'The Method' – a Review

 by Kirk Woodward[I’ve published many articles on Rick On Theater on the subjects of acting and actor-training.  Some were by me—I trained as an actor and have an MFA degree in acting—and some have been by other authors. 

[One of those other writers has frequently been my friend Kirk Woodward, also an actor (though primarily a playwright, composer, and director).  Kirk’s also a great reader and has contributed reports on many fascinating books, both about theater and other fields.  Now he comes back to ROT with a review of a new book about one of the most famous theories of acting and actor-training, The Method.

[Isaac Butler’s The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act is the latest in a long line of books and articles about director and teacher Lee Strasberg’s groundbreaking adaptation of the theories and teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski, the Russian founder of modern Western acting, the dominant technique of most of the 20th century.

[One interesting fact about Butler’s The Method is that it’s not a rave as far as his experience with and judgment of the acting style is concerned.  He’s well worth hearing out, though . . . and so is Kirk.  ~Rick]

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) is a “biography” of an approach to acting that was first identified and codified in Russia, brought to this country by refugees, taught by a raft of colorful characters, modified by teachers, directors, and books, embedded in this country’s consciousness amid numerous social changes, and ultimately absorbed into the mainstream of entertainment here and worldwide.

The ultimate victor among “Method” approaches was the one taught for decades at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. Butler writes: 

The Method has many definitions, but to instructors of stage acting, it refers very specifically to the techniques and values taught by Lee Strasberg [1901-1982], the most famous and prominent adapter of [Konstantin] Stanislavski’s ideas in the English-speaking world.

(Stanislavski lived from 1863 to 1938.) Butler writes that “The primacy of the actor’s lived experience, the necessity of breaking down both a role and a process into bits, and the goal of using a conscious process to access and manipulate inspiration are the foundation of Stanislavski’s ‘system’” (the Russian’s name for what became known as the Method).

Most prominent among the “techniques and values” developed by Stanislavski and central to the Method is the practice of Affective Memory, in which an actor, through exercises, learns to locate, call up, and reexperience highly charged emotional moments in the actor’s past, with the aim of ultimately being able to apply them to the emotions of a character in a play.

Interestingly, Butler says, “While the ‘system’ would always be associated in America with naturalism, Stanislavski first developed it in order to bring psychological truth to abstract, symbolist works,” which is quite the opposite of what I had imagined.

Butler says that in an acting class he took at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. in the 1990’s,

There were two goals . . . . First, the class would be able to observe how strong emotion actually worked, as opposed to the cliched ways we indicated emotion onstage. The other purpose was to help us find potential keys to unlock our emotions so we could use them in our work.

There are three interesting elements to that report of his acting class experience. The first is that, as far as he knew, the Studio Theatre’s instructors were not specifically committed to the Method at all; by the 1990’s they almost certainly considered it outdated and, as taught by Strasberg, even dangerous.

The second is that those two goals described above are a good high-level description of the Method, particularly as it was taught by Strasberg, even if the teachers did not profess to be committed to it.

The third is that for Butler it was dangerous – he feels he became emotionally damaged by Affective Memory, and he left acting altogether.

Butler knows theater first hand.  (If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been likely to say, for example, that “In rehearsals, directors perform more than actors do.” It takes having “been there” to know that.) Today he teaches theater history and performance at the New School in Manhattan. He co-wrote The World Only Spins Forward, a narrative of the success of Angels in America by Tony Kushner (b. 1956). He has hosted podcasts on Shakespeare and the creative process, and co-created 2015’s song cycle Real Enemies. He is an excellent guide to the world of theater history.

In his Introduction Butler efficiently addresses the two enormous currents of opinion about acting, that it is an “external” or an “internal” matter (that is, based on the observation and presentation of observable traits, or on a character’s psychology). Assuming that’s a real dichotomy (the argument is never finished), the Method definitely leans toward the latter.

Before reading this book I thought I was reasonably familiar with the history of acting. I realize now that I hardly knew anything; I have learned a great deal from this volume, and will certainly reread it. Out of a wealth of information, let me present a few examples from early chapters of the book.

I knew almost nothing about the relationship between the two men who founded and led the Moscow Art Theater (MAT – and not exactly its official name) in its first phase: Stanislavski and the splendidly named Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858-1943). For that matter, I didn’t know that Nemirovich-Danchenko was a theatrical artist in his own right, a director, playwright, and teacher.

I had assumed that his and Stanislavski’s relationship was roughly equivalent to that of Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) and George Balanchine (1904-1983), who together created and ran the New York City Ballet. Kirstein dedicated his career to furthering Balanchine’s and invested a great deal of money in it.

“The only justification I have is to enable Balanchine to do what he wants in the way he wants to do it,” Kirstein wrote. He handled the administrative side of the company, allowing Balanchine the opportunity to choreograph freely.

On the other hand, Stanislavski (a stage name, incidentally – I hadn’t known that), although he led on the artistic side, was the one who had the money, and he refused to use it to help underwrite the new MAT. He and Nemirovich-Danchenko had different opinions as well on artistic matters from the beginning.

They more or less agreed to split duties as Kirstein and Balanchine did, but neither was comfortable with the arrangement; they argued, then fought, then stopped speaking altogether. Yet their theater somehow progressed.

I did not know how close the MAT came to closing, not just once but many times. In fact Butler shows that its entire history was fraught with peril, some of it from inside, some external, as first the Czar and then the Communists endangered both the enterprise and the lives of those engaged in it.

Of course, generally speaking, all theater is precarious financially, unless it receives a state subsidy or some other regular flow of funds. In Europe, some theaters (particularly in Germany) enjoy such subsidies; in the United States, basically none have, with the exception of the Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939), part of the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945).

However, the MAT was precarious in life-and-death ways as well. The director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), who began his career working with Stanislavski and developed his own approach to acting, ended up murdered under Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) because of his artistic opinions, which the regime rejected, and he wasn’t the only one to pay that price.

I did not know that Stanislavski throughout his life was uncertain just how his “system” worked, an uncertainty that fed into endless disputes, particularly in the United States, about exactly what he meant and whether he meant it only provisionally or permanently. 

The story goes on, and so, for me, did the surprises, as the Method took shape and was transmitted from Russia, later the U.S.S.R., to western Europe and the United States, to become, like the immigrant population that brought it over, assimilated into the culture. Among the most influential of those who landed here were Richard Boleslawski (1889-1937), Michael Chekhov (1891-1955), and Maria Ouspenskaya (1876-1949), all of them major contributors to the field of acting instruction.

[See “Konstantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism,” posted on this blog on 2 May 2011, and the three-part profile of Michael Chekhov, 2, 5, and 8 November 2019.]

Similarly to what happened to Freud’s approach to psychoanalysis, the Method was ultimately modified and supplemented until it’s inaccurate to say today that many of our major actors are Method actors at all.

In fact – another surprise – two performers frequently described as outstanding examples of Method actors really aren’t. Marlon Brando (1924-2004), whose work for many embodied the Method, denied that Lee Strasberg taught him anything; he credited his teacher Stella Adler (1901-1992), whose approach spectacularly diverged from Strasberg’s in 1934. Robert DeNiro (b. 1943) has typically approached his roles through immersive external character study that is not part of the Method at all.

Butler says that “what he [Stanislavski] was describing was, at its core, ineffable.” That fact did not stop many from trying to describe the ineffable as the years went on, through teaching, and in books, beginning with The First Six Lessons (1933) by Richard Boleslawski (aka: Boleslavsky) and Stanislavski’s The Actor Prepares (1936).

But why “ineffable?” What’s so difficult about describing how acting works? The answer surely is that life is complex, and acting, which in some way or other imitates life, borrows from that complexity. As a result, acting is a bundle of opposites, including such enormous pairs as spontaneous and planned, mundane and extravagant, practical and spiritual, entertaining and educating, and so on.

These pairs continually synthesize themselves in whatever the actor is doing at the moment. Sometimes one element predominates, sometimes another. I referred earlier to Stanislavski’s uncertainty about exactly what his “system” was and how it worked. We should look at this uncertainty as a virtue more than as a fault. If acting is anything, it is a continual process of discovery. It changes as life changes.

And then, in a way, it doesn’t – another paradox. If we imagine two actors, perhaps one from 1722 and one from 2022, being able to meet and compare notes, on the one hand they would find their acting styles vastly different, and the same would go for the theories and techniques they applied to their craft.

On the other hand, they would immediately relate to each other as they traded stories about performance catastrophes, backstage quarrels, shortcuts for remembering lines, abusive theater managers and directors, missing paychecks, and so on.

