexual encounters. BOBBY LEWIS EXERCISES (1935– 97) Sources for the exercises: Bob Lewis, “Five-Finger Exercises for the Actor,” New Theatre (March, April, and June 1936); Tonio Selwart’s notebook of the Group Theatre Workshop (1938); “Kensight,” Ken (May 25, 1939); Midwest Daily Record (October 12, 1939); Robert Lewis, Method – or Madness (New York: Samuel French, 1958); Lewis, Advice to the Players (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Steven Reynold, “The Theatre Art of Robert Lewis” (Unpublished Dissertation: University of Michigan, 1981); interviews with Bobby Ellermann, Bobby Lewis, Stephen Rowe, and Tonio Selwart; and classroom observations. Relaxing and energizing 1.

2.

Lie on the floor. Try to achieve a complete state of relaxation, starting with your toes, feet, calves, thighs, shoulders, head, face, eyes, and temples. To relax them, isolate them. Tighten your fist, curl it up to get the sense of muscular tension and place of it. Tense one part, as you relax the other. For example, walk with stiff right shoulder while you relax the left shoulder. Stretching exercise: Stand with your hands stretched high over your head. Extend them until they reach the highest point. Then slowly release your hands downward. Shake them until your fingertips tingle.

Bobby Lewis 175 Concentration 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

Look at a series of matchboxes. Chose one with illustrations and inscriptions. Study it for three minutes. Put the matchbox away and attempt to draw it from your memory. Then check the result. While half of your class sings a song out loud, hum another song silently to yourself. Try not to miss a note. Count upward in eighths, beginning with eight, sixteen, twentyfour, while students attempt to interrupt you with other numbers and figures. Now start to count backwards in eighths. Look at a number of people. Pick one out and remember his (or her) dress, hair style and color, eyes and body. Turn away from the person and describe him completely to the class. Now copy that person’s gestures exactly. The degree of attention and choice of object is important. Give a cigarette to a young woman (or man). First flirt with the girl. (Your attention will be on her.) Now remember that the cigarette you gave her has been poisoned or duped. (Your Concentration should change to the cigarette.) In a simple improvisation, play a detective looking for a stolen necklace at a swank party. You meet students playing the hostess, the butler, etc. (Your Concentration should be on the missing necklace.) Then when you see a woman wearing the purloined necklace, your full attention should go to her.

Sensory perception 9. Using all your senses, work for the sensation of cold. 10. Dress for a fancy occasion, using imaginary articles from your wardrobe. 11. Set up an imaginary bar on a table counter. Now fix a complicated drink for a customer as you take orders from other customers. Imagination 12. In your mind, go on a trip to another country. Concretely think through all the steps of your journey. 13. Think of a famous person such as FDR or Garbo. Imagine visiting that person at their house. Imagine what you would wear, how you would get to their home, how you would introduce yourself and open the door, etc. 14. You have decided to leave your lover. Start to write that person a letter. Stop to tidy up your room and find a photograph of her or him.

9

Sandy Meisner

I don’t know what was worse – going to Korea or facing Sanford Meisner. Robert Duvall, 1983

Sanford “Sandy” Meisner created a distinct Stanislavsky-based technique that easily availed itself to the fast logic of mainstream Broadway or Hollywood casting: actors were selected on the basis of their appearance and ability to perform within a set range of types (without signaling their theatrical craft). Meisner claimed that he despised the ethos of show business but his aesthetic taste was analogous to the vast majority of commercial producers and directors; he hated acting that was either anchored in imitative character clichés or theory-based intellectualism. Acting, for him, had to be linked to the performer’s unique persona and his or her direct responses to their scenic environment and immediate conflicts. The Meisner Technique (labeled the “Meisnerian Method” at 20th Century Fox in 1959) was the first American-Stanislavsky practice that discarded the MAT’s identifiable notions of character creation or textural analysis. Actors had to start from scratch – that is, everyday reality – and remain at scratch. The technique had the added attraction that it did not always require the omniscient eye of a master teacher. Its principles were relatively simple, if sometimes demanding. A trained disciple could carry out nearly any session almost as well as its inventor. In that sense, Meisner Technique was the very opposite of the Michael Chekhov or Stella Adler Technique. Meisner’s ascorbic attitude in the classroom was legendary and always aimed at the matter at hand – the individual pupil. He rarely lectured on acting philosophy or diverted students with anecdotes about his illustrious career as a performer, which he modestly depicted as “generally undistinguished.” Meisner was an intensely asocial teacher and private person, a virtual recluse. Until the end of his life, he never

Sandy Meisner 177 imparted much information about himself or his work on the stage or screen. Partly for that reason, David Mamet praised Sandy as the “first authentic person” he met in the theatre. (In fact, much of Mamet’s seemingly pointless and repetitive dialogue may have originated at a Playhouse session.) Other students memorized Sandy as a “tragically singed romantic.”

