Stanislavski, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and the original group of Moscow Art Theatre actors, working through a long rehearsal period, had an instant and revelatory success with a play that had flopped abjectly on its first outing, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. It was immediately apparent that the company had achieved an unprecedented unity of ensemble effort and true-to-lifeness in its acting, and that these accomplishments were very much in keeping with the shifting temperament of the times. ^(I) The MAT had thus taken a long step toward both a new kind of actor and a new kind of director—obviously, the “unprecedented unity of ensemble effort” had been reached only with someone in close supervision. At the same time, that person had worked, we might say, from the acting to the production, not the other way round.

KS’s labors to refine and, ultimately, codify his ways of working with actors were lifelong. He saw early on, especially as turnover began in the MAT membership, that there was a limit to what could be achieved in even a long and intense rehearsal period. There had to be a training regimen put in place away from the pressures of production. So he founded a series of semi-autonomous Studios for that purpose, a couple of which, under the leadership of Vsevelod Meierhold and Yevgeni Vakhtangov, became entirely independent companies of importance. And his own efforts were eventually transcribed, however imperfectly, into his famous “System” of acting technique. His search for that, as he relates in My Life in Art, began with dissatisfaction with himself as an actor. He wondered why it was that at times, with some characters, he would strike through to something at once eloquent and truthful, something emotionally undeniable; at others, he would know he had not, however “successful” his performance. (He was a well-regarded actor from the start.) He also wondered why it was that, after initially locating a true creative connection with a role (he called this the “creative state” or “creative mood”), with many repetitions he tended to lapse into a mechanical reproduction of the resulting effects. And he observed that among the actors of his time, a handful seemed to not only visit this emotional truth territory regularly, but to actually dwell in it, to work from inside it, and to keep it fresh after hundreds of repetitions. If asked how they did that, these rare artists would probably have given radically different answers. Yet they arrived at an in-common state of being while on the stage, and in those great moments. Might there be a way that talented actors of not quite this natural-genius kind—the great run of gifted artists— could find their own ways to this state of grace, and if so, what was it?