So “it’s a mad world, my masters,” this world of acting, and The Method does it justice, particularly as it describes the remarkable group of characters who populate the story along the way. For illustration I will pick just one story, which perhaps actors may relate to. Lee Strasberg, directing a play for the Group Theatre (1931-1941), was often particularly demanding of his cast.

During a rehearsal, an actor made a small physical mistake, which she immediately corrected. Strasberg asked her, “Why did you do that?” She said it was a mistake, forget it, let’s move on. Strasberg wouldn’t let up. He kept demanding, “Why did you do that?” while the rest of the cast waited.

Finally another actor, known as one of the nicest in the ensemble, said quietly to the person next to her, “Now I’m going to kill him.” She charged Strasberg, fingers open to strangle him. Two other actors held her back. Strasberg ran from the theater and quit as director of the show.

Not your usual rehearsal story, but then The Method features an outlandish cast of characters. Butler is an excellent guide through the thickets of personalities, and theories, too. He recognizes that schools of acting, like other artistic trends, don’t come out of a vacuum; they both react to and intensify what’s going on in society around them. About the wide range of acting styles in recent decades he writes:

The end of the Method era in American culture had no single source. No new Stanislavski arose to lead a war on the prior generation’s hokum. The Method suffered instead the same fate that befell the postwar consensus in which it had been so firmly ensconced. Both began to lose their grip on America in the mid 1970s as the blockbuster, the inflation crisis, and revelations of decades of government wrongdoing struck the nation simultaneously; both stumbled into the 1980’s, punch-drunk and overmatched by a new vision of American society and its citizens. Before, our tax dollars went to advance the common good; now they would be returned to us so we could express ourselves through our purchasing power – helping others, the conventional wisdom went, through helping ourselves. Before, we were bound in common cause – individuals, yes, but part of a society and dedicated to its advancement; we were now to be consumers in a marketplace.

One wonders if it would be possible today for a “school” of acting to raise the almost religious fervor that culminated in the Method: the belief that changing the way people acted on stage would also change the world.

This seems an outlandish hope today, but it was a commonplace during much of the history described in The Method, emerging first in the minds of Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko, and appearing most spectacularly in the Group Theatre (1931-1941), with Harold Clurman (1901-1980) quite literally preaching the doctrine that society needed a new approach to acting that would change the way it saw itself.

Sometimes that expectation almost seemed to happen, as with the production of Waiting for Lefty (1935) by Clifford Odets (1906-1963), a play that vividly presented the struggle between labor and capital – but certainly did not resolve it.

Does acting change us or reflect us? Another conundrum! In any case, acting is no longer limited to the stage, film, and television. It has sprawled along with the diffusion of types of media. It would be fascinating to know how a book would describe the next thirty years of acting styles and techniques.

It’s a sure bet that there will be plenty to say. Meanwhile, we have The Method to give us a vivid and useful look at where we’ve come from.

[Before there was Strasberg’s Method, or even Stanislavski’s System, there was François Delsarte, the first man who tried to codify and systematize the training of actors.  I posted a profile of Delsarte, whose theories were the founding principles of the American Academy of Dramatic Art (founded in 1884), on ROT on 4 January 2014; see “The Father of Actor Training: François Delsarte.”]

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After this report was published, Kirk Woodward returned to Butler's book for “Bombast to Beckett” (13 January 2025). For more on the subject of method acting, click on the link.

Ryszard Cieślak

This man seems to be an accomplished gymnast with a control of his body so complete as to frighten any actor who is sloppy about his physical condition.

He stripped to his work shorts, agilely performed a series of difficult-looking exercises . . . and then invited us to do them.  The impossible was upon me.

                                                                                                      

So recounted actor Tom Crawley (1940-95) of the first time he saw Polish director and theatrical theorist Jerzy Grotowski’s (1933-99) principal actor and teaching partner, Ryszard Cieślak (1937-90).  It was at New York University on the first day of Grotowski’s first U.S. workshop in November 1967.  It was also clearly a daunting and intimidating experience.

Cieślak was known for his complete dedication to his art; his personal, “confessional” technique; and his total control of all his faculties in service to his performance.  Grotowski defined performing as “not a picture of life as it exists outside the theater, but an immediate act that I call ‘confession with body and blood.’”  He elucidated further: “Creation is always a kind of confession” and one critic dubbed his performances “Theater of Witness.”  Ryszard Cieślak was the embodiment of this philosophy.

Prominent theater critic, commentator, and journalist Margaret Croyden (1922-2015) explained this concept:

Hence, when Ryszard Cieslak says, “I will show you my man,” and Grotowski says, “Show me your Man and I will show you your God,” they mean that the actor will offer up his “confession” within the context of the play to reveal what he really is, his intellectual and biological Self—everything that custom, habit, and mores prevent him from doing in life.  He will reenact his own trauma as in a ritual mass expressed through his own “body and blood.”  Cieslak’s Prince [in The Constant Prince], then, is an exposure of Cieslak’s “naked soul.”

(The Constant Prince was a performance by the Laboratory Theatre directed by Grotowski based on the reworking by Juliusz Słowacki, 1809-49, of the 1629 drama El príncipe constant by Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, 1600-81, which dramatizes the martyrdom of Prince Ferdinand of Portugal, 1402-43.  The première took place in 1965 in Wrocław, Poland—formerly Breslau—and the production later played in London and other cities in the United Kingdom in September and October 1969, and New York City, October-December 1969.)

Cieślak was renowned for a kind of mystical release that Grotowski demanded of his actors.  Of Cieślak’s performance in The Constant Prince, for instance, Ronald Hayman (1932-2019), a British critic, dramatist, and writer who was best known as a biographer, reported:

As the prince, Ryszard Cieslak seemed to be in greater danger than a matador in a bull-ring.  There was no faking about the pain he had to suffer; the audience saw his body bouncing and his back going red under flagellation from a folded cloak, and he was genuinely hurting himself when he slapped his own chest.  He submitted to all the pain and humiliation with the same stoical passivity as to the kiss that Rena Mizecka implanted on his groin, but the alternation between supinity and violent animation made his performance seem all the more dangerous.  His physical expressiveness could have emerged only from a profound interiorization of a discipline that allows great scope to spontaneity.

Cieślak stated: “An actor needs above all courage, to reveal himself, to expose to everyone his inner being.”  As one student actor who took part in a workshop with the actor proclaimed: “Cieslak worked . . . with no fear.”

So who was this remarkable man, this artist so totally committed to his profession?  He’s been dead for almost 30 years and he only lived for 53.  Ryszard Cieślak became a member of Grotowski’s 13 Rows Theater in 1961, just 29 years before his death. 

Ferdinando Taviani (b. 1942), an Italian professor of theater history and theater scholar who followed Grotowski’s work for many years, wrote, “When Ryszard Cieslak died, almost nothing was reported in the papers, the announcement confined in most to a couple of lines.  After his work on The Constant Prince and Apocalypsis cum figuris, Cieslak had ceased to be newsworthy.” 

For such a brief time in the public eye, however, Cieślak left an outsized footprint—an indelible impression on artists who saw him work.  Taviani continued: “Anyone wanting to explain precisely what Cieslak was would have to be able to extend the meaning of the word ‘miracle’ and say it without fear of exaggeration.  For Cieslak really was the miracle actor of the twentieth century.”  Tom Crawley’s response, I daresay, was typical.

Cieślak did a number of workshops and master classes after that NYU program and the response was always similar: astonishment, awe, and inspiration.  Another participant in the 1967 NYU workshop, Stephen Wangh (b. 1943), who taught acting in NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing, published a book on acting inspired by Grotowski’s work (An Acrobat of the Heart; Vintage Books, 2000).  In it, he revealed his impressions of Ryszard Cieślak upon first meeting him: physically, he was “younger, more physical” than the “rotund” Grotowski (actually, Grotowski was only 3½ years older than Cieślak).  Then the Polish actor started his routine:

Cieślak silently stripped to his shorts, went to the middle of the empty studio and proceeded to demonstrate the “impossible” for us.  With incredible ease and precise physical control, he performed a series of headstands, rolls, and backbends, each flowing into the next, each completely centered and yet somehow off-balance and dynamic.  His body seemed to be made of liquid muscle, enormously powerful, yet utterly soft and supple.  He moved with the strength and precision of an accomplished gymnast, yet there was something in his face, in his searching eyes, that removed his work entirely from the world of gymnastics.  It was as if the enormous muscular energy we witnessed was merely the exterior emanation of an even more intense inner life.

When Cieślak demonstrated his . . . “plastique” body isolations, kinetic and dramatic impulses seemed to flow through his entire body as if it were made of molten metal. . . .   The infinite agility, the intense concentration, and the wonderful precision with which Cieślak glided effortlessly from headstand to backbends to leaps and rolls seemed entirely beyond our abilities.