Into the caldron Meisner’s background shared many similarities to Bobby Lewis’. Both grew up in Brooklyn, children of petite bourgeois Jewish families. Essentially dreamy loners, they studied music in their teens yet, more than anything, wanted to act professionally. (The two even died the same year – 1997.) At the Group, Meisner and Lewis separately fell into Stella’s contrarian orb and sought autonomous approaches for their acting styles and later methodologies. They were both natural teachers. Still Meisner was closest to Strasberg in temperament. Sandy found solace and strength inside his fortresses of artistic isolation. He eschewed all the communal glad-handing that most actors, including those in the Group, revered. For Meisner, aesthetic control and personal integrity were overriding concerns. They outshone any commercial temptation or deflections from his solitary path. In 1924, the Theatre Guild hired the nineteen-year-old Sandy as an apprentice. He appeared in five productions and attended the Guild’s School of Acting. Aaron Copland, his sometime partner, brought Harold Clurman to see Meisner in a student Guild performance. Something in Sandy’s characterization enthused Clurman and he quickly introduced him to Strasberg. Lee (then known as I. Lee Strassberg) asked Sandy to join his Chrystie Street Settlement theatre club. From the beginning, Meisner resisted Lee’s preoccupation with Emotional Recall. To him, it seemed unnecessary and, worse, didactic hocus-pocus. In 1931, however, Meisner joined the Group at Brookfield. Photographs from that summer show Sandy, during the lectures, stretched out on the outer edges of the Collective, smoking and physically disengaged. Just like the Theatre Guild directors, the Group leaders delegated him to walk-on parts. But when Strasberg imported Vakhtangov exercises into his Method training, Meisner’s phlegmatic outlook brightened. Like Lewis and many of the Group supernumeraries, Sandy took to the experimental work, fashioning dynamic characters from scraps of cloth and painted images. When Stella returned from Paris in 1934, brandishing her Stanislavsky notes and chart, Meisner felt a sense of liberation. For him,

178 Stanislavsky in America the “theoretical yoke” and doctrinaire tyranny of Strasberg had lifted. Lee, Meisner complained forty years later, “took introverted people and intensified their introversion.” Strasberg, in Sandy’s estimation, cared little about the health or artistic growth of individual company members. “He craved publicity and would do everything in his power to get more of it.” Meisner did not warm to Stella’s teaching methods either. He dismissed her as a frustrated character actress “who played out her fantasies in front of her students.” Yet Adler pushed Sandy into the cul-de-sac of self-realization: “Stella showed me who I really was” – an independent teacher and pivotal reformer of Method acting.

The Neighborhood Playhouse School After co-directing Clifford Odets’ smash agitprop Waiting for Lefty, and performing a star turn in Clurman’s production of Awake and Sing! in 1935, Meisner finally discovered a more satisfying outlet for his theatrical talents. In September, he began teaching the “Course in Art Theatre” at the Neighborhood Playhouse School. One year later, he was appointed head of its Acting Program. It was a respite that would give voice to and sustain Meisner’s discontent with conventional acting for the next five decades. An outgrowth of the Henry Street Settlement, one of several philanthropic institutions in the Lower East Side, the Neighborhood Playhouse functioned as a therapeutic arena for under-privileged youth. The three society matrons who established it in 1928 believed that stage acting and modern dance could help resolve the psychological problems that emotionally stunted many immigrant children from New York City’s teeming slums. In the first years of the Depression, the Playhouse developed a reputation for vocational guidance and high professionalism. Martha Graham and Laura Elliot, a celebrated voice coach, were among its permanent staff. In 1936, Meisner created a down-to-earth two-year acting curriculum. The first year was devoted to “building craft”; the second to character work and interpretation. Eli Wallach remembered Meisner’s courses as resolute and weirdly strenuous. Actors had to unlearn all their physical and vocal mannerisms. Good stage etiquette and singsong deliveries were utterly excised from Sandy’s classroom. For the first lessons, students were not even permitted to use words: they crawled around the floor, emitting animal cries and yaps to communicate. Improvisational scenes had few words or little dialogue either. Typically, a pupil played a lone burglar

Sandy Meisner 179 searching a house for valuables. As he rifled through imaginary drawers and closets, he had to carefully listen for sounds of the residents returning to their apartment. And like Stanislavsky and Strasberg, Sandy often ended the scene with the pound of a fist on his desk and a dismissive critique, “I don’t believe it!” Before the actor could speak, he had to master of the art of listening and behaving naturally. Everything in the first year had to be enacted with naïvety and spontaneous flair. Tony Randall, who had already achieved fame as a radio personality, comically recalled his fear of Meisner’s invariable disapproval of student work at the Playhouse. Randall claimed that he once had a nightmare that he became gravely ill in the rotunda of Grand Central Station. A curious crowd encircled him as he began to violently retch. Among the commuters was Sandy, who sternly admonished him, “Stop indicating, Randall!” While Meisner continued to act with the Group on Broadway and afterwards with Strasberg, he, more and more, perfected his teaching. Sense Memory exercises always concluded with a simple rhetorical question: “Was it you or some character who listened to the sounds of the street?” “Was it you or some character who remembered the scent of a rose?” At first he called these introductory études “Object Exercises,” then “the Reality of Doing.” Students were instructed to behave directly from the impulses of their true selves and uncouple any characterizations that were unrelated to their actual personalities. In order to do this, actors had to have an “intimate and practical knowledge” of themselves. Sandy demanded that all activities had to be performed without affect, “style,” or “in character.” Above all, the completion of the task, not its preconceived result, was what mattered. In the second year of Meisner training, character/text analysis was introduced. Sandy taught Action/Problem/Given Circumstances/Spine work. Actors had to place themselves in the specific circumstances of the scene: “as if ” they were the characters or, if that was unsatisfactory, adjust their behavior to the exact needs of the script or director. Meisner called this Particularization – an old Strasberg term. After the war, the Neighborhood Playhouse expanded and moved uptown to East 54th Street. On the walls of Meisner’s classroom were placards that summarized his uncompromising, anti-academic views: “Act Before You Think!” “Be Specific!” “It Takes Twenty Years to Become an Actor!” Hoping to avoid, the throng of problems that beset the Actors Studio and the new Stella Adler Conservatory, Sandy limited his classes to fifty enrollees each semester.

