Stanislavsky in America: An Actor's Workbook (review)

When Konstantin Stanislavsky toured the United States with his celebrated Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) in the early 1920s, he opened the door for his now-famous System to become the foundation of American actor training. How his technique was interpreted, disseminated, challenged, and transformed in this country by Russian émigré teachers and their American students is the subject of Mel Gordon's concise and practical Stanislavsky in America: An Actor's Workbook. In the preface, Gordon concedes that numerous scholars have explored the ways in which the System "fermented into a Russian-American brew" (xiv) once it landed in the United States. He argues, however, that most of those studies incorrectly ascribe the System's popularity in the US to the ways in which Russian and American theatre are alike, along with "weak acting traditions or the death of [America's] stock companies" (xiv). Indeed, throughout the rest of the book Gordon is successful in proving his assertion that "[t]he historical truth is quite otherwise and exceedingly more complicated" (xiv).

The book consists of nine chapters, each focusing on a particular theatre company, teacher, or actor-training program that has contributed to American perceptions and misperceptions of Stanislavsky's work. Gordon makes a particular contribution by concluding every chapter (except for the first) with a series of exercises used by the featured instructors, many of which are drawn from unpublished material and interviews.

His style of writing, as always, is entertaining and engaging and will appeal to both the casual theatre enthusiast and the serious student of acting. What a shame, however, that his enjoyable prose is marred by a significant number of typographical errors — so many that I eventually found them distracting.

The opening chapter provides a succinct overview of how Stanislavsky developed the System in his native land and includes a discussion of how the Bolshevik Revolution and changing political climate affected the ensemble of the MAT in divisive ways. While it sets up the rest of the book adequately, it would be stronger if Gordon had drawn from more current research that has emerged since the fall of the Soviet Union. The selected bibliography for chapter 1 lists his own book, The Stanislavsky Technique: Russia (1988), as the most recent source while the other four comprise Christine Edwards's The Stanislavsky Heritage (1965), John Gassner's Producing the Play (1941), Erika Munk's Stanislavski and America (1966), and a 1977 issue of Yale/Theater (Cadden 1977). Certainly, all of these sources are valid; however, Gordon's discussion of the experiments in rehearsal techniques that Stanislavsky conducted in the final years of his life (1936-1938) could benefit from the latest scholarship in the area of Active Analysis by Sharon Carnicke (2008, 2010a, 2010b) and Bella Merlin (2001, 2003).

Particularly strong, on the other hand, are chapters 2 and 3, which profile the American Laboratory Theatre and the famed Group Theatre respectively. In this stretch of the book, Gordon offers a compelling exploration of how Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya of the American Laboratory Theatre first introduced American actors (namely Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Robert Lewis, and Sanford Meisner) to the theory and practice of the System. Gordon then traces in detail how those students "borrowed many of the American Laboratory Theatre's most hallowed principles" (40) and, along with fellow members of the Group Theatre, placed them into rehearsal practices, thereby creating "a comprehensive program in Stanislavsky Technique" (40). Thus, Gordon delineates clearly how the American version of the System began and how, early on, Strasberg and the other members of the Group dubbed their own work in Affective Memory the "'Method' in order to separate it from its Lab origins" (44).

Chapter 4 is divided into a series of individual sketches of émigré Stanislavsky-based teachers ranging from the legendary to the obscure. Again, Gordon makes a significant contribution with this chapter by bringing to light the work of several little-known or forgotten instructors that contributed...