A report on a 1981 program in Los Angeles affirmed that “[a]ctors’ bodies were tempered, tested and tried like fine steel in a fiery crucible to create sensitive instruments.”  One young participant recounted: “It’s over, and yet not over.  My whole life has changed.  I can’t think of anything else.”

From a 1984 class at Yale. Thomas Richards (b. 1962), a Yale senior whose father was the Yale School of Drama’s director and the Yale Repertory Theatre’s artistic director Lloyd Richards, reported, “This work opened in me something which had been tightly shut . . . .  It introduced me to a physical way of expression; I began to see the importance of the body for the actor.” 

Richards, who would eventually become Grotowski’s successor at the Centro per la Sperimentazione e la Ricerca Teatrale (Center for Experimentation and Theater Research) in Pontedera, Italy, described his reaction following the day’s work: “After each session with Cieslak, I would practically run home dancing in the streets, such was the state of my excitement.  I distinctly remember the impression of the street lamps reflecting light through the flakes of nighttime snow as I danced home.”  (This was a man who’d expressed disappointment when he learned that it wouldn’t be Grotowski who was coming to do the workshop, but Cieślak, who, Richards felt, “must be second best.”)

Here’s Richards’s first impression of Cieślak:

Our acting class was in full swing when Cieslak walked in.  I practically fell out of my chair, I had never seen such presence from anyone.  “My God, this is a dinosaur, people like this don’t exist anymore.  He walks like a tiger.”  Cieslak sat down and with his presence alone he began to take over and dominate our class.  Faced with him I felt like a docile schoolboy, a well-trained circus animal next to a wild panther.  Through his presence alone, and almost silently, he stripped our acting teacher of his authority.

“I was spellboind,” averred the young acting student.  “The work with Cieslak was an eye and body opening period: a taste of some other possibility which had a deep effect on my unconscious,” wrote Richards.

Ryszard Cieślak was born on  9 March 1937 in Kalisz, Poland, a city of 81,000 inhabitants (1939) in west-central Poland.  A regional capital, Kalisz is a commercial and industrial center and a center of traditional Polish folk art.  

During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, the Cieślak family was resettled by the Germans in Chęciny, 220 miles southeast of Kalisz.  (Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, which precipitated the war.)  The town became a killing ground for the Jewish population, with mass shootings in  the town square or in the nearby forest; thousands of Jews, including many from other parts of Poland, were transported from Chęciny to death camps. 

The Cieślaks escaped to Krakow and took refuge in a monastery there.  They returned to Kalisz in 1944 and seven-year-old Ryszard began his primary school education.

In 1954, Cieślak graduated from Adam Asnyk High School in Kalisz and began studying exact sciences at the Lodz University of Technology.  He transferred to the Cracow University of Technology to study medicine a year later; he wanted to study psychiatry.  In 1957, however, he discontinued his medical studies and began studying in the Puppetry Department of the Ludwik Solski State Theater School in Cracow (now spelled Krakow), from which he graduated in 1961.

One of his teachers in Cracow was Jerzy Grotowski, who taught acting.  Cieślak was invited to join Grotowski’s 13 Rows Theater (Teatru 13 Rzędów) in Opole and became a member of the theater’s acting company on 1 October 1961, eventually becoming its leading actor.  He became the model for Grotowski’s “poor acting.” 

Poor acting is an essential element of “poor theater.”  Grotowski eliminated all superfluous spectacle from his productions, leaving the actors to communicate with only their bodies and voices, plus a few essential props, costumes, and sets, which were generally abstractions and symbols and often represented many different things depending on their use by the actors.  This was poor theater, and poor acting was similarly stripped down to the actor’s inner core, creating a bond with the individual spectator as the artist, not via the fictional character as a kind of buffer.  As described earlier, this is what Cieślak did, baring his very self to his audience. 

Cieślak starred in all Grotowski’s productions, including  Kordian (1962), Akropolis (1962), The Tragic Fate of Doctor Faust (1963), Masks (1963), Hamlet Study (1964), and the aforementioned Constant Prince, among others.  In 1965, Grotowski moved his company to Wrocław, renaming it the Teatr Laboratorium [Theater Laboratory—usually known in English as the Polish Theater Lab]  Cieślak worked with the theater troupe until its dissolution in 1977.

Akropolis by Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907) brought Grotowski and his troupe international renown—and did the same for Cieślak.  The actors represented concentration camp prisoners acting out stories from the Bible and Greek mythology as they build a crematorium around the audience.  (The première of Akropolis was in Opole; Auschwitz is only 70 miles away—about an hour-and-a-half drive.)  A film of the production was made in 1968, making the performance available to a wider audience.

When Grotowski’s productions of The Constant Prince, Akropolis, and Apocalypsis cum figuris (1968) were presented in New York in 1969, Cieślak became the first non-English-speaking actor to be recognized for Outstanding Performance at New York’s annual Drama Desk Awards in 1970 for his role in The Constant Prince.  Theater critics called Cieślak “Off Broadway’s most outstanding creator and the actor with the greatest promise.”

Akropolis had brought Grotowski, the Theater Lab, and Ryszard Cieślak to international notice, The Constant Prince made Cieślak a star in the world of international, avant-garde, and experimental theater.  His performance as the Prince astonished almost everyone who saw it.  In Poland, writing in the monthly culture journal Odra, Józef Kelera said:

In my opinion the force and, moreover, the success of The Constant Prince are mainly due to the principal character.  In the actor’s creation, the essential elements of Grotowski’s theory take precise tangible forms which can be verified not merely in the demonstration of his method, but also in the beautiful fruits it produces.  

The essence of this does not in reality reside in the fact that the actor makes amazing use of his voice, nor in the way that he uses his almost naked body to sculpt mobile forms that are striking in their expressiveness; nor is it in the way that the technique of the body and voice form a unity during the long and exhausting monologues which vocally and physically border on acrobatics.  It is a question of something quite different.

We have always followed—and often acknowledged—the remarkable technical results achieved by Grotowski in his work with the actor. We have nevertheless retained a certain scepticism with regard to the arguments he uses which compare the work of the actor to a psychic act of transgression, an exploration, a sublimation, a displacement of deep-lying psychic substances.  However, when faced with the creation of Ryszard Cieslak, this scepticism is called in question.  

In my profession as a theatre critic I have never yet felt the desire to use that dreadfully banal and overworked expression which, in this particular case, is quite simply true: this creation is “inspired”.  I cannot help considering this word with a certain amount of surprise, examining it through a magnifying glass, but if it still has a legitimate place in the world of theatrical criticism, I certainly could not find a better opportunity to use it.  Until now, I accepted with reserve the terms such as “secular  holiness”, “act of humility”, “purification” which Grotowski uses.  Today I admit that they can be  applied perfectly to the character of the Constant Prince.  A sort of psychic illumination emanates  from the actor.  I cannot find any other definition.  In the culminating moments of the role, everything  that is technique is as though illuminated from within, light, literally imponderable.  At any moment the actor will levitate . . .  He is in a state of grace.  And all around him this “cruel theatre” with its  blasphemies and excesses is transformed into a theatre in a state of grace.

Fernando Taviani, the Italian theater scholar, asserted, “Even from the complex point of view of theatre culture, The Constant Prince was extraordinary. . . .  What it did was to change the way in which our culture conceived of the actor.”  (Along with my earlier quotation of Ronald Hayman’s comments, I could write a long separate post just on Cieślak’s work in The Constant Prince.  This will have to suffice for the present article.)

After the Theater Laboratory ceased to function in 1977 (it officially disbanded in 1984), Cieślak and Grotowski collaborated on many theater projects.  Grotowski having ceased directing in 1970, Cieślak followed his teacher into the realm of what Grotowski dubbed “paratheater” (literally, beyond or above [from Greek para-] theater; also known as the “theater of participation” or “active culture”). 

In this phase of his work, Grotowski shifted his focus away from conventional theatrical performance—that is, new play production—toward eliminating the distinction between actors and spectators in events that involved spontaneous contact between experienced leaders and outside participants and were heavily influenced by rites and rituals—both historical and traditional, and invented.

Cieślak described this new direction as “progressing beyond theatre to paratheatre.  In the theatre, people come to see, to watch.  In our new theatre, all participate. . . .  This is a quasi-performance, very warm, with open places where people can participate . . . .”

In September 1984, having been invited by British director and theater innovator Peter Brook (b. 1925) to join the Centre International de Recherche Théâtrales-Bouffes du Nord (or C.I.R.T.—International Centre for Theatre Research), his international company in Paris, Cieślak worked on developing a performance based on The Mahabharata, the classic Sanskrit epic, with the actor creating the role of the blind ruler Dhritarashtra.  (The Mahabharata premiered at the 39th Avignon Festival on 7 July 1985.  The Brooklyn Academy of Music presented the nine-hour production at the Majestic Theatre in Fort Greene in 1987.)  