180 Stanislavsky in America After Lewis quit in 1948, some Actors Studio members wanted to bring Meisner into their fold. He was an obvious choice, especially after he directed the second of their CBS Television series. But this infuriated Strasberg. After inviting Sandy to dinner, Lee utterly berated his former pupil. The Studio had no need for his developing Technique. Strasberg put it bluntly: “What makes you think you can teach?” Sandy only offered up a tight smile.

Film acting In 1958, Meisner left New York to head 20th Century Fox’s New Talent Division in Los Angeles. His job was to train young film actors and assist producers in winnowing out future stars from their stable of novice performers. Sandy found it a thankless undertaking. It reinforced his innate disgust of show business. Eager juveniles and starlets fervently attended and just as suddenly exited his classes in quick succession. (One Fox producer warned a fresh-face ingénue that Meisner’s training would destroy her charming and singular personality.) During his six years in Hollywood, Meisner perfected the exercises most identified with his Technique, the Repetition Work. He felt that statements that echoed and re-echoed what was just heard could tap into the unconscious and emotional wellsprings of the student. Instead of advancing the storyline, Repetition Exercises forced the actors to “stay in the moment,” discover their partners’ true reactive states, respond accordingly, and obstruct any anticipation of preplanned dialogue or action. The Repetition Exercises were executed with a special intensity, often continuing for twenty to thirty minutes. Changes from the repeated lines had to occur naturally and over a period of time. The rules were simple: “to listen, to answer, and to respond in the moment.” This had the power to impede clever or well-designed improvisations. Actors had to concentrate on the unforeseen emotional consequences that erupted unaffectedly from their partners. This was “living on the stage.” While at 20th Century Fox, Meisner acted in two films. He debuted as an oily prosecutor in Story On Page One, a courtroom melodrama and Rita Hayworth vehicle, written and directed by Odets. Meisner’s coterie praised his fascinating and detailed performance, but Sandy regretted the entire experience. He felt that he had altered his thinly drawn character into a reptilian showboat. Although the Meisner Technique had accommodated itself well to film acting, Sandy claimed that he instinctively reverted to his theatrical roots.

Sandy Meisner 181 Meisner rejoined the Neighborhood Playhouse School in 1964. Over the next thirty years, and despite serious health problems, he continued to teach his distinctive Technique. The obscurity that he so relished was shaken when a feature-length documentary, Sanford Meisner: The American Theatre’s Best Kept Secret, was broadcast in 1985. Theatre critics considered it the most insightful filmed biography of an acting teacher and it greatly enhanced Sandy’s growing stature. He retired from the Playhouse nine years later. SANDY MEISNER EXERCISES (1935– 9 4) Sources for the exercises: Transcriptions of Sanford Meisner’s lectures, “The Meisnerian Method” given at 20th Century Fox Film Studios (1959–60); Stanford Meisner, On Acting (New York: Vintage, 1987); Larry Silverberg, The Sanford Meisner Approach (New York: Smith and Krause, 1994); interviews with David Garfield, Sarah Hoskins, David Jacobson, Diane Keaton, Zach Matalon, David Ornston, Mala Powers, Liana Pai, and Robert Scott; and classroom observations. Reality of doing 1. 2.

Listen to sounds coming from the street. Describe them. [Question: Did you listen in character or as yourself?] Silently sing a favorite song to yourself. [Question: Was it you or a character who was singing?]

Repetition 3.

4.

Basic repetition exercise: Sit in a chair directly facing your partner in a second chair. Verbally make a simple observation about his physical appearance such as: (a) “You are wearing a red plaid shirt.” He repeats your comment, (b) “I am wearing a red plaid shirt.” You repeat your statement, (c) “You are wearing a red plaid shirt.” And again he repeats the response. Listening carefully to him, you repeat (yet again) your initial observation. This continues for four or five minutes. Second stage: This begins like the basic repetition exercise but allows for a change in thought. For instance: (a) “You are wearing a red plaid shirt.” (b) “I am wearing a red plaid shirt.”

182 Stanislavsky in America This may transform into: (c) (d) (e) (f)

“You smiled.” “I smiled?” “You smiled.” “I smiled.”

… and so forth. 5.

