The method, p.12
The Method, page 12
In the summer of 1911, a producer hired a group of recent graduates of the Adashev School to perform in the ancient Ukrainian town of Novgorod-Seversky. Vakhtangov led the company, directing eleven of the twelve plays they performed, including works by Ibsen and Maupassant. The resulting productions were by all reports a success, and Stanislavski deputized Vakhtangov to lead semi-clandestine workshops in the “system,” spreading the technique within the ranks of the young Moscow Art Theatre actors without further alienating the older company members. “Work,” Stanislavski told the young man. “If anyone interferes, I’ll tell them to leave. I need a new theatre. Go on working quietly. Don’t mention my name.” Vakhtangov’s classes, which he insisted on teaching in his own way without Stanislavski’s interference, centered on focus, relaxation, and naïveté.
Before long, these classes had attracted a following too large to keep secret. It was time for Stanislavski to make his move. He started by recruiting the best early-career actors he could find from the ranks of the MAT, Suler’s classes, and Vakhtangov’s workshops. He found them a space like his beloved, mythologized barn in Pushkino, but in Moscow. There, Stanislavski would create an environment dedicated to experimental inquiry and excellence in art, one that merged his stage ethics with his new ideas of the “system,” alongside Suler’s Tolstoyan collective ideals.
At first it was simply called the Studio, but within a few years it would be called the First Studio. It was here, in a shabby room above a cinema called the Lux, that the version of the “system” brought to America was born.
The First Studio opened in 1912. Stanislavski paid for it all out of pocket. Its members—soon dubbed studytsi—numbered approximately fifteen, including Vakhtangov, Boleslavsky, and two young actresses, Vera Soloviova and Maria Ouspenskaya, who would go on to become accomplished acting teachers in the United States. Just as the more realistic style of acting had been forged throughout Europe in smaller private clubs rather than on large stages, the “system” would come to fame in Russia in a space much smaller and more intimate than the Moscow Art Theatre. The room above the Lux seated only fifty people, and the “stage” was merely the part of the floor between the first row of the audience and the back wall. There was no wing space, no fly space, and no backstage.
Stanislavski did not lead the First Studio. He was, rather, an Eminence, materializing within its walls to lecture on the “system,” run the occasional workshop, and give notes at rehearsals. It was left to Suler to teach the “system” and help the young actors adapt it to the practical needs of production. The actors were too star-struck to learn from Stanislavski, and he was too enraptured by his own ideas to explain them well. Besides, he needed to limit his workload. His health problems continued unabated, and he still ran the family factories and had responsibilities at the Moscow Art Theatre.
Suler’s influence on the First Studio extended beyond acting technique and into ethics and philosophy. “Why did he love the Studio so much? Because it fulfilled one of his greatest life goals,” Stanislavski said. “To bring together people with each other, create a common cause, common goals, common labor and joy, to fight banality, violence, and injustice, to serve love and nature, beauty and god.” These were Tolstoyan precepts, and Suler believed that art—and the process by which art was made—could implant those precepts here on earth. The world was a dishonest and broken place, but people were fundamentally good and had the potential to make the world truthful and beautiful. Theater could enable this by telling the truth, and by revealing the unspoken common language that connected us all. These ideas would go on to influence his studytsi long after his death. Vakhtangov, for example, once declared, in terms Suler would have been proud of, that “the purpose of art is to force people to be more attentive to each other, soften their hearts, and ennoble their actions.”
Suler was no dictator. He and Stanislavski welcomed ideas from the studytsi, placing a notebook at the entrance to the First Studio. Anyone who wished to add a complaint or to propose an exercise, an area of inquiry, or a text to work on had merely to write their desire in the book, and Suler would endeavor to find time to fulfill it. While most of these books do not survive, many members of the Studio went on to write memoirs. From these we know that the Studio’s work focused on many Stanislavskian precepts, including muscle relaxation, circles of attention, dividing a role into tasks, and the throughline of action. At times, students would bring in parts of the “system” they found challenging, and Suler would design exercises to enable their work.
