1 Realist Theatre as the Plane of the Dispute

The clash between Konstantin Stanislavsky’s and David Mamet’s views on the process of creating a role and applying it on stage has brought about a dispute over the best acting method. It is a dispute over theatrical work conducted in a convention known as psychological realism, or realist theatre, which is characterised by a logicality of events, linearity, cause and effect, mimesis (imitation, mimicking) and diegesis (storytelling). This type of theatre is known as “dramatic theatre” and encompasses the story, stage action, the characters, the utter domination of the text, etc. Perhaps in the current theatrical reality, where postmodernism and avant-garde are commonplace, a more accurate term to use would be “classical dramatic theatre.” In this theatrical convention the actor’s goal is to accurately achieve the playwright’s goals as interpreted by the director and materialised in the course of rehearsals in the form of stage characters played for the audience. The role and theatrical shape of the play performed on stage should be characterised by a broadly understood realism (or even naturalism) and as such represent everyday situations and experiences as closely as possible, or – to use Aristotle’s notion of mimesis praxeos – show people in action by means of imitation.

The dispute in question is born out of two entirely different views on acting, which may be characterised as a dispute between complexity and simplicity. The simplicity of being in action proposed by Mamet is juxtaposed with the complexity of Stanislavsky’s emotional experiencing. This dispute lets us look at acting from two perspectives and consequently allows us to reject all that is irrelevant and look at the essence of acting.

2 Complexity: Key Notions in the Stanislavsky System

To reach an objective we need a set of acting tools, i.e., a method allowing us to achieve channelled and precise acting. The Stanislavsky system provides such a set of tools in which one element complements another, producing a coherent whole aimed at achieving a transformation through the creative process. The system’s structure is very complex and can be divided into various phases:

1. –the analytical phase, in which the director and actors “break down” the contents of the play in order to get to know every detail of the character’s lives and circumstances as intended by the author and to establish the supreme objective;
2. –the technique phase, which encompasses exercises for improving muscle relaxation, body flexibility, contact with a partner, attentiveness on stage, improvisations about given subjects, activating the actors’ imagination, etc., as well as situational rehearsals during which actors try to apply the analytical material gathered and evoke suitable emotions and feelings, i.e., discover the life of the human spirit on stage by applying the so-called magical if, i.e., putting themselves in their character’s shoes and fully believing in that character. Consequently, they maintain the appropriate onstage condition, the same as in offstage life, in order to create realistic situations;
3. –the staging phase, in which the actors focus on rehearsing the entire play, their characters’ emotional experiences, playing the role in a defined personality frame, costume, makeup, internal tempo-rhythm, etc.

Stanislavsky’s legacy is a direction, in which the actor should head to create a stage persona that is not a separate “artificial, mechanical being” but the outcome of the actor’s onstage emotional experiences, a certain extension of the personality of the actor who finds in himself or herself the required qualities and takes them out into the open while remaining himself or herself. Stanislavsky made it clear that the core idea of his system is the achievement of complete organicism of the actor, succumbing to internal impulses, as well as emotional and external reflexes resulting from the onstage behaviour of their partner.

The phrase organic body-mind captures the essence of Stanislavsky’s explorations. “The organic body-mind is a body which responds to the demands made by the mind in a way that is neither “redundant,” “defaulting” nor “incoherent,” that is when:

1. –the body responds only to the demands made by the mind;
2. –the body responds to all the demands of the mind;
3. –reacting to those demands only, the body adapts to them, seeks to satisfy them (Barba & Savarese, 2005, p. 99).

The organic body-mind is “the most normal human condition”, the kind we can observe in everyday life. However, the artificial conditions on stage restrict our perception, block it and hinder the emotional experience (perezhivanie). This most normal human condition, everyday life kind, becomes distorted. What distorts it is our fear of being judged, disbelief in what I am doing, a superficial reception of the play, imprecise action due to stage fright, ignorance and consequently a lack of suitable feelings and emotions. Obviously, the actor continues to experience all kinds of feelings and external stimuli. They are, however, remote from the author’s and director’s intentions, thus to achieve the relevant emotional state of the character, we should use a subtle assortment of psychophysical activities developed during rehearsals. This creates an illusion of everyday life where the artificiality of the stage does not constrain the actors or block out their reactions. The actor becomes the character, both physically and spiritually. He/she believes in what is happening on stage and what they feel as if it were happening in real life. The stage action is purposeful with nothing left to chance and the actors’ actions are precise, resulting in a narrative, which makes the audience forget that they are watching a carefully rehearsed performance, leading them to believe in the authenticity of the play. The precise physical actions discovered by the actors enable them to harness the contents coming directly from their subconscious to their acting. The actor’s acting is no longer volitional and becomes more involuntary. This has an effect on the actor. The actor surrenders to it as a dancer surrenders to music or a canoeist to the current of the river. However, we are not dealing here with any kind of trans-technique. Emotional experiencing sharpens the senses and harmonises the physical and spiritual aspects of ourselves. The emotional experiencing causes us to perceive reality the way we do in real life, without the mental barriers caused by being on stage in front of an audience.