Third stage: Here a line is repeated until you receive an emotional response from your partner. For instance: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h) (i)

“You look pretty today.” “I look pretty today?” “You are embarrassed by my statement.” “I am embarrassed by your statement?” “Yes, you are embarrassed.” “I think you’re a creep.” “I’m a creep?” “Yes, a creep.” “What is a creep?”

… and so forth. Three-moment game The assertion-reaction logic of the repetition exercises is opened up into an interpretative dialog. 6.

You make an opening remark or question, to which your partner responds. Then you interpret his remark. For instance: (a) “I don’t like your hair.” (b) “I don’t care what you like.” (c) “I offended you.”

Independent activity 7.

Choose an activity that is crucial for you to complete in a short period of time. For example, you borrowed your mother’s best dress, without asking her permission, and you spilled red wine on it. She will be furious to learn that you borrowed it, let alone stained it. In addition, your mother is coming home in one hour

Sandy Meisner 183

8.

9.

to dress for the Oscar ceremony. You must remove the stain and make the dress look like it is as good as new. Knock at the door: Another obstacle, a second person, is added to the above exercise. Needing to see you, your partner knocks at the door. You interpret the sound. For example, you might say, “That was a furious knock.” Your partner enters the room. You must continue with your independent activity. If your activity should be done in solitude, you have to find a way of removing your partner from the room. Your dialog starts with repetition work. The partner begins, “That was a furious knock?” … and so forth. Wishful thinking: If you had $25,000 but could only spend it on an assortment of fun, nonpractical things (with a maximum of $8000 on any single item), what would you buy?

Scene work 10. Interpretation of a nursery rhyme: Take a familiar rhyme from your childhood and locate its essential dramatic elements – its characters, conflicts, and Actions. Now perform it, using only the words you remember. 11. Create a scene in which you use three emotions – for example, fear, hate, and love. You may use other actors but you are the only speaking character.

Appendix: Studio Programs Course work

American Laboratory Theatre Fall Term October 8, 1928 [TA Apr 28]

Oscar Bernner Richard Boleslavsky John Mason Brown Margrete Dessoff Elsa Findlay Emily Hewitt Elizaveta Anderson-Ivantzoff La Sylphe Margaret Prendergast McLean James Murray Maria Ouspenskaya Prof William Tilly

Principles of Stage Make-up The Art of Acting History of the Theatre Voice Production Dalcroze Eurythmics Body Rhythm Ballet Ballet and Corrective Gymnastics Principles of Phonetics Fencing The Technique of Acting Correct Speech for the Stage

Maria Ouspenskaya School Of Dramatic Art Spring 1939 – Three-Year Program

Maria Ouspenskaya (with Alexander Koiransky) Margaret Prendergast McLean Victor Chain Jacques Cartier

The Technique of Acting Principles of Phonetics Fencing Rhythmic Physical Control (Dance and Calis Make-Up)

Appendix 185

Group Theatre Studio Spring 1939

Elia Kazan Robert Lewis Elis Letting Anna Sokolow

Fundamentals of Acting Problems of Acting (Improvisation) Voice Body Movement; Application of Technique (Scene Study)

Michael Chekhov Studio Fall 1941 Michael Chekhov George Shdanoff Alan Harkness Beatrice Straight Deirdre Hurst Ann Veith Greenley Ruth Pusch H.L. Pusch

Acting Acting Acting Acting Acting Speech-Formation Eurythmy Gymnastics; Music Appreciation; Choral Singing; Fencing; Makeup

Actors Laboratory Workshop Spring 1947

Phoebe Brand Will Lee Art Smith Danny Mann Benjamin Zemach Sam Levene Jacobina Caro Margaret Prendergast McLean Jan Gusick Gene Callnon Aline MacMahon, Rose Hobart Curt Conway

Acting Acting Production Group Acting Advanced Acting Production Group Body Work Speech Fencing Stage-craft Script reading Acting/Assistant to Art Smith

Selected bibliography

General Christine Edwards, The Stanislavsky Heritage (New York: New York University Press, 1965). John Gassner (editor), Producing the Play (NY: Dryden Press, 1941). Mel Gordon, The Stanislavsky Technique: Russia (NY: Applause Books, 1988). Erika Munk (editor), Stanislavski and America (NY: Hill and Wang, 1966). Yale/Theater 8/2–3 (Spring 1977).

American Laboratory Theatre Richard Boleslavsky, Acting: The First Six Lessons (NY: Theatre Arts Books, 1933). J.W. Roberts, Richard Boleslavsky, His Life and Work in the Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981). Stella Adler, “Notes from American Lab Classes” (Unpublished, 1925–26). Richard Boleslavsky, “The Creative Theatre” (Unpublished Transcriptions of Lectures, December 1923). Lee Strasberg, “American Lab Notebook” (Unpublished, January 1925). Ronald Willis, “The American Laboratory Theatre, 1923–30” (Unpublished Dissertation: University of Iowa, 1968).