In order to encourage the imagination, actors would bring in songs, or short stories, or images, and create whole performance pieces out of them, called études. At other times, the actors would work on finding inner truth using improvisation. Suler would make up scenarios and the actors would all have to behave as if that scenario were true without overdoing it, concentrating on the simple tasks that lay before them. They might repeat a scenario many times over the course of days or even weeks, adding new circumstances, or new problems for the actors to solve. These improvisations could grow quite elaborate. In one, the studytsi all played workers in a tailor’s shop, with their specific jobs assigned to them by Suler. At first they focused on accurately portraying their various jobs, but soon little scenes began to grow out of the busy fifteen-person scrum. Scenes that appeared to have potential would be called out by Suler for further development, while the other studytsi would be given different prompts to awaken “something alive in them.” The exercise would then be repeated until a short ensemble play developed.
The studytsi also explored sense memory and affective memory. As Soloviova described it, “affective memory … starts from sense memory. I recall how hot my glass of tea was. I recall how cold it was when I was walking to the studio.” The senses awakened the memory, the memory awakened the emotion. They developed this ability for the times “when our inspiration or, in Stanislavski’s expression, when ‘Apollo’ does not answer readily. But if your intuition gives you what you need, you don’t have to use affective memory.” In those instances, Stanislavski would say not to worry about any particular technique, “just thank Apollo and act!” Less focus was paid to external matters. Having already completed years of vocal and physical training, the studytsi knew how to dance, fence, and modify their voices to fit a role.
In the First Studio’s early years, Suler also worked with his charges to strip away all theatricality from their performances. While adapting Chekhov’s The Witch, a short story about a sexton who suspects his wife of witchcraft, the Studio’s space was divided into several booths. Each booth could only seat the studytsi playing the Sexton and the Witch, and they all rehearsed simultaneously, forcing an extreme restraint on the actors.
All of this work proved greatly influential on the First Studio’s inaugural production, The Wreck of the Ship “Hope” by the Dutch playwright Herman Heijermans, directed by Richard Boleslavsky. The play, a realist drama set in a fishing village rife with conflict between the fishermen and their bosses, was a natural fit for the company. It combined the kind of period setting and anthropological focus that Stanislavski sought with the sociopolitical themes Suler loved. And with the exception of Vakhtangov, no one at the First Studio was more prepared to direct than Boleslavsky. He had already staged many plays with the Polish Hearth, and as one of Stanislavski’s favorites, he had more practical experience with the “system” than almost anyone else in the company. As Vera Soloviova put it, “Richard was taking [Stanislavski’s] teaching with all his artistic heart and using it only after he had digested it well.”
He did not, however, slavishly re-create his mentor’s methods. For one thing, he didn’t have the luxury of rehearsing for several years. He instead had only a few weeks, and the actors had around two hours a day to rehearse after their work at the Moscow Art Theatre was done. Boleslavsky began with table work, taking the actors through the play, dividing it into bits, and working with something he called “the long-distance mood.” Stanislavski had previously discussed a play’s supertask (or its “spine”), the central action that motors it forward. But the long-distance mood was a central image that unified a production’s atmosphere and aesthetics. For The Wreck of the Ship “Hope,” that central image was, naturally, the sea. Boleslavsky worked with the actors, creating new exercises to lead them toward the nautical rhythms and physicality of fisherman.
Boleslavsky pulled the actors back from self-indulgence and the fetishization of emotion—two pitfalls with the “system” that people were already beginning to notice—and staged the play with simplicity and dynamism. The size of the Lux helped Boley’s work; the space was so small that anything that smacked of normal stage acting felt too big. Lacking money, adequate performance space, footlights, a ceiling grid from which to hang lights, or backstage space, the studytsi invented madly. Commenting on the production later, Boleslavsky said they “used our ingenuity to make Dutch fisherman out of scraps of makeup and costumes from the [Moscow Art] Theatre’s discontinued plays.” They raided the props storeroom as well, repainting and touching up pieces of furniture until they looked sufficiently homespun and Dutch. Lacking room for a cloth backdrop, they painted a landscape onto windowpanes and hung them against draperies on the back wall.