From September 1989, Cieślak was employed as a visiting professor at New York University’s Tisch School of Arts (where, coincidentally, that first Grotowski workshop had happened in 1967).

Ryszard Cieślak died on 15 June 1990 of lung cancer in Houston, Texas.  Some people believe that the actor’s premature death was caused (or accelerated) by the psychological and physical abuse through which he’d put himself all his career.  (There’s no evidence for this theory.  The fact is that the actor smoked several packs of cigarettes a day and later also became a heavy drinker.)  

Cieślak’s remains were brought back to Poland and buried in Wrocław.  His tombstone sculpture was carved by contemporary Polish-Italian sculptor Krzysztof Bednarski (b. 1953 in Cracow). 

It’s hard to separate Ryszard Cieślak’s art from Grotowski’s theories and practices.  Not only did Cieślak learn from Grotowski—almost exclusively, when it comes to acting and theater—but the actor so took to his master’s principles that he essentially became Grotowski’s surrogate. 

Though the actor declared, “I am not Grotowski,” Cieślak was the living embodiment of Grotowski’s ideas.  “Grotowski’s closest collaborator in this research,” says Towards a Poor Theatre (Simon and Schuster, 1968), “is Ryszard Cieslak who, in the opinion of a critic from the French newspaper ‘l’Express’, is the living image of this method” (punctuation sic).

So, if you hear in reports of Cieślak’s acting or quotations of his explanations of what he does and how he works echoes of Towards a Poor Theatre or any other writings by or about Grotowski, there’s a reason for that.

Let’s start with the attribute on which my opening remarks focused: Cieślak’s astonishing control of his body.  The exercises that Tom Crawley found so daunting were Grotowski’s “corporals” and Cieślak demonstrated, discussed, and analyzed them on the CBS television program Camera Three in the second half of a two-part episode called “The Body Speaks” on 21 December 1975.  New York Times TV reviewer John J. O’Connor described the series of exercises intended to prepare the actor’s body as “an instrument for acting”:

Mr. Cieslak. rolls and tosses his body about the hard floor of a studio with astonishing abandon. Using basic yog[a] position[s], the motivational thrust is transformed from contemplative to outrageous extroversion.  The wild movements are constructed not mechanically or automatically but with a “sense of play toward discovery.”

The corporals are designed to engage the entire body.  On 14 December, the first part of the episode, Cieślak demonstrated Grotowski’s “plastiques,” exercises which train each set of muscles to move independently of the others (also sometimes called “isolations”).  O’Connor’s report:

Mr. Cieslak throws his body into contortion, contraction, jerking, twitching and belly‐dance gyrations.  It is an opening of the body and, as he explains it, a “going beyond the body.”  The individual exercises are described as notes on a musical scale.  Turning toward the “first moments of improvisation,” the notes finally “begin to make a melody.”

“A more demanding regime of physical exertion is difficult to imagine,” declared O’Connor.  The Times writer concluded:

The two parts of “The Body Speaks” constitute a compelling portrait of the sheer physical discipline required for the serious performing artist.  Another, more appropriate title might have been cribbed from the recent National Geographic special called “The Incredible Machine.”

(The Incredible Machine was a video journey inside the human body, using advanced technology—for 1975—of microscopic photography and sound, including scenes of heat radiation, color x-rays, and camera exploration of a living human heart.  It was a NatGeo documentary aired on the Public Broadcasting System/WNET-13 in New York City on 28 October 1975.)

Cieślak’s “physical discipline” that O’Connor described is the key to Grotowski’s poor acting as exemplified by Cieślak.  Grotowskian acting is an extension of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s concept of “the method of physical action”—the Polish theorist admired his Russian predecessor greatly for having been the first to devise a system of actor training (I guess he discounted François Delsarte)—which is why Grotowski and Cieślak placed so much emphasis on the training and discipline of the actor’s physical instrument.

In order to communicate with an audience by using only what actors often call their “instrument,” without the artificial aid of costumes, make-up, elaborate sets, inorganic sounds or music, and so on—the production elements Grotowski eschewed—an actor must be in total control of his or her body, to make it obey on command and to endure the physical strain, even pain, the “confession” requires. 

Tom Crawley quoted Grotowski from the 1967 workshop as demanding: “Creation involves effort, obstacles, something achieved.  It is not something simply avoided or arrived at by whim.  It is an effort brought out of commitment, risk and, in many cases, pain.”  Probably no actor lived this dictum to the extent that Ryszard Cieślak did.

It’s not hard to understand Cieślak’s regimen of physical fitness—it’s hard to do but not to understand—but one part of what he was preparing for is harder to grasp.  A focal aspect of the Grotowskian confessional acting style for which Cieślak was most renowned was “secular holiness.”

While the Stanislavskian actor’s goal is to merge with the character, to understand his or her motivations and goals and Brecht wanted his actors to find intellectual connections and, as he put it quite literally, demonstrate the actions of the character, the Grotowskian actor’s goal is to reveal that which is “most personal and closely guarded” within him- or herself. 

One important difference between Grotowskian acting and the Brechtian style lies in precisely what the actors reveal.  Grotowski, like Brecht, prohibited his actors not only from identifying with their characters—that is, pretending that the actor and the character are the same person—but also from demonstrating or showing anything that doesn’t spring from immediate and organic impulses. 

Ryszard Cieślak, as a Grotowskian actor, became an instrument for revealing “the innermost core of our personality—in order to sacrifice it, expose it.”   It is a nearly mystical experience for both the actor and the spectator.  While Stanislavsky wanted his audience to feel and respond to the emotional experience communicated by the actor and Brecht created a dialectic in which the actor demonstrates the situation that the play is presenting to the audience, commenting on the circumstances and inviting criticism from the spectators, Grotowski saw the shared experience as “shamanistic.”   This is what Cieślak practiced on stage.

We should note that emotions are part of this process, not eliminated from it; Cieślak’s feelings were part of his performances.  The emotions Cieślak expressed on stage weren’t those of the character, however, as a Stanislavskian actor would project, but his own. 

In his book An Acting Method Using the Psychophysical Experience of Workshop Games-Exercises (Edwin Mellon Press, 2000), Jerry Rojo (1935-2018), award-winning set designer, Professor Emeritus of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut, and pioneer in Environmental Theater, asserted, “In Grotowski’s notion of the ‘holy actor,’ an actor—in a direct, willful act—offers up the extreme of her own psyche and emotion, and this is, in fact, an act of sacrificial giving.”

What Cieślak accomplished on stage, what his performance in The Constant Prince exemplified, was what Grotowski called the “total act,” which he described in the Polish journal Dialog in 1969:

This act can be attained only out of the experience of one’s own life, this act which strips, bares, unveils, reveals, and uncovers.  Here an actor should not act but rather penetrate the regions of his own experience with his body and voice. . . .  At the moment when the actor attains this, he becomes a phenomenon hic et nunc; this is neither a story nor the creation of an illusion; it is the present moment.  The actor exposes himself and . . . he discovers himself.  Yet he has to know how to do this anew each time. . . .  This human phenomenon, the actor, whom you have before you has transcended the state of his division or duality.  This is no longer acting, and this is why it is an act [.  . .].  This is the phenomenon of total action.  That is why one wants to call it a total act.

Grotowski and Cieślak’s goal in acting, what all this preparation and training was aimed at, was a combination of spontaneity and discipline.  Grotowski instructed that “spontaneity and discipline, far from weakening each other, mutually reinforce themselves; that what is elementary feeds what is constructed and vice versa, to become the real source of a kind of acting that glows.”  So, while Cieślak is always “receptive to what will happen” at any given moment on any given night, he has a technique that gives his performance a shape that remains true and repeatable from show to show.

Despite what it sounds like from this simplistic examination, Cieślak’s acting wasn’t entirely free-floating.  The actor spoke of constructing a “score” for each role which would remain constant, a vessel for the flexibility of the moment-to-moment responses of the actors.  This is what allowed him to create freely at each performance but still repeat the play and scenes show after show. 

Grotowski used the metaphor of the banks of a river to illustrate this concept:

[T]he score, of course, is fixed—but it’s not fixed in the sense that something is absolutely fixed, but in the sense of having two banks—in having two banks of a river.  In other words, between this and that [indicating each hand], a human reaction, which has its limits—its borders—is different.  If the spectator can see a production three times, he thinks that it’s absolutely the same.  But if he’s seen it ten times, he will then observe that each time, it’s something totally different.  It’s only between the same banks (transcribed from videotape by the author).