The Group Theatre Helen Krich Chinoy (editor), Educational Theatre Journal (December 1976) (“Reunion: A Self-Portrait of the Group Theatre”). Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945). Mel Gordon (editor), The Drama Review (T104 Winter 1984) (Special Issue on The Group Theatre). Wendy Smith, Real Life Drama (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). “Brookfield Centre Notebook” (Private Collection, 1932). Raymond Gasper, “A Study of the Group Theatre and Its Contributions to Theatrical Production in America” (Unpublished Dissertation, Ohio State University, 1955). Lee Strasberg, “Johhny Johnson Rehearsals” (Private Transcription, 1936).

Selected bibliography 187

Russian émigré teachers Raikin Ben-Ari, Habima (NY: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957) [translated from the Yiddish by A.H. Gross and I. Soref]. Michael Chekhov, Lessons for the Professional Actor (NY: Performing Arts Books, 1985). ——, On the Technique of Acting (NY: HarperPerennial, 1991). ——, To the Actor (NY: Harper & Rowe, 1953). Horton Foote, Beginnings A Memoir (NY: Scribner, 2001) Andrius Jilinsky, The Joy of Acting (NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 1990). Charles Marowitz, The Other Chekhov (NY: Applause Books, 2004). Laurence Senelick (editor), Wandering Stars (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992). Judith Malina, “Dramatic Workshop Diary” (Unpublished, 1945). George Shdanoff, “Memories” (Unpublished Memoir, 1985).

Actors Laboratory Actors Laboratory Prospectus (Privately Issued, 1945). Nora Salvi, “History of the Actors Laboratory, Inc., 1941–50” (Unpublished Dissertation: University of California, Los Angeles, 1969).

Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio Cindy Adams, Lee Strasberg, the Imperfect Genius of the Actors Studio (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1980). Jerry Benjamin, Actors Studio Notebook (1960–1964) (NY: Privately printed, 1976). Edward Easty, On Method Acting (Florence, AL: House of Collectibles, 1966). David Garfield, A Player’s Place (NY: Macmillan Publishing 1980). Robert Hethmon (editor), Strasberg at the Actors Studio (NY: Viking Press, 1965). Foster Hirsch, A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio (NY: W.W. Norton, 1984). Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life (NY: Knopf, 1988). Lee Strasberg, A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987). Actors Studio Handbook (NY: Privately printed, 1965). Jean Scharfenberg, “Lee Strasberg, Teacher” (Unpublished Dissertation: University of Wisconsin, 1963). Lee Strasberg, “Method Project” (Unpublished Transcription, 1975).

Stella Adler Stella Adler, The Technique of Acting (NY: Bantom Books, 1988). ——The Art of Acting (NY: Applause Books, 2000). Peter Manso, Brando: The Biography (NY: Hyperion, 1994). Joanna Rotta, Acting With Adler (NY: Limelight, 2000).

188 Stanislavsky in America

Sandy Meisner Sanford Meisner, On Acting (NY: Vintage, 1987). Larry Silverberg, The Sanford Meisner Approach (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1994). Sanford Meisner, “Class Outline for 20th-Century-Fox Studio” (1959–60).

Bobby Lewis Robert Lewis, Method or Madness (NY: Samuel French, Inc., 1958). ——Advice to the Players (NY: Harper & Rowe, 1980). ——Slings and Arrows (NY: Stein and Day, 1984). Steven Reynolds, The Art of Robert Lewis (Unpublished Dissertation: University of Michigan, 1981).

Index

Actors Lab 40, 92, 104, 114–24, 138, 187 Actors Studio 40, 82, 114, 125, 128–46, 160, 172, 173, 179, 180 Actors Studio Theatre 141–42 Actors Theatre 84 Adler, Jacob 150, 152, 154–55 Adler, Luther 55, 71–73, 151–52, 159, 167 Adler, Sarah 150, 158 Adler, Stella xiv, 25, 33, 48, 54–55, 58–61, 65–66, 71, 73, 90, 100, 119, 129, 131, 150–64, 167–69, 171, 176–79 American Actors Company 102 American Center for Stanislavsky Theatre Art 102 American Laboratory Theatre xiii, 16–39, 40, 42, 53, 62, 68, 70, 80, 116, 143, 151–53, 166, 173, 185 American Negro Theatre 92 American Repertory Theatre and Studio 33 American Theatre Wing 84, 102, 128 Anderson, John 63 Anderson, Maxwell 51 Andreyev, Leonid 9 Andrius Jilinsky’s Actors Workshop xiii, 102 An-sky, S. 87 Antoine, André 2 Ardrey, Robert 72, 74 Aronson, Boris 42, 127, 151 ARTEF 89, 91, 114, 115 Astrova, Maria 84–85

Atkinson, Brooks 50, 55 Ayliff, H.K. 30–31 Baker, Carroll 137 Bakst, Leon 18 Baldwin, James 142 Balieff, Nikolai ix, 80–81, 101 Bankhead, Tallulah 128, 129 Barker, Margaret 48, 53 Barrymore, John 30 Baxter, Anne 26 Beethoven, Ludwig van 51, 56, 63 Belasco, David xii Bel Geddes, Norman 27 Ben-Ami, Jacob 151, 166, 167, 173 Ben-Ari, Raikin xiv, 89–90, 92, 106–7, 158 Bengal, Ben 117 Berkeley, Busby 73 Bernstein, Leonard 140–41 Birman, Serfima 87 Blaue Vogel 19 Bogdanov Russian Theatre 103 Bohnen, Roman 44–47, 115, 116, 118, 137 Boleslavsky, Richard xiii, 11, 12, 16–39, 40, 42, 43, 50, 54, 55, 62, 89, 96, 101, 131, 143, 151, 154, 168 Boleslavsky, Natasha 17, 30 Boyer, Charles 30, 31 Brand, Phoebe 57, 61, 83, 116–17 Brandeis Insitiute 90, 92 Brando, Marlon 131, 133, 137, 142, 146, 150, 159, 160 Braun, Heywood x Brecht, Bertolt 67, 158