Yet the production nearly ended before anyone could see it. The members of the First Studio felt overworked and underrehearsed, the exhaustion of toiling away into the small hours of the morning clearly catching up with them. As one member put it, others “were dissatisfied with their roles” and the process writ large. At first Stanislavski advised Boleslavsky to fire the malingerers. Weeding out those who weren’t up for the job would only help the First Studio in the long term. Before it could come to that, however, Stanislavski intervened with yet another inspirational speech. “The show must go on,” he said, “even if we have to do the impossible.” With a keen sense of the legend that had already accrued to himself and the Moscow Art Theatre, he told them, “Remember your future depends on this production. You must have your ‘Pushkino’ phase just as we had.”
On January 31, 1913, the First Studio presented Wreck to Stanislavski and other key members of the Moscow Art Theatre. Three hours before the first performance, one of the actors dropped out of the show. His three-year-old daughter had died, he wrote in a note. His wife was distraught, and he couldn’t leave her alone. Boleslavsky stepped into the role and, in a sign of the studytsi’s fanaticism about dedicating their lives to art, “never quite forgave that actor. And [the actor] could not forgive himself.”
Despite the last-minute cast change, the performance for the Moscow Art Theatre “rose high above our hopes. The whole assembly applauded us, they praised us and laughed at us good-naturedly.” Nemirovich said it was as if he witnessed the “christening of a son or a daughter of the Moscow Art Theatre,” and Stanislavski also approved. By the end of the month, invited audiences filled the fifty-seat auditorium above the Lux and emerged enraptured by what they saw. A theater magazine called The Mask hailed it as “the biggest event of the entire theatrical season.” People also took notice of the performance of a rising star within the First Studio named Michael Chekhov—a nephew of Anton—who played the relatively small role of Kobe, “an idiot fisherman.” Chekhov inflated the role through invented stage business, making Kobe far more central to the play. Though he was chastised for this, Chekhov’s belief that the actor must go beyond the text to find the character’s true nature would become a hallmark of his work as an actor, teacher, and theorist over the course of the twentieth century. Wreck was performed sporadically through the year, but it would go on to be a mainstay of the First Studio. By 1924, it had been performed 429 times. The production proved that the “system” could be taught, and employed by those to whom it was taught, to great ends. After it opened, the Moscow Art Theatre’s board agreed to start funding the First Studio.
But the Studio’s next production—Hauptmann’s The Festival of Peace, directed by Vakhtangov—exposed the tricky balance within the “system” between the actor’s search for the truth and the need to communicate with the audience. Subtitled A Family Catastrophe, Peace is an excoriation of societal hypocrisies in the style of Ibsen’s Ghosts. Vakhtangov embraced its misanthropy and led the actors inside themselves at the expense of almost everything else. While one of Vakhtangov’s students later wrote that “such a fusion of the actor with the image, such faith in the truth of fantasy, such commitment from the actor to the life on stage had never been known,” Stanislavski was furious.
Fetishizing emotional states was an abuse of the “system,” he declared. The goal of the “system” was experiencing, the state of ya yesm. True emotion was a route to that goal, not an end in itself. One studio member wrote that she had “never seen K.S. so angry. He was literally in a fury and cursed us, cursed Vakhtangov, saying that it was some sort of illness, hysteria.” Another described him as yelling “so that Zeus, the thunder-bearer himself envied [Stanislavski] in that moment.” The play’s overt politics also grated on Stanislavski, who preferred scripts to present multiple perspectives, leaving space for the audience to make up their own minds. In his anger, he threatened to close the production, relenting only when Kachalov talked him out of it. The show eventually opened to mixed reviews, staying in the First Studio’s repertoire but seldom performed.