Cieślak explained how the score functions:

We work in rehearsals to find an objective set of actions and relationships that, understood apart from  anything we the performers might feel, communicate to the audience the images, actions, and meanings we want to communicate.  This process takes months and it is a via negativa—that is, we  reject more than we accept and we search so that we can remove obstacles to our creativity.  We  play out the actions at hand, the associations that offer themselves to us. Grotowski  watches.  He helps us remove blocks, things that prevent us from fully confronting and experiencing the actions at hand.

Finally we construct a coherent score. This score, which grows minutely day by day, includes all the objective things a spectator sees from night to night.  For example, in Akropolis my score includes how my body lies in the wheelbarrow, what tone my voice has, how I breathe, how my fingers move. The score even includes the associations I have, what I think about from moment to moment.  These associations I change from time to time, as they get stale.  And as it is for me, so it is for everyone else.  Ideally the score is whole and does not need completion or revision. In practice, it is never that way.  Only a percentage of each production is scored when we begin performing it for audiences.  After four years of performing Akropolis about 80 per cent of it is scored for me.

Cieślak provided two analogies to explain the technique: a glass with a candle burning inside it and the bed of a river.  The glass, as the score, contains the flame, but the flame changes with each performance, responding to the moment, just as the riverbed channels the water, which is always “new and unknown.”  While the score remains constant, even unyielding, but imperceptible, it is the flame or the river that the spectator sees, and which alters in response to the audience and the environment.  The actor described his technique in terms of the candle burning inside a glass chimney:

The score is like a glass inside which a candle is burning.  The glass is solid; it is there, you can depend on it. It contains and guides the flame.  But it is not the flame.  The flame is my inner process each night. The flame is what illuminates the score, what the spectator see through the score.  The flame is alive . . . so my inner life varies from night to night, from moment to moment.  The way I feel an association, the interior sense of my voice or a movement of my finger.  I begin each night without anticipations.  This is the hardest thing to learn.  I do not prepare myself to feel anything.  I do not say, “Last night, this scene was extraordinary, I will try to do that again.”  I want only to be receptive to what will happens if I am secure in my score, knowing that even if I feel a minimum, the glass will not break, the objective structure worked out over the months will help me through.  But when a night comes that I can glow, shine, live, reveal—I am ready for it by not anticipating it.  The score remains the same, but everything is different because I am different.

I can’t think of a more fitting ending to this brief profile—and make no mistake: there’s much more to say about Ryszard Cieślak that I can’t manage on this blog—than to quote Jerzy Grotowski’s own homage to his student, friend, colleague, and collaborator.  After Cieślak’s death, Grotowski, who only outlived his leading actor by nine years when the innovator himself died in 1999 at the age of 65, spoke of him:

When I think of Ryszard Cieslak, I think of a creative actor.  It seems to me that he was really the incarnation of an actor who plays as a poet writes, or as Van Gogh was painting.  We can’t say that he is somebody who played imposed roles, already structured characters, at least from a literary point of view, because, even if he kept the rigor of the written text, he created a quality entirely new. . . .

It is very rare that a symbiosis between a so-called director and a so-called actor can go beyond all the limits of the technique, of a philosophy, or of ordinary habits.  This arrived to such a depth that often it was difficult to know if there were two human beings working, or a double human being. . . .

Now I am going to touch on a point which was a particularity of Ryszard. It was necessary not to push him and not to frighten him. Like a wild animal, when he lost his fear, his closure we can say, his shame of being seen, he could progress months and months with an opening and a complete liberation, a liberation from all that in life, and even more in the work of the actor, blocks us.  This opening was like an extraordinary trust.  And when he could work in this way for months and months with the director alone, after he could be in the presence of his colleagues, the other actors, and after even in the presence of the spectators; he had already entered into a structure which assured him, through rigor, a security.

Why do I think that he was an actor as great as, in another field of art, Van Gogh for example? Because he knew how to find the connection of gift and rigor.  When he had a score of acting, he could keep to it in the most minute details.  This—it is the rigor. But there was something mysterious behind this rigor which appeared always in connection with trust.  It was the gift, gift of self—in this sense, the gift.  Attention!  It was not the gift to the public! No. It was the gift to something much higher, which over-passes us, which is above us and also, we can say, it was the gift to his work, or it was the gift to our work, the gift to us both. . . .

The text [of The Constant Prince] speaks of tortures, of pains, of an agony.  The text speaks of a martyr who refuses to submit to the laws which he does not accept. . . .  But in working as director with Ryszard Cieslak, we never touched anything which was sad.  The whole role was based on a very precise time from his personal memory linked to the period in which he was an adolescent and had his first big, extraordinary amorous experience.  All was linked to that experience.  This referred to that kind of love which, as it can only arrive in adolescence, carries all its sensuality, all that which is carnal, but, in the same time, behind that, something totally different that is not carnal, or which is carnal in another way, and which is much more like a prayer. It’s as if, between these two sides, appears a bridge which is a carnal prayer. . . .

And even during months and years of preparatory work, even when we were alone in this work, without the other members of the group, one can’t say that this was an improvisation.  This was a return to the most subtle impulses of the lived experience, not simply to recreate it, but to take flight toward that impossible prayer.  But yes, all the little impulses and all that which Stanislavski would call physical actions (even if, in his interpretation, it would be much more in another context, the one of social game, and here it was not at all that)—even if everything was like refound, the true secret was to go out of the fear, of the refusal of himself, to go out of that, to enter into a big free space where he could have no fear at all and hide nothing. . . .

The first step toward this work was that Ryszard dominated totally the text. He learned the text by heart, he absorbed it in such a way that he could start in the middle of a phrase of any fragment, still respecting the syntax.  And at this point, the first thing we did was to create the conditions in which he could, as literally as possible, put this flow of words on the river of the memory, of the memory of the impulses of his body, of the memory of the small actions, and with the two take flight, take flight, like in his first experience: I say first in the sense of his base experience.  That base experience was luminous in an indescribable way.  And with that luminous thing, put in montage with the text, with the costume which makes reference to Christ or with the surrounding iconographic compositions which also allude to Christ, there appeared the story of a martyr, but we never worked with Ryszard starting from a martyr, all to the contrary. . . .

We can say that I demanded from him everything, a courage in a certain way inhuman, but I never asked him to produce an effect. He needed five months more?  Okay.  Ten months more?  Okay.  Fifteen months more?  Okay.  We just worked slowly.  And after this symbiosis, he had a kind of total security in the work, he had no fear, and we saw that everything was possible because there was no fear.

Taviani reported that among the young people who’d worked with Cieślak, some “explain that Ryszard was not only capable of teaching them technique, but could teach them about courage.”

Michael Chekhov, Part 3

[This is the third (and last) installment of my profile of Russian actor, director, and acting teacher Michael Chekhov.  Part 3 begins with a discussion of Chekhov’s disappointment with his performing career in Germany, which may have spurred him on to his period of wandering in Europe before he decamped for England and finally the United States, where he eventually settled for the last 17 years of his life. 

[As I said in my introduction to Part 2 (posted on 5 November), I recommend all readers who have just discovered “Michael Chekhov” on Rick On Theater go back to Part 1 (2 November) and read the first two parts of this series.  I have defined, explained, and introduced words, terms, and names that will show up again below and it will be hard to follow the train of thought without that familiarity.]

There’s little record of Michael Chekhov’s German film work, largely because of its nature as I noted in Part 2.  His one title role, in Olga Tschechowa’s Der Narr seiner Liebe, was silent, and his supporting work was largely silent, depriving him of his most powerful and compelling attribute on the stage: his voice.  Furthermore, stage actors in Russia enjoyed almost cult status. seen not merely as great artists but also as charismatic personalities  They didn’t enjoy similar recognition outside their home country, however.  In Chekhov’s case, the charisma which he’d been accorded in Moscow was a local phenomenon, bound up in the national traditions of artistry and the innovation that Russian theater experienced at the turn of the 20th century and didn’t travel to a different cultural environment west of the Russian frontier..

Another reason, almost certainly linked to this fact, was the actor’s own dismissal of the work as insubstantial.  Some chroniclers of Chekhov’s life and career assert that the slim record of this period—the Russian actor was little more pleased with his stage work in Germany—was that it was so short.  I suspect that it was brief because Chekhov was displeased with his opportunities and critical reception. 

According to Oksana Bulgakowa, a German professor of film history and film analysis, Chekhov’s stage roles were “of the ‘stand and serve’ variety.”  He accepted this in the hope that Reinhardt would eventually let him do Shakespearean parts, but that never happened.  “‘The time’s not right,” the impresario told him.  “It’s not what audiences want right now.”  I sense he was disappointed and found respite in traveling around Europe teaching and directing rather than staying in Germany—where he could conceivably have been quite comfortable since his former wife and daughter were living there successfully; his current wife, Ksenia Karlovna, had roots there, and he had Reinhardt as a kind of patron.  Instead he went wandering until he settled for a time in England before emigrating to the United States. 