190 Index Breuer, Bessie 134 Brice, Fanny 55 Bridges, Lloyd 115 Bromberg, Joseph 56–57, 63–64, 73, 83, 115 Bruce, Lenny 32 Brynner, Yul 100 Bulgakov, Barbara 24, 82–84, 100 Bulgakov, Leo 24, 82–84, 100 Bulgakov, Mikhail 6 Bulgakov Studio of Stage Art xiii, 83 Burton, Richard 144 Carnovsky, Morris 61, 62–64, 67, 72, 73, 83, 104, 114, 116, 118, 121, 137, 144, 152 Carter, Huntley x Challee, William 83 Chamber Art Theatre xiv, 86 Chauvre-Souris ix, 18, 79–81, 101 Chayefsky, Paddy 94 Chekhov, Anton 6, 7, 10, 14, 24, 74, 80, 96, 132, 133, 141–42, 171, 173 Chekhov, Michael 11, 17, 92, 96–104, 109–10, 118, 119, 167, 169–70, 173, 176 Chekhov Theatre Studio xiv, 79, 99–100, 103–4, 169 Chekhov, Xenia 98 Chernetskaya, Inna 91 Chicago Art Theatre 84 Chicago Repertory Group 63 Chile, Edith xiv Chronegk, Ludwig 4 Civic Repertory Theatre 65, 166 Cliff, Montgomery 129, 140 Clurman, Harold 40–74, 115, 128, 130, 131, 151–55, 157, 159–60, 165, 168–71, 177–78 Cobb, Lee J. 73, 116, 128, 137, 139 Cooper, Florence 63 Cooper, Gary 104 Copeau, Jacques 42, 59 Copland, Aaron 177 Coppola, Francis Ford 143 Corey, Jeff 115, 121, 137 Corso, Frank 140 Coward, Noel 39, 55 Coy, Walter 63 Craig, Gordon 17, 126, 127

Crawford, Cheryl 40–69, 125, 128–29, 131–35, 157, 168, 172 Crawford, Joan 30, 70 Cronyn, Hume 118, 137 Crowley, Alice Lewisohn 21–22 Curitz, Michael 73 Dalcroze, Émile Jacques 23, 27, 86, 91 Dandridge, Dorothy 120 Da Silva, Howard 116, 121, 137 Dassin, Jules 115–16, 137 Daykarhanova, Tamara 31, 80–82, 104–6 Dean, James 137, 142 De Niro, Robert 142, 150 Dern, Bruce 142 Dickens, Charles 11 Dietrich, Marlene 30, 129 Dikki, Alexander 11 Dollar Top Theatre 171, 172 Drama Circle xiv Dramatic Workshop xiv, 89–90, 158–59 Dreiser, Theodore 67 Duncan, Isadora 91 Dunnock, Mildred 102, 137 Duse, Eleonora 173 Duvall, Robert 176 Eisenstein, Sergei 158 Elischeff, Horace 151 Elliot, Laura 178 Erdman, Nikolai 6 Erickson, Leif 72 Ewell, Tom 132 Fagin, Myron C. 121 Farmer, Frances 72, 74 Farmer, Virginia 51, 62, 115 Ferguson, Francis 30 First Studio 10–12, 17–18, 20, 22, 23, 43, 53, 79, 84, 85, 96–98, 101–2, 115, 116, 167 Flake, Dick 115 Fontaine, Joan 102 Foote, Horton 102 Friedland, David 94–95 Gable, Clark 30 Galpern, Lasar 85–86 Garbo, Greta 31 Garfein, Jack 140, 142

Index 191 Garfield, John 41, 69–74, 128, 131, 139 Gazarra, Ben 140 Gazzo, Michael 140 Gellendre Theatre Studio 102 Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen 1–2, 4, 5 George Shdanoff Acting Training Center 104 Germanova, Maria 12, 18, 103 Gest, Morris ix, xi–xii, 20, 83 Gilbert, Lou 137 Gielgud, John 144 Giotto 53 Glinka, Mikhail 80 Glagolin, Boris 89 Gnesin, Maurice xiv, 95–96 Goldina, Miriam 90, 92–93 Goldschmidt, Lena 67 Gogol, Nikolai 80, 168 Goliezovsky, Kasdan 85 Goodman School of Drama xiv, 95–96 Gordin, Jacob 152 Gordon, Michael xiv Gorelik, Mordecai 72 Gorky, Maxim 6, 80, 87 Goya 53 Graham, Martha 64, 91, 178 Granovsky, Alexis 85 Green, Paul 43–50, 67–69 Grosz, George 64 Grotowski, Jerzy 146 Group Theatre 31, 40–78, 80, 85, 127, 130, 144–45, 151–57, 165–72, 177, 179, 186 Group Theatre Studio xiv, 72, 169–71 Guthrie, Tyrone 94 Habima 79, 86–96, 144 Hamsen, Knut 9 Harris, Julie 137 Harrison, Rex 104 Hatfield, Hurd 100 Hauptmann, Gerhart 14 Hayworth, Rita 180 Hecht, Ben 159 Hepburn, Katherine 32 Heston, Charlton 95 Hitchcock, Alfred 100 Hogaboom, Maurine 93

