The Stanislavski System as a Tool for Teaching Dramatic Literature

Abstract

Living in one of the most picturesque towns in New England has great advantages in terms of extorting work from guests eager for a whiff of the salt air. One such fortuitous act of blackmail occurred in 1970 when Ms. Constance Clark hinted that a week in New England would surely restore her spirits. I agreed on the condition that Ms. Clark, an accomplished actress who has studied the Stanislavski system with some of the finest teachers of that method, give a lecture to my draoma class about how an actress prepares a role. She agreed, and, since my Modern Drama class was studying Chekov, she did the pre-rehearsal preparation for the role of Varya in The Cherry Orchard as an illustration of the techniques she was discussing. As a teacher of dramatic literature since 1963, 1 had long sought a method of giving my students-many of whom had never seen a live play-some insight into the process of theatrical production. I was also weary of reading countless plagiarized papers and mountains of dreary conventional term papers from which the student strove to erase any possible trace of her/his personality or imagination. Thus, out of Ms. Clark's lecture and my desire to find a creative approach to the term paper dilemma was born the project I now assign to all my advanced dramatic literature classes, both Shakespeare and Modern Drama. The student is asked to write a Stanislavskian analysis of a character, an exercise which calls on the student to do the same intellectual preparation that an actor or actress would do before and during rehearsals. Before describing the exact assignment, I would like to mention that the results of this assignment have been successful beyond my expectations. At the end of each term in which I have given this project, I have asked the students to evaluate the term paper assignment (as part of their overall written evaluations of the course). Though I have not kept formal statistics, at least 80% have said that they much preferred this project to the more traditional term paper. Some positive aspects of the assignment fro7n the point of view of the instructor are: