A diagram of Stanislavski's
"system", based on his "Plan of
Experiencing" (1935)and indirectly.[6] In rehearsal, the actor searches for inner motives to
justify action and the definition of what the character seeks to achieve
at any given moment (a "task").[7] Later, Stanislavski further
elaborated the "system" with a more physically grounded rehearsal
process known as the "Method of Physical Action".[8] Minimizing at-
the-table discussions, he now encouraged an "active analysis", in
which the sequence of dramatic situations are improvised.[9] "The
best analysis of a play", Stanislavski argued, "is to take action in the
given circumstances."[10]
As well as Stanislavski's early work, the ideas and techniques of
Yevgeny Vakhtangov (a Russian-Armenian student who had died in
1922 at the age of 39) were also an important influence on the
development of the Method. Vakhtangov's "object exercises" were
developed further by Uta Hagen as a means for actor training and the
maintenance of skills. Strasberg attributed to Vakhtangov the
distinction between Stanislavski's process of "justifying" behavior
with the inner motive forces that prompt that behavior in the character
and "motivating" behavior with imagined or recalled experiences
relating to the actor and substituted for those relating to the character.
Following this distinction, actors ask themselves "What would
motivate me, the actor, to behave in the way the character does?"
rather than the more Stanislavskian question "Given the particular
circumstances of the play, how would I behave, what would I do, how would I feel, how would I react?"[11]
In America, the transmission of the earliest phase of Stanislavski's work via the students of the First Studio of
the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) revolutionized acting in the West.[12] When the MAT toured the US in the
early 1920s, Richard Boleslawski, one of Stanislavski's students from the First Studio, presented a series of
lectures on the "system" that were eventually published as Acting: The First Six Lessons (1933). The interest
generated led to a decision by Boleslawski and Maria Ouspenskaya (another student at the First Studio) to
emigrate to the US and to establish the American Laboratory Theatre.[13]
However, the version of Stanislavski's practice these students took to the US with them was that developed in
the 1910s, rather than the more fully elaborated version of the "system" detailed in Stanislavski's acting
manuals from the 1930s, An Actor's Work and An Actor's Work on a Role. The first half of An Actor's Work,
which treated the psychological elements of training, was published in a heavily abridged and misleadingly
translated version in the US as An Actor Prepares in 1936. English-language readers often confused the first
volume on psychological processes with the "system" as a whole.[14] Many of the American practitioners who
came to be identified with the Method were taught by Boleslawski and Ouspenskaya at the American
Laboratory Theatre.[15] The approaches to acting subsequently developed by their students—including Lee
Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner—are often confused with Stanislavski's "system".
Stella Adler, an actress and acting teacher whose students included Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and
Robert De Niro, also broke with Strasberg after she studied with Stanislavski. Her version of the method is
based on the idea that actors should stimulate emotional experience by imagining the scene's "given
circumstances", rather than recalling experiences from their own lives. Adler's approach also seeks to stimulate
the actor's imagination through the use of "as ifs", which substitute more personally affecting imagined
situations for the circumstances experienced by the character.