Perhaps Stanislavski should have been more understanding of his protégé’s obsessions, as his own relentless drive to perfect the “system” continued to estrange him from the Moscow Art Theatre. With the success of The Wreck of the Ship “Hope,” the First Studio had moved to a nicer building, and the younger members of the Moscow Art Theatre spent most of their time there, treating the MAT like a mere day job. Stanislavski even rehearsed at least one of his productions, Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, at the First Studio instead of at his supposed artistic home. The “system” had become the true love of his life. He was willing to subordinate everything—including the theater company he had built through force of will at Pushkino—to his search for perezhivanie.
Like his fellow Tolstoyans, Suler idealized the Russian peasants and their zemstvo system of communal life and work on shared land. He convinced Stanislavski that the studytsi could build character through living and farming as the peasants did and in the process realize Stanislavski’s long-frustrated dream of bringing theater to the people. Stanislavski purchased land in Yevpatoria in Crimea for the First Studio in the spring of 1912. If the studytsi were like an order of holy knights, the Crimea estate was to be their temple. The actors would live in Yevpatoria over the summer, building the estate during the day and rehearsing and training at night. Stanislavski and Suler envisioned a retreat, accessible by railroad, where audiences could stay and watch the First Studio perform. The estate would be funded by ticket sales and the cultivation of the land by the actors. Over the next few years, they constructed common buildings, a hotel, a stable, a cowshed, barns, and an icehouse.
The studytsi spent their second summer in Yevpatoria in 1914, building facilities, farming, and rehearsing. In June, a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip managed, despite the odds, to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, creating a vortex that pulled the world’s great powers ever closer to the cataclysm of the Great War. Russia had spent the last few years rearming itself after the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War. By the time of Archduke Ferdinand’s death, Russia was spending more on its military than Germany was. Instead of deterring the Germans, this escalation only made a swift attack on Russia more attractive. The Germans knew that if they waited too long, the tsar’s army might be too strong to defeat.
War loomed over Europe, seemingly inevitable. When the First Studio returned to Moscow, they found the city gripped by nationalist fervor. Russian greatness was welded to military might and power on an international stage. Both had waned over the early twentieth century, but Nicholas II felt that war with Austria and Germany gave Russia an opportunity to seize the Baltic straits and expand its empire. The army, which numbered 1.4 million at the beginning of the Great War, mobilized. By the end of the year, Russia would draft five million more people into its armed forces. Some members of the First Studio signed up immediately. Boleslavsky, meanwhile, appeared in propaganda films as an actor. One of these, The Exploits of the Cossack Kuzma Kruchkov, briefly made him a star.
Stanislavski was also away from Moscow, and his journey back would prove far more difficult. Along with Kachalov, Lilina, and the critic Nikolai Efros, Stanislavski spent June on holiday in Marienbad. There they marked the tenth anniversary of Chekhov’s death, while Stanislavski continued work on an article called “Various Trends in the Art of the Theatre,” once again outlining the differences between hackwork, representation, and experiencing. When they heard the news of Ferdinand’s death, they knew that war was coming, but because of massive troop mobilization, train tickets back to Moscow were scarce. By August 4, as Germany invaded Belgium, Stanislavski, Lilina, and a couple of others remained in what was swiftly transforming into enemy territory. Their plan of escape involved taking a train to Munich, then another to Switzerland, whence they could travel to Russia. As Stanislavski describes it, by the time they got to Munich, war fever afflicted everything. “All human relations were changed,” he wrote in My Life in Art. “I will not describe all that the alien had to bear in an enemy country.”
Stanislavski’s instinct was to cultivate his own vulnerability, naïveté, and openness. He was uniquely ill suited to this voyage. On the way to Switzerland, German soldiers boarded his train, accused the Russians of being spies, and arrested them. The only reason Stanislavski survived that day was that he wasn’t worth a bullet during an ammunition shortage. Instead, the soldiers dragged the great director (who had impressed the kaiser less than a decade before) to a fortress, imprisoning him and his wife and friends for two days before deporting them to the country they had been attempting to reach in the first place. From Geneva they traveled to Marseilles, from Marseilles to Odessa, and then, at long last, from Odessa to Moscow.