Hopkins, Arthur 21, 30 Hunter, Kim 137 Hurok, Sol 98, 101 Howard, Sidney 31 Humphrey, Doris 91 Huston, Walter 31 Ibsen, Henrik 6, 7, 14, 128, 130 Itkin, Bella 96 Itkin, David xiv, 95–96 Ito, Michio 91 James, Daniel Lewis 90 Jewish Art Theatre 151 Jilinsky, Andrius 11, 12, 82, 98, 100–102, 110–13, 118 Kachalov, Vassily x, 18 Kahn, Otto xii Kalich, Bertha 166, 167 Karnot, Stephen 62 Kaye, Danny 16 Kazan, Elia 41, 51, 62–64, 66, 71, 72, 74, 125, 128–140, 165, 170–72 Kean, Edmund 54 Keitel, Harvey 142 Kingsley, Sidney 56–59, 70, 153 Kirkland, Alexander 57, 69 Knipper-Chekhova, Olga 153 Koiransky, Alexander 22 Kollwitz, Käthe 53 Kommisarjevsky School of Acting xiv Kraber, Tony 51, 63–64, Kraft, Hyman 129 Laban, Rudolf von 85 Labor Stage 92, 131 Latvian State Theatre 98 Laurents, Arthur 140–41 Lawrence, Marc 119 Lawson, John Howard 51, 55, 58, 121 Lazareff, Ivan 84–85 Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute 142 Le Gallienne, Eva 70, 166 Lettings, Elis 170 Levene, Sam 118, 137 Leverett, Lewis 62, 83, 169 Levy, Melvin 60

192 Index Lewis, Bobby 25, 48, 50–52, 61, 63–64, 70, 72, 82, 116, 125, 131–36, 156, 165–75, 177, 180 Lewisohn, Ludwig xi Lincoln Center Theatre Repertory Workshop 173 Lipton, James 165 Lithuanian State Theatre 101 Logan, Joshua 30, 134, 141–42 Looke, Sam 117 Loy, Myrna 31 Lynn, Eleanor 72 Lynn, Elizabeth 92 MacMahon, Aline 118 Macgowan, Kenneth 70 McCarthy, Joseph 57, 114, 128, 138–39 Maeterlinck, Maurice 9 Mahler, Gustav 53 Mailer, Norman 125, 136 Malden, Karl 137 Maly Theatre 5, 96 Mamet, David 177 Mann, Danny 115, 118 March, Frederic 129 Maria Ouspenskaya School of Dramatic Art xiv, 31–39, 185 Martin, Mary 129 Matthau, Walter 90 Mayor, A. Hyatt 26 Mchedelov, Vakhtan 87–88 Meisner, Sanford xiv, 25, 52–53, 61, 62–63, 65–66, 134, 146, 169, 176–83 Meredith, Burgess 142 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 58–60, 62, 71, 81, 88, 158, 168, 173 Michael Chekhov Studio 100, 186 Miller, Arthur 129–31, 134, Miller, Paula 48, 58, 137 Miriam Goldina Studio 93 Moliére 39 Monroe, Marilyn 100, 120, 137 Moore, Sonia 102 Moscow Art Players 79, 98–99, 101, 168–69 Moscow Art Theatre ix–xiii, 3–15, 16–24, 58–60, 67, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 96–97, 100–101, 103,

126–27, 141, 144, 153, 155, 168, 176 Moscow Art Theatre of Prague 18, 84, 101, 103 Motherwell, Hiram x Murphy, Audie 119 Nazimova, Alla 30 Neal, Patrica 104 Neighborhood Playhouse xiv, 21, 91, 94, 177–79, 181 Nelson, Ruth 47, 52–53, 83, 116, 152 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir 3–13, 80, 82, 93 Newman, Paul 137 New Theatre School xiv, 63, 85, 91 New York Troupe 101–2 Obey, André 53 Odets, Clifford 41, 48, 52, 62–63, 65–66, 70–74, 116, 128, 139, 143, 157, 171, 178, 180 Offenbach 56 Okhlopkov, Nikolai 58 Oenslager, Donald 71 Olivier, Laurence 146 O’Neill, Eugene 39, 141 Ouspenskaya, Maria 11, 16, 23–39, 40, 42, 43, 70, 81–83, 143, 146, 155, 166 Pacino, Al 142, 143 Page, Geraldine 137, 141 Palmer, Lilli 104 Papp, Joe 120 Pargod 90 Patten, Dorothy 48, 152 Pearlman, S.J. 129 Peck, Gregory 131 Penn, Arthur 142 Phillips, Wendell 44 Piscator, Erwin 67–68, 89–90, 158–59 Piscator, Maria-Ley 89–90, 158 Players Company 84 Polish Theatre Lab 146 Polonsky, Abraham 139 Polus 54 Powell, Dawn 51, 55 Powers, Mala 100

