Acting in Real Time

Notes

NOTES Introduction 1. Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938) was the founder of the Moscow Art Theatre (1898), where he developed his ideas for psychological realism. 2. The reader will ‹nd a more detailed de‹nition of these terms in Part III of this book. 3. In this book, when I speak about acting, I use the verbs “to act,” “to perform ,” and “to play.” And what I am speaking about is stage acting, not ‹lm or television acting. To avoid awkward grammar, I use the word “actor,” and the pronoun “he” to mean both male and female actors. 4. Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was the founder of the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin (1949), where he tested his theories of epic acting. 5. The Measures Taken was ‹rst published as Die Massnahme (Berlin: G. Kiepenheuer, 1930). It belongs to a small group of so-called didactic plays. Eric Bentley’s translation was ‹rst published in the Colorado Review in 1956–57. Another translation by Elizabeth Hanunian was published by the U.S. Government for the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ case against Brecht in 1947, causing him to leave the United States, where he had been living in exile from Nazi Germany since 1942. 6. The original play was meant for so-called workers’ choirs—big organizations af‹liated with the unions or the Communist Party. Eisler, too, had been living in exile in the United States, was indicted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and had to leave the country. 7. We discovered this in the newly available German edition of the complete works of Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968). In the Dutch text the Young Comrade is listed as one of the other characters, equal to the Agitators and the Chorus. Also in Bentley’s trans259 lation the Young Comrade is listed as one of the characters, which easily leads to the misunderstanding that he is the main character and the tragic hero of the play. This leads to the misunderstanding that this role will be cast in the traditional way. 8. Hanns Eisler’s original score was for a workers’ choir of four hundred amateur singers. The actors in the ‹rst performance of the play, directed by Brecht in 1930, were professionals. One of them was Brecht’s wife Helene Weigel, another the famous actor Ernst Busch. 9. The other “giants of the modern theater” are Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook. 10. Joseph Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1972). Chapter 1 1. Denis Diderot, Le Paradoxe sur le Comédien, written in 1773 (Paris, 1830), trans. Geoffrey Bremner as The Paradox of the Actor, in Denis Diderot, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, (London: Penguin, 1994). The Paradox is a discourse on the subject of acting truthfully. The content of the discourse is in fact the paradox of the actor. 2. Among Pirandello’s most famous plays are Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV, trans. Mark Musa (London: Penguin, 1995), and Tonight We Improvise, trans. Marta Abba (New York: Samuel French, 1988). Pirandello received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. Chapter 2 1. Aristotle, Poetics, around 350 B.C, trans by S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961). 2. Konstantin Stanislavski wrote several books about his system, of which An Actor Prepares (New York: Theatre Art Books, 1936) is the most in›uential. His later books, Building a Character (New York: Theater Art Books, 1948) and Creating a Role (New York: Theater Art Books, 1961), only appeared in English long after Stanislavski had died. Of the many books about Stanislavski, I would recommend especially Sonia Moore’s The Stanislavski System: The Professional Training of an Actor, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1984); and Jean Benedetti’s more recent Stanislavski and the Actor (New York: Routledge, 1998). 3. See also the section “The Actor’s First Paradox: What Is Real?” in chapter 1. 4. Ton Lutz (1919–2009), Dutch actor, director, acting teacher, and the artistic director of several big theater companies in the Netherlands. 5. Lee Strasberg (1901–1982), the cofounder and later director of the Actors Studio in New York (1947), developed the substitution and emotional memory techniques further into what became known as the Method: “sense memory” became a cornerstone for “method acting.” 260 NOTES TO PAGES 5–32 6. Strasberg originated...