All was not of no value, however.  Out of his frustration and displeasure with his German acting experiences, Chekhov made an important discovery, one that became a central point in his acting theories.  In Life and Encounters, he describes in great detail the agony through which he went to prepare to take over the role of Skid in Vienna.  The rehearsal time was short and he was mostly drilled in his performance and lines by Reinhardt’s assistant—the maestro himself didn’t arrive in Vienna until a few days before the opening performance—and the disjointed rehearsals were chaotic and perfunctory. 

Dress rehearsal, the first time the cast worked at the Theater an der Wien with full costumes, make-up, lighting, and sets—the previous sessions had taken place in Reinhardt’s apartment—was the night before the Vienna opening.  Chekhov recounted, “I could feel myself hurtling into a chasm and I was ashamed, sometimes getting angry and sometimes sinking into apathy.”  At the dress rehearsal, the actor found himself thinking nostalgically about his “beloved MAT and its atmosphere.”

At the opening performance, Chekhov wrote, “I went on stage with a feeling of dull indifference.”  He began hearing his own lines as he spoke them as if he were in the audience.  He’d become “a spectator of my own acting.”  His “consciousness had split into two,” he realized.  This became Chekhov’s principle of divided consciousness, based on a Steiner concept of “lower I/ego” and “higher I/ego.”  In the words of Kirillov and Merlin in their notes to The Path of the Actor:

Both of these essences co-exist and constantly fight against each other within every human being.  But although this process is unconscious for the ordinary person, the artist has to relate to it consciously, developing his sense of ‘individuality’ rather than ‘personality’.  Chekhov’s belief was that the ‘personal’, which is inappropriate for the realm of art, is always egoistic and subjective; it might be effective as far as the audience is concerned, but that effect is not artistic.  The ‘individual’ is non-egoistic and objective, and it coincides with the ‘ideal’ realm of images and art.  Chekhov maintained that the idea of ‘temperament’ . . . resides in the sphere of the ‘personal’, and he denounced the ‘primal’ nature of its influence, maintaining that with ‘temperament’ the actor achieves nothing on the stage except for agitating his audience’s nerves.

Chekhov himself wrote:

In a gifted person there is a constant struggle taking place between his higher and lower Egos.  Each of them is seeking to gain the upper hand. The lower Ego, complete with its ambition, passions and egotistical agitation is the victor in everyday life.  However, the other Ego is (or should be) the victor in the creative process.  The lower Ego is inclined to deny the existence of the higher Ego completely and to attribute the latter’s powers, capabilities and qualities to itself.  By contrast, the higher Ego recognizes the existence of its double, but rejects its instincts of enslavement and possession.  It wants to make the lower Ego the bearer of its ideas, feelings and forces.  So long as the lower Ego says ‘I’, the higher Ego is condemned to silence, but it can free itself of the lower Ego, abandon it and (partially) disengage from it, and then the lower Ego is silenced and recedes.  A kind of division of consciousness occurs, with the higher Ego acting as the source of inspiration and the lower Ego as the bearer, the agent.

The actor went into some detail discussing this concept (which I won’t do; I touch on affective memory in “Realism and Un-Realism”); it was an important notion for him because it was fundamental to his rejection of one of Stanislavsky’s most basic acting techniques.  Affective memory, also called emotional memory, is an actor’s recall of an emotion or feeling from a situation from his or her own life that is similar to one the character is experiencing and transferring it to the moment being performed.  (This is related to Uta Hagen’s technique of “substitution”; she discusses both emotional memory and substitution in Respect for Acting.)

So out of his dismal start in the West, Michael Chekhov learned an invaluable lesson at the hands of Max Reinardt and the commercial theater.  Using Berlin as a base of operations, Chekhov taught, performed, and directed around Western Europe and the Baltics.  This was known as his period of wandering, during which he developed new techniques of acting and directing.

Also operating around Europe and beyond (Palestine, then a British mandate) from a base in Berlin was the Hebrew-speaking theater troupe Habima, founded in Bialystock (then part of Russia) in 1912.  In 1918, Habima moved to Moscow and became an adjunct of MAT (under the guidance of Evgeni Vakhtangov).  The troupe left the Soviet Union in 1926, ostensibly on tour of Europe and the U.S., but in the face of Soviet anti-Semitism and communism’s strident atheism, the members decided to stay abroad. 

Maintaining a base in Berlin, the company invited Chekhov—whose mother, readers will recall, was Jewish—to direct them in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in September 1931.  Gordon characterizes the production, presented as a light psychological comedy, as “airy” and “un-Shakespearean” and adds, “Chekhov is praised as an experimental director for the first time in the West.”  (Gordon had just reported that Berlin’s 8-Uhr-Abendblatt [8 O’clock Evening Paper], a left-leaning daily newspaper, had called Chekhov “one ‘of the greatest hopes of the modern western theatre.’”)

(Habima—the name means “the stage” in Hebrew [ha = ‘the’; bima = ‘stage’]—so “the” Habima is a tautology—remained in Western Europe, with visits to Palestine where several members had already settled, until 1931 when it reestablished itself in Tel Aviv and it built its own theater there in 1945—three years before Israel’s independence.  In 1958, the year the company won the Israel Prize for theater, Habima Theatre, as it’s formally called, was designated the national theater of Israel.)

In April 1931, the Chekhovs moved to Paris to help form a Russian émigré theater called the Théâtre Tchekhoff.  (Note the French spelling of Chekhov’s family name!  Paris between 1917 and World War II was a refuge for Russian aristocracy, who had spoken French in Russia and adopted French culture, and opponents to Soviet Marxism, and had a famously large Russian émigé colony.)  The money to realize this project never came through. 

In June, the émigré actor-director staged and performed in a repertory that included Hamlet, Erik XIV, The Deluge, and Twelfth Night at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in Paris’s bohemian art quarter, Montmartre on the Right Bank.  A few of the actors in the company were professional actors, but most were novices and amateurs.  This was an obstacle for producing and presenting quality public performances and the general reception was tepid—except for praise for Chekhov’s own performances. 

The Théâtre de l’Atelier productions were hastily put together with the troupe’s mediocre acting company.  Stanislavsky’s son, Igor Alekseyev (1894-1975; Stanislavsky’s birth name was Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev), labeled them “awful hackwork.”  Alekseyev continued that Chekhov “is an excellent actor but a bad director and a worthless administrator.”

The next month, the actor-director founded the Theatre of Chekhov, Boner and Company with Georgette Boner (1903-1998), the Swiss German daughter of a Zürich millionaire, student of Max Reinhardt, and director of the Deutsche Bühne (German Stage) in Paris whom Chekhov had met in May.  Boner, an acquaintance of Ksenia Karlovna, became a lifelong friend of the Russian émigré and often served as his financial backer.  Boner edited the manuscript of a prospective German publication on Chekhov’s Technique and wrote Hommage an Michael Tschechow [Homage to Michael Chekhov] in 1994. 

The Chekhov-Boner company planned a production of Twelfth Night based on the staging Chekhov had created with Habima, as well as a dramatization of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote and a production of Arthur Schnitzler’s Anatol.  The actor-director had planned several productions he wanted to stage in Moscow before he left, but having been unable to follow through, he began using those plans for his French company—often in simplified versions and with shortened preparation periods.  (Remember that his Hamlet with MAT 2 took 13 months to rehearse, as most MAT performances did—give or take a month or two—far more than Western European shows, such as Reinhardt’s extravaganzas, allowed.  Productions in the U.S., particularly commercial shows (that is, Broadway), allowed even less time for rehearsals.)

With the help of Viktor Gromov (1899-1975), a Russian actor, director, and writer Chekhov had taught in Moscow at MAT 2, the émigré director staged and starred in a musical pantomime based on some Russian folk tales by Leo Tolstoy which they called Le Château s’éveille [The Castle awakens; the English title varies]. 

Chekhov’s hope was that the new show, which opened on 9 November 1931 at the Théãtre de l’Avenue near the Champs Élysées, would attract a large international audience.  There was little spoken dialogue in the performance in the belief that the symbolistic gestures would afford the production a universal language comprehensible by both French and Russian viewers.  Theatre Guild Magazine, the organ of the New York City production organization, said, for example, that “words are almost entirely excluded.”

The star and director of Château, guided by his understanding of Steiner’s philosophy, had focused on the symbolic production effects and movements. Theatergoers, however, weren’t taken with the mystical themes and technical problems on opening night exacerbated their displeasure.