Stanislavsky’s explorations were to transform acting, which had earlier been perceived as make-believe, into something truthful.

3 Simplicity: Mamet Speaks Out against Stanislavsky

David Mamet (2014), who passionately rejects Stanislavsky’s ideas is on the opposite end of the acting dispute. He completely negates the need for analysing the text and claims that the knowledge coming out of it is useless to the actor and can only be an obstacle and barrier to a spontaneous being on stage. The actor does not have to ‘become’ the character, in fact, Mamet does not acknowledge the very existence of the term “character”. A character is only letters on paper. The actors must speak their lines clearly to achieve more or less what the author intended, and the audience will view them as ‘an illusion of the character’ on stage. Mamet dismisses emotional experiencing ‘of the character’s tragedy on stage’ and claims that it is impossible to make oneself experience any other feelings than those that he/she has at the moment of being on stage in front of the audience. He ridicules Stanislavsky’s method which has the actor think of a memory, reaction or feeling for each moment of the play and remain faithful to it on stage. He claims that such behaviour cuts off the actor’s stage awareness and spontaneity. Instead of engaging in dialogues with their onstage partner, the actors are absorbed by checking whether they have activated the emotion “prepared” beforehand. Mamet asserts that the emotional and psychological nature causes a person to rebel against any instruction to experience a feeling. “If a person could really command its subconscious to evoke certain emotions when he/she so wishes, there would be no neuroses, psychoses, psychoanalysis – there would be no sadness” (Mamet, 2014, pp. 24–25). Since we cannot control our thoughts, can we control our emotions?

Stanislavsky’s method instructs the actor to think up vicarious stories, called emotional experiencing, with which the actors torture themselves in an attempt to program their mind to experience those emotions. In Mamet’s opinion, the actor does not need to experience anything – all they need to do is appear on stage and open their mind and spirit to what happens there, which will trigger the truest and most honest emotions. The actors have their own tragedies. Actors are filled to the brim with stories from their own lives, which make up the emotional load needed to create the role. Stanislavsky’s magical if, i.e. “what I would do in that situation” (Mamet, 2014, p. 22) is an empty and pointless deliberation because the very idea of a hypothetical situation – such as one that requires frenzied courage or overcoming oneself, as in Hamlet – must be rejected. We cannot foresee what we would do if our mother together with our uncle murdered our father in order to take over the kingdom. “Only a fool or a liar can claim he knows what he would do in circumstances requiring courageous behaviour” (Mamet, 2014, p. 50).

It is the director who builds the meaning of the staging through context and it is he/she who is responsible for structuring the staging in such a way as to provoke the matters included in the play. The actor should under no circumstances be bothered with the meaning of his/her acting and the issues that it conveys. The context and the order of scenes, as well as the simple aim that each scene serves, make up a score that the actor should follow. Let us take a look at a simple example: an actress is sitting on a chair on stage. For the audience, this may mean waiting. The actress is sitting on a chair, holding a watering can and in front of her there is a flower pot with flowers. For the audience, this may mean the intention to water the flowers. The actress is sitting on a chair and in front of her hangs a noose. For the audience, this may mean hesitation before committing suicide. In all the above cases the actress’s behaviour is the same. She is relaxed and contemplative while sitting on the chair. She is not trying to imagine or feel anything, she responds to the circumstances of the empty stage, watering can, flower pot and noose. In all those cases she feels the same way. It is the audience who, using their imagination, will make a different interpretation of each of those situations. They do not need to be helped with artificially programmed emotional experiencing. Acting – that fleeting moment – happens when the actors accept all that is going on inside them and around them and combine their own struggles with uncertainty, with the picture sketched by the playwright in the form of the dialogue spoken at that exceptional moment. This creates an illusion of the character, which will be authentic for the audience. The experience of being on stage in front of the audience and the acceptance of that experience is enough to experience the character. It carries a sufficient emotional load.

