Acting: The First Six Lessons Acting: The First Six Lessons is a key text for drama students today. These dramatic dialogues between the teacher and “the Creature”—an idealistic student—explore the “craft” of acting according to one of the godfathers of method acting. The book also features Boleslavsky’s lec- tures to The Creative Theatre and American Laboratory Theatre, as well as “Acting with Maria Ouspenskaya,” four short essays on the work of Ouspenskaya, his colleague and fellow actor trainer. This new edition is edited with an introduction and bibliography by Rhonda Blair, author of The Actor, Image, and Action. Richard Boleslavsky (1889–1937) (born Ryszard Boleslawski) was a Polish actor and director. He was a member of the Moscow Art Theatre and director of its First Studio. He emigrated to New York in the 1920s and was the first teacher of the Stanislavski system of acting in the West. He went on to produce plays on Broadway and was a leading Hollywood director in the 1930s. Rhonda Blair is Professor of Theatre at Southern Methodist University. She is a leading voice on the applications of cognitive science on the acting process and the author of The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience. She is currently the President of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). Acting: The First Six Lessons Documents from the American Laboratory Theatre Richard Boleslavsky Edited and introduced by Rhonda Blair 711 Third Avenue, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10017 Contents Acknowledgments viii Editor’s introduction ix Acting: The First Six Lessons 1 Introduction 1 1 The First Lesson: Concentration 4 2 The Second Lesson: Memory of Emotion 11 3 The Third Lesson: Dramatic Action 22 4 The Fourth Lesson: Characterization 31 5 The Fifth Lesson: Observation 45 6 The Sixth Lesson: Rhythm 53 The “Creative Theatre” Lectures 65 Introduction 67 1 What is the theatre? 71 2 What is a play? 74 vi Contents 3 What is the audience? 77 4 What is an actor? 82 5 What is a theatrical designer? 84 6 What is a theatrical composer? 88 7 What is a collective work in a theatre? 92 8 What is a theatrical performance? 97 9 What is a mechanical performance? 99 10 What is a creative theatrical performance? 101 11 The qualifications of a creative actor 103 12 What is the meaning of “Living the Part?” 105 13 What is “Spiritual Concentration?” 107 14 What is the Spiritual or Affective Memory? 114 15 How to use affective memory in preparing a part 117 Boleslavsky lectures from the American Laboratory Theatre 121 1 Lecture 3 123 2 Lecture 5 130 3 Lesson 6 137 4 Lecture 7 142 5 Lesson 8 150 Contents vii 6 Lesson 9 156 7 Lecture 10 164 8 Lecture 11 169 Notes on acting with Maria Ouspenskaya 181 1 October 1954 183 2 November 1954 189 3 December 1954 195 4 January 1955 201 Acknowledgments My deep thanks must go first to Talia Rodgers for suggesting this pro- ject to me; this provided an excuse to return to material that I had long ago left behind—only to discover I had so much more to learn and appreciate about Boleslavsky’s heritage. Many thanks to Sharon Carnicke and Laurence Senelick for directing me to a range of useful background sources and materials for Boleslavsky. My sincere apprecia- tion to Robert Ellerman for corresponding and meeting with me about Boleslavsky, Stanislavsky, and Strasberg, and for providing a copy of the 1924–25 American Laboratory Theatre lectures, among other materials. Once again my former professor Ronald Willis has deeply informed my work; besides providing me with valuable insights on Boleslavsky and the American Laboratory Theatre, he also loaned me a wonderful and rather ancient copy of the Creative Theatre lectures. My thanks to our Meadows School of the Arts librarian, Amy Turner, for assistance in copyright research, and to my graduate assistant, Jamie Rezanour, for diligently typing and proofing the Boleslavsky lectures and Ouspenskaya essays. Niall Slater has been a patient and gracious shepherd; I am happily indebted to him for his effective facilitation of this project. As always, I am joyfully thankful to my partner Bill Beach for his support. Editor’s introduction Boleslavsky and Acting: The First Six Lessons More than any other person, Polish actor, director, and teacher Richard Boleslavsky (February 4, 1889—January 17, 1937) is responsible for the initial dissemination of the teachings of Stanislavsky in the United States. As founder and central teacher at the American Laboratory Theatre (1923–29), he taught Stanislavsky’s basic principles to hundreds of actors; here he had a profound influence on those who would become leading figures of the theatre over the next decade and who would teach Stanislavsky-based approaches to acting into the late twentieth century. His book, Acting: The First Six Lessons, made it possible for theatre practitioners across the country to have a primer in Stanislavsky. Published