Some critics lauded the presentation, which was subtitled an “experiment in rhythmical drama.”  Theatre Guild Magazine, for instance, had gone on to say:

There are moments . . . when this combination of allegory, music, and geometric stage sets . . . all tend to work the audience up into a sort of frenzy as though they were themselves struggling against evil.

Most of the press, however, both Parisian and foreign, reviewed Château negatively; the Russian journals especially were dismayed by the miscarriage of Chekhov’s Russian experiment before a foreign audience.  The director and star of the presentation was most hurt, though, by the response of Sergey Volkonsky (1860–1937), a writer, critic, theater theorist, and former director of the Imperial Theaters who was one of the most prominent experts and teachers in Russia of the rhythmic movement of Émil Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950), the Swiss composer, musician, and music educator who developed Dalcroze Eurhythmics (not to be confused with Steiner’s Eurythmy—though the two concepts are related).

Volkonsky (also spelled Wolkonsky), who had a reputation for expertise in and appreciation for the potentiality of rhythm in artistic expression, had come to a rehearsal of Le Château s’éveille and later “wrote what turned out to be a scathing review.”  The émigré Russian director protested, “I had rarely had occasion to read such merciless criticism.” 

In any case, Chekhov himself recorded, “With the exception of two or three kind reviews (in the French press), the Russian newspapers rejected my ‘innovations’ indignantly and demanded ‘real’ theatre.”  Audiences stayed away, and Château closed after only a few performances.

The “outright and miserable failure” of Château, in the director’s own words, threw Chekhov into a depression and he was said to have suffered an emotional crisis.  He wrote to fellow director and theatrical innovator Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) that “I over-innovated to such extent that I over-frightened spectators of all kinds.”  He’s reported to have broken down during one the performances.

In February 1932, at Gromov’s suggestion. Chekhov went to Riga, Latvia (like Lithuania, its Baltic neighbor, an independent nation at this time), to perform with the Latvian National Theater at the Russian Drama Theatre in a repertory of The Inspector General, Erik XIV, The Deluge, and a stage adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1859 novel The Village of Stepanchikovo [Село Степанчиково и его обитатели – Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli – The Village Stepanchikovo and its inhabitants].  The Village of Stepanchikovo opened on 25 November 1932; it would be Chekhov’s last production at the Russian Drama Theatre.

In productions of Aleksei Tolstoy’s historical drama The Death of Ivan the Terrible (opening: 23 April 1932) and Hamlet (opening: 21 October 1932), based on his 1924 MAT 2 staging, with the Latvian National Theatre in October, Chekhov, playing the title roles, spoke Russian on stage while the rest of the cast responded in Latvian.  Chekhov found the audiences in Riga appreciative, which helped his mental and physical health to improve.  He planned to write that German book on his acting technique with Georgette Boner, who later came to Latvia to collaborate with him.

During this time, the Latvian Actors Union asked Chekhov to organize an acting school in Riga.  With Gromov and some Latvian theater artists, he took charge of the project, which coincided with trips south to the independent nation of Lithuania at the invitation of Andrei Zhilinsky (1893-1948), director of the Kaunas State Theatre and a student of Chekhov’s at the MAT and MAT 2.  (Kaunas served as the temporary capital of Lithuania while Vilnius, the nation’s traditional capital, was under Polish control.  There were large populations of Russians in all the Baltic states, which formed the rationale for their Soviet annexation after World War II.) 

The Theatre School of the Latvian Actors Union opened in September 1932 and Chekhov taught there until the spring of 1934, contributing greatly to the advancement of the newly-developing field of actor-training in Latvia.  The teaching at the Riga school and the work he’d been doing with the acting company at the Kaunas theater became the foundation of the book Chekhov would write on the technique of the actor.  With the Lithuanian actors, he did exercises, improvisations, and what he called études, which were special exercises and improvs specific to the early work on a play or scene.  When he was in Riga, he wrote letters on acting to the actors in Kaunas and these became the notes for On the Technique of Acting (American version: To the Actor).

That May, Chekhov performed six roles in Chekhov Sketches, dramatizations of some of his uncle’s short stories, in a single evening at the Kaunas State Theatre.  In November 1932, he would take this solo tour-de-force to Estonia, and in April 1933, to Warsaw, Poland.  The rest of that year and into the next, Chekhov traveled to Kaunas, frequently commuting back and forth to Riga a few times a week.  (It’s about a 165-mile/265-kilometer trip each way, perhaps three hours’ travel.) 

He staged his Hamlet in Kaunas in October 1932, with Zhilinsky in the title role and his wife, Vera Solovyova (1892-1986), as Gertrude.  (Solovyova had played the same role in Moscow in 1924 and her husband had played the First Player.)  In March 1933, Chekhov also performed Malvolio in Twelfth Night (with Zhilinsky in the cast as Sir Toby Belch while serving as assistant director). 

The Latvian National Opera in Riga approached Chekhov and asked him to stage an opera for them.  The Russian actor-director had never staged an opera, but nonetheless, he began working with the company on Richard Wagner’s Parsifal in November 1933; at the same time, he was working with the actors at the Latvian National Theatre on Hamlet and Twelfth Night. 

Then in January 1934, Chekhov suffered a heart attack—angina pectoris—which put him in the hospital for over a month; he was all of 42.  He begged to be released for a few hours a day to work on the opera, but his doctor refused.  (The theater director would suffer severely from the aftermath of the attack for the rest of the year.)  Instead, Gromov, Chekhov’s assistant on Parsifal, snuck into the hospital at night and the two men would go into the corridor and under a dim, blue night light, the director would go over his plans for the next day’s rehearsal. 

Thus, the National Opera production was completed and opened on 14 March 1934.  Chekhov got himself released from the hospital for the final dress rehearsal and watched the performance from the auditorium.  The première was a gala event and the performance was met with acclaim in the press and standing ovations from the audience.  The Latvian opera company and Chekhov talked about future collaborations, but the plans were never realized. 

Even before Chekhov’s heart attack, his situation in Lithuania was becoming difficult.  As a result of a military coup in 1926, a conservative authoritarian government was installed in Kaunas and one-party rule under the  Lithuanian Nationalist Union was established.  Andrei Zhilinsky, although he was a native Lithuanian (born Andrius Oleka-Zhilinskas), was deeply involved in the Russian theater in Kaunas and in the Russian community and culture in the country.  To the nationalists, he was to blame for the “Russification” of Lithuania. 

Zhilinsky’s association with Chekhov made the chauvinistic press and anti-Russian elements in the society attack the visiting artist from his first appearance on stage in Kaunas.  By the time his stylized Inspector General opened on 26 September 1933, the nationalist sentiment was firmly against him and the critics declared his grotesque staging a manifestation of “communistic tendencies and propaganda.”  The Inspector General was Chekhov’s final production for Zhilinsky’s Kaunas State Theatre; it became impossible for Chekhov to work in the country any longer.  This was, of course, ironic since it was the communists who had hounded Chekhov out of Russia five years earlier.

The criticisms spread to Latvia, which was only slightly less nationalistic than its neighbor.  A right-wing coup brought another authoritarian government to power in Riga in May 1934.  This is what ended the plans for the Russian director to stage further work with the opera company.  All other prospective projects were abandoned as well.  Chekhov’s health prevented him from leaving Latvia immediately, however, so he retreated to the countryside to rest, read, and study Anthroposophy.

Georgette Boner came from Paris to Latvia in the summer of 1932 to work with Chekhov on the German acting technique book.  She edited and revised the text and he rewrote it many times while he used her as a sounding board and Chekhov “explained my complex theory of rhythm and composition and its application to theatre” to her and “she elevated me to such philosophical heights with her questions, advice and arguments, or brought me to my wit’s end with the latest psychological thought, that I became apprehensive lest my thoughts were altogether too naive.”  In the end, however, Chekhov was wasn’t happy with the manuscript and declined to get it published.

In the spring of 1934, Chekhov and Boner got together with Zhilinsky, Solovyova, and some other former MAT artists to form the Moscow Art Players.  Leonid Leonidov (1885–1983), a Russian-born Berlin theater impresario, had offered to back a tour of The Inspector General to the United States.  In the U.S., Sol Hurok (1888-1974), a Russian-born producer and manager, produced the U.S. end of the tour, which included the February-March 1935 run at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre of the Moscow Art Players of Revisor (the transliterated Russian title of The Inspector General, which was used for the New York City presentation) in rep with Poverty Is No Crime by Aleksandr Ostrovsky, Strange Child by Vasili Shkvarkin, Marriage by Nikolai Gogol, The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov, The Deluge by Henning Berger, I Forgot by Anton Chekhov, and Enemies by Boris Lavrenov. 