Mamet compares the actor to an athlete who should have a relaxed, supple and trained body and the courage to overcome obstacles (Mamet, 2014, p. 36). Those obstacles are found on the stage. The most prominent one is our own fear that fills us at the moment we step out of the wings onto the stage. Acting has characteristics of heroism. An actor needs courage, concentration and self-acceptance for the creative moment to take place on stage in front of the audience. The actors, whether they like it or not, stand naked in front of the audience. They do not need to hide behind magic formulae, the character’s experiences and history, redundant ideology or ideas for the role. Once the actors accept themselves, they will not fake anything or impose anything on themselves and will open up to the flow of the moment, true acting will become possible.

In summary, Mamet proposes the following: learn the lines, prepare simple onstage actions together with the director (rehearsals should not take longer than a few weeks), set the simplest possible goal to achieve, go on stage and accept your current condition as well as fear and uncertainty, overcome that fear with courage and speak your lines to your partner loudly, clearly and with determination. Ignore your emotions, do not force yourself to feel or imagine anything, be constantly focused on your stage partner. The actor should not hold on to any emotional stirs and fantasies but should resolutely work towards the goal he/she had set. Do not prepare anything redundant, surrender to impulses, be open and humble. That is all. Is it a lot?

Mamet reduces the acting method to a few simple tenets in order to capture its most crucial elements. For that reason he rejects the complexity of Stanislavsky’s system, ignoring the fact that at the end of his life, Stanislavsky did a similar thing. He combined all his previous ideas in a new, basic one, which he called the method of physical actions, which was to crown his previous explorations. He claimed that there is no system that the working name ‘system’ embraces only a few basic rules and exercises (see above) and there can be no single recipe for playing a role. The method of physical actions teaches that all the processes occurring in the actor – starting from breathing and going all the way to subtle movements of imagination – come down to exactly that – physical actions. Why, then, does Mamet not discuss the last stage of Stanislavsky’s research? Because it is not commonly known and sufficiently described. Mamet makes references to general and superficial opinions about Stanislavsky’s work, most of which are inaccurate, erroneous or downright false. Mamet makes numerous remarks about acting being relatively simple while it is academics and all kinds of teachers who come up with quack ideas based on the Stanislavsky system in order to sustain the illusion of possessing “covert knowledge”. Mamet tries to dispel that illusion and believes common sense will allow actors to get rid of complexes, making acting simple, comprehensible and tangible. Is it really the case?

4 Acting Practice

Our deliberations are useful only inasmuch as we can identify their practical aspect. Both Mamet and Stanislavsky are in agreement as to the objective of the action and the action itself. Without them, it is impossible to even initiate acting. The key difference lies in the onstage condition. ‘The natural human condition’ is the stage condition that Stanislavsky recommends to actors. Everything here is subordinated to the truth. Master your technique to the point where the audience does not see acting, by human emotional experiencing, as they do in daily life. However, Mamet encourages the actors to accept their condition of “today”, of the “here and now”, to let go of any hypothetical experiences of the character. This leads us outside the dramatic theatre into the realm of modern post-dramatic theatre. Hans-Thies Lehman (2009) defines this means of theatrical expression as an invasion of reality. What has heretofore been a secret, hidden from the audiences’ eyes – what the actor feels privately – can become the pivotal point of acting due to the invasion of reality. The line between reality and fiction becomes blurred. Mamet does not notice the trap that the actor may fall into. By accepting their private emotions, they leave their acting to chance. What if the actors feel bored or discouraged, what will be their source of energy to act? What if the dramatic action requires joy and the actors are immersed in their private sadness? By rejecting work on the emotional experiences of the characters, the actor may lose control over the events on stage. Let us try to paraphrase Mamet – what remains is the purpose of the action, the action itself and the stage partner. Focus your attention and involvement on what you are doing and not on how you feel. Who cares about how you feel? Your task is to convey the contents of the play through your actions. Action is what matters the most!

