I would summarize Stanislavski’s findings this way: First, the actor must search for a technique based not on appearances, however artfully composed, or on predetermined effects, however logical-seeming, well-calculated, or sanctified by past practice, but based on finding one’s way to a purely subjective identification with the character’s life experience, of which the play shows us a determinative segment. To do this, the actor must fashion an inner technique, a way of identifying and exploring the parts of his or her self that are shared with those of the character, then work from there toward the external characteristics and their theatricalization. (Such notions as that of a subtext, of emotional recall, and of the imagination’s “magic if” were associated with this new kind of inner technique.) Then, the actor must work toward not only the character’s external aspects  (which were by no means to be slighted), but more importantly the character’s personal objective, or goal, as he or she discovers it in the text. That will be seen as a through-line, or arc, through the narrative. But the performer will work on it by breaking it down into units of action (actors came to call them “beats”), producing a series of specific actions with specific intentions—determined by the immediate situations and conditioned by the “given circumstances”—whose exact outcome is not known in advance (because, of course, who knows what happens when my objective meets up with yours?), and which therefore lays down its own pathway through even the most familiar material. As to emotion, KS advised leaving it alone, to never work directly on evoking it, but instead to concentrate on “the thing that went before.” In life, after all, we don’t generally go about trying to have emotions; they arise unbidden, and sometimes unwanted, as we pursue our desires.

The director’s function in relation to this approach to acting was, first, to determine the central theme of the play and its progression through the story, and to define the play’s overall mood, or, as Verdians would say, its tinta; to convey these understandings to the actors so that their individual efforts would share a common awareness of it; and to assist each actor in the pursuit of his or her objective and in responding to the events that ensue. The collective sum of these pursuits and understandings constituted the “concept” of the production, always derived from the laws of the play’s stage world, not from perceptions drawn into that world from the outside, however interesting those might be. Thus, the production itself, no less than its individual performers, could be said to work “from the inside out.” Late in his career, Stanislavski placed less stress on the necessity of actions invariably developing from within; sometimes, the simple doing of the action could summon its “motivation.” He also came to believe that he should micromanage less, and trust his actors more. But of course, those would be actors trained according his own principles.

Obviously, any director must stage the work at hand—that is, see to it that the strivings of his actors come together in a way that’s not only dramatically coherent, but aesthetically and practically appealing as theatrical presentation. But as some commented on the MAT’s arrival in New York—where David Belasco’s miraculous coups of scenery and lighting, along with his intense work to pull compelling theatrical effects from his actors, had set a standard of realistic representation—its productions didn’t look “staged.” The life of the stage world seemed to progress according to its own logic and rhythms, and the director’s work had, in effect, disappeared. There must have been a guiding hand, but the hand was an invisible one. ^(I)No doubt this impression must be evaluated in its time-and-place context, and with the note that the plays of Chekhov are especially amenable to it. ^(II) Nevertheless, it suggests the effect sought by the ideal of the integrated production, and reminds us that according to that ideal, the elements of performance and production must conform not only to one another, but to the text itself—to glean from the text the most rigorously honest inferences the interpreters can make as to the creator’s intentions, which are usually not as mysterious as often represented.