Index 193 Provincetown Players 83 Pushkin, Alexander 80 Quinn, Anthony 120 Quintero, José 141 Randall, Tony 179 Rapoport, Iosif 51, 53–54 Ravel, Maurice 51 Reinhardt, Max 83, 92, 98, 158 Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center 139 Revue Russe 18–19 Ribot, Théodule-Armand 9 Rice, Elmer 83 Riveria, Chita 140 Rives, Amelie 29 Robbins, Jerome 140–41 Robert Lewis Acting Company 174 Rosenstein, Sophie 26–27 Rothafel, Roxy 85 Salvini, Tomasso 4, 7, 8 San Francisco Academy of Allied Arts 86 Saroyan, William 72, 171 Saylor, Oliver x Schildkraut, Joseph 30 Schmidt, Mark 51 Schneider, Benno 91–92, 115, 116 Schreiber, Elsa 104 Schwartz, Maurice 90, 151 Second Moscow Art Theatre 98, 100–102, 103 Selznick, Irene 130 Shankar, Uday 64 Shaw, George Bernard 22 Shaw, Irwin 73, 74, 117 Shdanoff, George 99, 102–4, 117–18 Sherwood, Robert 133 Sidney, Sylvia 73 Sifton, Claire and Paul 50 Simonov, Reuben 93 Smishlayev, Valentin 11, 12 Smith, Art 64, 66, 116, 118 Sokoloff, Vladimir 100 Sokolow, Anna 170 Soloviova, Vera 11, 18, 81–82, 100–102 Sondheim, Stephen 140–41 Stage Society 100

State Jewish Theatre (GOSET) 85, 91 Steiger, Rod 137 Steinbeck, John 132, 137 Steiner, Rudolf 97 Stella Adler’s Conservatory of Acting 100, 159–61, 179 Stockton, Miriam Kimball 20–21 Stoddard, Eunice 83, 145 Strasberg, Lee 25, 28, 40–78, 82, 99, 117, 118, 125–128, 134–37, 138, 140, 141–49, 150, 152–54, 156–57, 165, 167–70, 173, 174, 177–80 Strasberg, Susan 144 Stravinsky, Igor 103 Straight, Beatrice 99, 100, 150 Straight, Dorothy 22 Strindberg, August 97 Stuart, Irene 82 Studio of the Theatre xiv Studio of Theatre Arts 95 Sulerzhitsky, Leopold xii, 8–12, 17, 79, 101 Tairov, Alexander 81 Tamara Daykarhanova School for the Stage xiv, 82, 92, 102, 171 Tamiris, Helen 55, 169 Tamiroff, Akim 24, 83, 100 Tandy, Jessica 133 Tarcai, Mary 116–17 Taylor, Laurette 84, 130, 173 Teatr Polski 17–18 Tenney, Jack B. 120–21 Thatcher, Molly Day 62, 134 Theatre Collective 62, 85 Theatre Guild 41–43, 49–50, 68, 91, 171, 177 Théâtre Libré 2, 5 Theatre of Action 62–63, 132, 169 Theatre of Russian Drama 84 Theatre Union 62 Tolstoy, Alexei 6 Tolstoy, Lev 9 Tone, Franchot 44, 48, 69–70, 73, 141, 152, 167 Torn, Rip 137 Toulouse-Lautrec 53 Toy Theatre 89 Turgenev, Ivan 9

194 Index Unser Teater 93–94 Vakhtangov, Evgeni 11, 12, 17, 51–55, 57, 61, 68, 79, 87–88, 91–95, 97, 100–102, 115, 137, 143–44, 155, 167, 173, 177 Vakhtangov Theatre 53, 58, 82, 93, 144 Van Fleet, Jo 137 Vardi, David 93–94 Vardi-Yoalit Theatre Studio 94 Vassiliev, Sergius 81 Vera Soloviova Studio of Acting 79–113 Vollmoeller, Karl 27 Walker, Alix 51 Wallach, Eli 137, 178–79 Warren, Brett xiv Washington, Dinah 172 Weidman, Charles 91 Weill, Kurt 67–69, 92, 129, 134 Weisgal, Meyer 89 West, Mae 93

Westchester Repertory Company 83 Whitmore, James 132 Wigman, Mary 64 Wilder, Thornton 129 Williams, Frances 53 Williams, Tennessee 129–33, 137–38 Winchell, Walter 66, 104 Wood, Ed 146 Woollcott, Alexander x Workers Acting Studio 91, 115 Workers Laboratory Theatre 62, 169 Yeats, William Butler 22 Yiddish Art Theatre 90, 151 Yoalit, Khava 93 Zelitsky, Vladimir 85 Zemach, Benjamin 82, 87–88, 107–9, 119 Zemach, Nakhum 86–90, 93 Zhdanov, Andrei 155 Zola, Émile, 1, 2