5 From the Simplicity of Action to the Complexity of Emotional Experiencing: An Attempt at Implementing Mamet’s Tenets

In 2013, together with two students who were members of the Academic Association at the Acting Division of the fourth year of the Wrocław Branch of the Kraków Theatre School, we did research on Stage Condition in Daily Situations. We tried to utilise Mamet’s simple tenets. The results of our research were shown in a stage play we titled An Everyday Situation. O. The play was based on David Mamet’s text titled Oleanna (1993; hence the O in the title). The project took about six months. The students focussed only on memorising their lines. We forewent the analysis and only signaled such simple physical actions as: coming up to a locker, taking out books, packing a briefcase, coming up to the window, moving a chair, walking out through the door, etc. Our place of work was a lecture hall with a desk and a board in the middle, to give as much credence to the scene from the play, in which a student meets her professor. Additionally, we wanted to do away with all the theatricality of the place. The actors were asked to completely forego their search for any emotionality or oral interpretation of the text, their internal reactions and the purpose of their actions. Instead, they were instructed to focus on speaking their lines in the simplest manner possible (in theatre jargon, “in white”), in a neutral rhythm while performing the aforementioned actions. Our endeavours were accompanied by loose conversations about the themes of the play. Therefore, a rehearsal would look like this: text work – repeating lines while performing simple actions, intertwined by conversations about Mamet’s play. The actors did not attempt to act. We did not try to figure out whether in a given moment we needed anger or sarcasm, request or command, joy or sadness. We did not assume one interpretation of the play and remained open to various interpretations. Neither did we set any goals for our actions, in order to free up our endeavours from an imposed direction.

The effects of our work came as a surprise, because feelings began to emerge spontaneously in the actors. The pace of our conversations became dynamic and changeable. Additionally, clear intentions started to emerge and the actors actually transformed into the characters from the play. The preparations came down to buying costumes (ordinary casual clothes) in a local mall. Did Mamet’s assumptions work? In my opinion, this simple approach to acting is not sufficient. It is not enough to arrange “choreographed” moves to replace the complex process of emotional experiencing. It takes more than that, namely the conversations we had during rehearsals, which took more than half of the time. The rehearsals resembled a social event, a loose exchange of opinions rather than the ‘table work’ on text practised commonly in many theatres. After exhausting subjects contained in the play, we swiftly moved on to personal issues – and when done with those – we went home without feeling guilty about wasting time on “useless talk”. What purpose do these conversations serve? Firstly, to build an atmosphere of trust and freedom and remove all obstacles which may stand in the way of the creative act. Secondly, to create a mental plane for the emergence of the broadened mind. Franco Ruffi (in: Barba and Savarese, 2005, pp. 162–165) uses this term to describe an actor who – by the conscious application of Stanislavsky’s method – begins to experience the play. This happens as a consequence of arousing or awakening the mind through questions and answers, enquiries and fantasies, rejecting and accepting views, approval and negation and the magical if (Barba and Savarese, 2005). What would happen if somebody treated me like the character from the play? What would I do if I were to face the same dilemma? The process of looking for the answer is far more important that the answer itself. It is thanks to this process that cool opinions transform into intense feelings, dry definitions become heated emotions. The energy coming from this process leads to involvement. This process gives rise to internal emotional experiencing. When – as in platonic dialogues – the actor surprises himself/herself with questions for which there is not one answer or it is very difficult to find. They escape clichés and stereotypes in their way of thinking. They genuinely endeavour to get to the bottom of the character’s behaviour. What takes place is an unnoticeable process of identifying with the role. Every day the mind becomes filled with the author’s ideas. These ideas are no longer distant words on paper. They become the actors’ feelings, their life and eventually the actors themselves.

6 Conclusions

In order for drama to occur in front of the audience, the stage partners should – within reason – interact with each other and provoke each other. While analysing the conclusions of our work, the actors said things like: I really wanted to hit him; I really hated you at times; Your attitude towards me was really disgusting. The transformation became a fact. The actors did not say: My character felt this; or: I felt it while I was acting. They used the first person I and thus identified their emotions with the emotions of their character. Mamet is right about many things. Building stage action requires the simplest approach possible. A painstaking analysis of the play in terms of the characters’ emotions is often unnecessary. One does not need to bring on “faith”, which has more to do with tradition and social conditioning than our will. There is no need to plan every detail of being on stage. Neither is the past of the stage character an important issue for the actor to consider. The content overload that directors often throw at us may hinder the creative process. However, this process does need “intellectual fuel”. Without it, one finds it hard to activate one’s imagination and consequently to experience emotions on stage. Experiencing emotions is not equal to exhibitionism. The actor’s reactions are always a priority. They must, however, be related to the play and it is from them that the actor derives impulses that activate the imagination and that become “the motor of emotions”. The actor’s imagination gives rise to the emotionality of his/her character. It is this emotionality that lifts the barrier between the character and the actor. There is a person and his/her feelings and they are the essence of everything that happens on stage.