Stanislavsky in Focus.(Review)

Sharon M. Carnicke. Stanislavsky in Focus. Russian Theatre Archive Series 17. Amsterdam, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998. Pp. xv + 235. $23.00

In her study of the (mis)interpretations of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) in the Soviet Union and the United States, Sharon Carnicke convincingly shows that the transmission of ideas across linguist and cultural boundaries is fraught with potential dangers. For various political, idealogical, and cultural reasons, the two countries developed vastly different visions of Stanislavsky's theory of acting; Soviet theater emphasized the physical aspects of the great director's System, while in the States its phsychological techniques were considered the key to successful acting. In the confusion there also emerged important cultural myths, such as the equating, in the United States, of Stanislavsky's System and the Method, which should be rightfully attributed to Lee Strasberg. Carnicke focuses on three major areas to show how this situation came about: Stanislavsky's tours of the United States; those in the United States who translated, transmitted, and carried on his legacy; and the repressive context of Stalinist Soviet Russia. After this eye-opening historical overview, she re-examines Stanislavsky's writings in the original Russian and demonstrates that, due to censorship, publishers' demands, poor translations, and the fact that Stanislavsky's theories were constantly growing and changing, both cultures have not yet been exposed to the full range of his ideas, which is so large and complex that Carnicke implicitly asks whether one can speak of a single Stanislavsky "System."

The cultural dilemma in which Stanislavsky and his followers found themselves is apparent in Carnicke's description of Stanislavsky's tours of the United States with the Moscow Art Theatre in 1923 and 1924. Stanislavsky met with President Coolidge at the White House but was unable to speak because protocol demanded that foreign visitors speak through their ambassadors, which the Soviet Union did not have because it officially had not yet been recognized by the United States. Stanislavsky received negative reactions in the press in both the United States (fear of communism) and the Soviet Union (suspicion of capitalist sympathies). Once the group reached the New York area, where much of Russia's emigre cultural elite had settled, the feeling surrounding the group changed. Established and future directors and actors praised the Russians' performances for their realism, and almost immediately began the formation of the American interpretation of the System. Carnicke points out many ironies associated with this situation. What American audiences saw was far from the System at its best; the actors were exhausted by the frantic pace of the tour (380 performances in twelve months); by 1923 Stanislavsky had moved beyond realism in acting, but for political reasons he was forced to select the most "realistic" of the Moscow Art Theatre's works for production in the United States, and regardless he was no more than a figurehead director at this time.

Despite these ironies, ideas attributed to Stanislavsky would come to dominate stage and screen acting in the United States. The process was started by Richard Boleslavsky, a Russian emigre who was Stanislavsky's spokesperson. Boleslavsky gave lectures, published articles on Stanislavsky, and later founded the American Laboratory Theatre. He also stated that "it would be impossible to impose any foreign ideal upon American soil" (38), words proven to be prophetic by The Group Theatre and The Actors Studio, which were guided by Stanislavsky's ideas (as they understood them) and also by a "commitment to the American context" (39). This first generation of American Stanislavskian actors was instructed almost exclusively by Russian emigres who, Carnicke argues, could not have been aware of the many nuances of English and American culture necessary for successful teaching of acting, which itself depends heavily on nuance and shades of emotion. The words of these instructors form what Carnicke terms the "oral lore" that surrounded Stanislavsky's name. His American students, such as Strasberg and Stella Adler, in turn emphasized those elements of this oral tradition that best suited their ...