in 1933, it preceded the publication of Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares by three years, and it has remained in print ever since. The basic materials in Acting in fact appeared even earlier: in his lectures at the Princess Theatre in 1923 (under the title “The Creative Theatre”); in lectures he gave at the Lab; and in a series of articles in Theatre Arts Magazine and Theatre Arts Monthly from 1923 to 1932. The book you hold was a crucial “first-wave” component in the dissemination of Stanislavsky-influenced principles among American actors. It is the first in any language ever to describe basic principles of Stanislavsky-based approaches to actor training, and it has remained in widespread use since its publication. Acting continues to be on the bookshelves of many actors and acting teachers. Boleslavsky’s credentials as an acolyte of Stanislavsky are impeccable. Admitted provisionally to the Moscow Art Theatre as a 17-year-old student actor in fall 1906, he joined the company in summer 1908 and was immediately cast in a wide range of roles, including that of Laertes in the infamous Gordon Craig production of Hamlet. His first role was that of Belyayev in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country; here Boleslavsky was in on the ground floor of the earliest work on the System, for this production was Stanislavsky’s “first coordinated x Editor’s introduction effort to prove his new system of acting” (Roberts 1981: 18). In 1912 he was propitiously chosen to be an original member of MAT’s First Studio; there he fell under the influence of Sulerzhitsky’s Tolstoyan spirituality and developed a close relationship with Yevgeny Vakhtangov, both of whom would have a significant impact on his approach to theatre. Maria Ouspenskaya, who would work with Boleslavsky at the American Laboratory Theatre as the primary acting studio teacher, was also a member of the Studio, and it was during this time that the foundation for their relationship was laid. While continuing to act, Boleslavsky also quickly became a much-admired Studio director, and in 1916 he was invited to share leadership responsibilities at the Studio; his work with actors was marked by a “sharpening of the actor’s expression, his ‘stripping bare’ of the characters” (Roberts 1981: 73), which Boleslavsky’s biographer J. W. Roberts argues was in fact a precursor to Yevgeny Vakhtangov’s “fantastic realism”–theatricality in support of emotional truthfulness (ibid.: 76). After serving in the cavalry in World War I and following the 1917 October Revolution, Boleslavsky managed to avoid arrest, unlike many other actors (even though he did not sup- port the new communist regime). However, due to increasing govern- ment repression, Boleslavsky left Russia by early 1920, passing through Minsk, Warsaw, and Prague to direct and act with a number of com- panies, before arriving in New York in September 1922 with the Revue Russe (Willis 1968: 29). When the Moscow Art Theatre arrived in New York on January 3, 1923 for its US tour, Boleslavsky rejoined the company as an actor and assistant to Stanislavsky. He was given Stanislavsky’s blessing to deliver a series of lectures, beginning on January 18, at the Princess Theatre. These lectures, typically known as the Princess Theatre Lectures, were “the first enunciation of Stanislavsky’s ideas publicly presented to an American audience” (Roberts 1981: 106); there is little doubt that these lectures are those recorded by Michael Barroy in “Creative Theatre” (Willis 1968: 31) and which are included here. These lectures describe the vision that guided Boleslavsky, first in his formulation of the American Laboratory Theatre, a theatre and school inspired by the work of the MAT that was formally established on June 29, 1923 (ibid.: 40), and then in writing Acting, published a decade later; the fundamental principles remain the same. The American Laboratory Theatre, founded by Boleslavsky with the invaluable moral and financial support of a number of well-placed New Yorkers, most particularly Miriam and Herbert Stockton, was central to the course of twentieth-century American acting. The curricu- lum was multifaceted, addressing all aspects of actor training—mental, Editor’s introduction xi emotional, physical, and spiritual. The heart of the curriculum were lectures given by Boleslavsky and acting classes taught by him and by Ouspenskaya. Other components included voice, singing, eurythmics, fencing, ballet, art history, theatre design, and culture, sometimes taught by leading lights such as Norman Bel Geddes, Robert Edmond Jones, and Mortimer Adler. The Lab also regularly hosted guest speakers such as Jacques Copeau and George Pierce Baker. What Boleslavsky called the spiritual and creative components of the work were the most important for him; these encompassed the actor’s work on sensitivity, imagination, and general cultural education.