The Soviet government threatened to cancel plans to send a Moscow theater troupe to the U.S. if the Moscow Art Players were allowed to perform on Broadway, but Hurok persisted.  It was the first season of Russian and Soviet plays to be presented in the U.S. and the program sold out and received good reviews.  Hurok extended the Players New York run, originally scheduled for four weeks, for two additional weeks.  After New York, the company took its rep of Russian plays to Philadelphia and Boston. 

While his troupe was performing on Broadway, Chekhov met with members of the leftist Group Theatre, a company devoted to the principles of Konstantin Stanislavsky.  In 1935, the renowned theater company was looking for new acting teachers and Chekhov was invited to come in for an interview in February.  After having seen him perform, members like Stella Adler (1901-92), Sanford Meisner (1905-97), and Robert Lewis (1909-97)—who all became highly regarded acting teachers themselves—wanted to meet the Russian actor and director. 

Lee Strasberg, famous now for developing the Stanislavsky derivative known as the Method, wasn’t happy with the notion of going outside the Group for teachers, but the others had been so impressed with Chekhov’s work in the Moscow Art Players rep that they wanted to learn from him.  As Richard Brestoff, an actor and teacher, put in his book The Great Acting Teachers and Their Methods (1995), however: “the Group members concluded that his style was so personal to him that it could not be taught or used by others.”  (Brestoff allowed that this impression was “probably mistaken.”)

Another American theater artist of note who saw Chekhov perform in the Moscow Art Players Broadway début was young ingénue Beatrice Straight (1914-2001).  Straight, a member of the aristocratic Whitney family, was born into wealth and influence, but she wasn’t a dilettante as an actress.  (Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1875-1942, the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, was another member of the line by marriage.)  She studied her art seriously and when she saw Chekhov’s work, she suggested he start an acting school at her family’s estate, Dartington Hall, in Devonshire, England. 

Dartington Hall, which dates to the 14th century, was purchased in 1925 by the American millionaire Leonard Elmhirst and his wife Dorothy, Straight’s step-father and mother. They established an experimental progressive community at the estate and Chekhov opened the Chekhov Theatre Studio there in October 1936. 

At the end of the Moscow Art Players’ U.S. tour, Zhilinsky, Solovyova, and some of the other artists remained in the United States, and Chekhov—now Michael—set up in England.  His studio started with about 20 students from nations all around the Western world, such as England, the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Germany, Austria, and Lithuania.

The Russian actor-director-acting teacher ran and taught at the Chekhov Theatre Studio at Dartington Hall until 1938.  The threat of World War II, which broke out in Central Europe the next year with the German invasion of Poland, with whom Britain had a mutual defense treaty, in September 1939, would force the United Kingdom to declare war on the German Reich. 

In February 1936, the communist government of the USSR disbanded MAT 2, Chekhov’s old home base.  On 7 August 1938, Konstantin Stanislavsky died in Moscow of a heart attack he’d suffered five days earlier.  He was 75 years old.

Chekhov, Straight, and the Elmhirsts pulled up stakes in Devonshire and moved the school, with many of the current students and teachers, to Ridgefield, Connecticut, in December 1938.  It remained there until March 1942 when it disbanded as a consequence of the World War II draft.  (The United States had entered the war on Japan on 8 December 1941, and Germany and Italy on 11 December.) 

When Beatrice Straight accepted her Oscar for her supporting performance in Network in 1977, she thanked Michael Chekhov in her speech.  Straight, with Robert Cole, a writer  and actor, as executive manager, launched the Michael Chekhov Studio in New York City in 1980.

At the studio, Chekhov organized the Chekhov Theater Studio Players.  The troupe’s first production was a dramatization of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed.  It played at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre in October and November 1939, but the critical reception was mostly negative.  The New York Times reported that “it comes close to being a travesty.”  In December 1941, Chekhov and Shdanoff co-directed the Studio Players in Twelfth Night at Broadway’s Little Theatre to much better notices.  Straight played Viola, Ford Rainey played sir Toby Belch, Hurd Hatfield was Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Yul Brynner was one of the Illyrian residents.

In October and November 1940, Chekhov and the company made a 10,000-mile tour of the length of the East Coast with Twelfth Night and The Cricket on the Hearth.  They played small towns in high schools and community centers and created a sensation.  The Studio Players made two more such extensive tours in 1941 (a stylized staging of King Lear) and 1942.

Just ahead of the closure of the Ridgefield school, in October 1941, Chekhov started teaching professional classes in Manhattan at the Chekhov Theatre New York Studio. 

In October 1942, Chekhov left New York City for Los Angeles and the next year, he appeared in his first Hollywood film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Song of Russia (released on 1944), followed by In Our Time from Warner Bros. in 1944.  Life and Encounters, his second autobiography, was published in the Russian periodical Novyi Zhurnal [Новый журнал – New journal] the same year. 

In 1945, Chekhov played his best-known movie part, Dr. Alexander Brulov, the Freudian psychoanalyst of Ingrid Bergman’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound.  He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in the 18th Academy Awards in 1946.  His favorite film role came the next year, Solomon Levy, the Jewish father in Abie’s Irish Rose, from United Artists (1946).  That same year, Michael Chekhov became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

In August of that year, the actor and director published the Russian version of On the Technique of Acting.  (The abridged English version, To the Actor, came out in 1953 with an introduction by Yul Brynner, 1920-85; the full text in English was released in 1991.)

In 1948, the esteemed acting teacher held professional classes for actors in the film industry at the home of fellow émigré actor Akim Tamiroff (1899-1972), born in Georgia of Armenian heritage.  It was here that his influence and concepts spread through Hollywood to inspire many now-famous movie actors (many of whose names I dropped at the opening of this profile).

On 30 September 1955, Michael Chekhov suffered a fatal heart attack in Beverly Hills, California.  He was 64.  He was the first modern acting theorist to develop a comprehensive program of actor training as an alternative to the Stanislavsky System,  Despite his unfamiarity outside the worlds of acting and directing, his ideas and techniques had an immense influence on stage and film artists during his lifetime and afterwards.

In 1998, his fellow Russian George Shdanoff (1905-98), an acting coach, released the documentary From Russia to Hollywood: The 100 Year Odyssey of Chekhov and Shdanoff, which profiles Chekhov and is narrated by Mala Powers (1931-2007), a film and television actress who was a student and close friend and associate of Chekhov’s, and Gregory Peck (1916-2003), another Chekhov student and co-star of Spellbound. 

The regard of Michael Chekhov’s work, both as a working artist (acting and directing) and as a teacher and theorist, has grown since his death—indeed, in the past few decades.  Actors like Johnny Depp and Anthony Hopkins have acknowledged Chekhov's influence on their acting on Inside the Actors Studio, the cable TV show.  Other posthumous releases, attesting to this renewed interest, include expanded editions of On the Technique of Acting in 1991 and To the Actor (with a forward by Simon Callow in addition to Brynner’s preface) in 2002.  The English translation of The Path of the Actor came out in 2005, the 50th anniversary of Chekhov’s death, and selected lectures were released on CD in 2004. 

[I’m going to repeat my explanation of the Russian names and words in the text of “Michael Chekhov”: Because the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet doesn’t align with the Latin alphabet or English letter sounds at all precisely, there are many ways to transliterate Russian into English.  (This doesn’t even count transliterations into other languages.  You’ve all seen how Chekhov’s family name is spelled differently depending on which language into which it’s being transliterated: Chekhov for English, Tchekhoff for French, and Tschechow for German.  There are even more spellings for other languages that didn’t appear in this post.) 

[For the Russian names, I’ve tried to use a consistent transliteration of the Cyrillic spellings, but I have used the common spellings for names that have become standardized in English (usually because the bearers of those names have become well known or have immigrated here), such as Vladimir Sokoloff (instead of Sokolov), a Russian-born actor who had a long career in Hollywood.  I haven’t routinely supplied the Cyrillic spellings of Russian names except in a few instances—mostly because there are so many, it would unnecessarily clutter up the text.  I did include the Russian spellings for a few names where I thought it would be useful for those ROTters who can read Russian. 

[For the titles of Russian plays (or Russian translations of foreign plays) and for Russian-language books, journals, and articles I reference in the post, I have included (where I could determine them) the Cyrillic spelling, the English transliteration, and the English translation.  (Note that many Russian titles have several alternative English versions, even titles of some works published in English.)  I did this so that readers who are interested can do a search for more information on these works and often that requires having the original form of the title—even if you can’t read it yourself.) 

[As with the names, I have tried to use the same transliteration system for all Russian titles and words so that they are as consistent as I can make them.  (In several cases, unhappily, I wasn’t able to find the Russian original of the titles—and in many of the same instances, the English title varies depending on who’s doing the translating.   Unfortunately, this situation makes it hard to look up titles and names, especially in printed reference works.]