Book Review: An Actor Prepares

This is a revision of a piece I wrote for the Astral Codex Ten book review contest which I can reveal now that the contest is over, and all of my loyal fans can no longer sway the results.

Constantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares is told from the perspective of an acting student, Kostya, in a class taught by the Director, Tortsov, a stand-in for the author. Each chapter, the Director gives the students an exercise which they royally screw up, he explains what they did wrong, a few students argue with him, he wins, and they see their errors and become enlightened.

I picked it up because I was about to start taking an improv class, and I thought it would be funny to read a book about the exact part of acting improv lack (and because I thought no one else would review it). Turns out, it was funny, but the joke was on me. Although the title is an accurate summary of the pseudofiction, it doesn’t deal with learning lines or memorizing blocking. Stanislavski’s preparation primarily concerns the fundamentals of actions: how to attend to their details and imbue them with emotion. These are the building blocks of character-building (the following books in the trilogy are Building a Character and Creating a Role) and directly applicable to improv.

The lowest form of acting on Tortsov’s hierarchy are exploitation, using the stage to your own personal benefit (e.g. to wink at cute boys and show off your attractive feet) and horribly offensive stereotypes (e.g. playing Othello as a savage).

Above those is “mechanical” acting. Mechanical acting uses visual cliches to convey the character’s emotions. Holding your hand to your heart, pulling at your hair, holding you head in your hands are not realistic, but they communicate love or longing, distress, and grief to the audience (especially an audience familiar with the corpus of theatrical cliches. According to Tortsov, mechanical acting does not amount to “art”, but it can be done with a high degree of technique. You know this is true because while you’ve never laughed out loud while texting “lol”, it is possible to have a better or worse command of texting slang.

The next step is “representational” acting. The representational actor prepares by entering the mind of their character and examining their emotions. However, once they find a suitable expression of these emotions, they practice and perform that expression (as one student did over and over in the mirror). With enough practice, the actor need not bring the actual emotions with them on stage, only the matching musculature. It differs from mechanical acting in that it requires creativity and true portrayal which elevates it to the level of art, yet it still falls short of the highest form of acting.

This highest form Stanislavski calls “living”. The living actor prepares in much the same was as the representational actor except they put themself in the mind of their character each performance. At its best, this form of acting lets the actor’s subconscious take control to the point that the actor only needs to do the most natural things and they’re exactly the things done in the manner that the character would do them.

The goal of the actor’s preparation is to be ready for these moments when the subconscious can take over. Since it’s impossible to directly manipulate the subconscious, an actor prepares using conscious exercises.

The first lesson to this effect is that every action must have a purpose. It’s impossible to act “in general”. On stage, the students feel uncomfortable and self-conscious doing something as simple as sitting in a chair without a purpose. Are you waiting at the doctor’s office or collapsing after a long day of physical labor? Are you closing the door to have a private conversation away from the loud people in the hall or because there’s a draft (or just because that’s what the stage direction says)? Your objective informs the manner in which you carry out any action. Without any purpose, you act perfunctorily and your attention invariably wanders to the audience (throughout the book a death-knell for good acting). Fortunately, purpose and action keep the (often literal in this book) spotlight of attention on the stage.

The same way it’s impossible to act “in general”, it’s also impossible to emote “in general”. In another exercise, Tortsov contrives a scenario in which a student must sell a brooch she has lost in the curtains in order to pay for and continue the classes. The purpose leads her to search meticulously over every fold. The stakes lend her an intense determination during the search and despair upon coming up empty-handed.

Supposition, purpose, emotion, action, and attention are all interconnected. Within each moment, supposition provides purpose and emotion, purpose guides action and attention, action conveys emotion. On the scale of an act or whole play, Tortsov speaks of the “super-objective”, a character’s overall motivation, usually involving interaction between characters (e.g. prove myself to my superior, convince my wife to get over our dead child). Attention may jump from different objects to other actors to the past, present, or future to the actor themself (but never to the audience). The movement of attention forms the throughline of the play which supports the super-objective.

It was surprising to me how little a seminal work on acting addressed learning lines or more mechanical elements of the profession. Occasionally, the book would reference other classes the students were taking, like elocution, fencing, and dancing. But knowing your lines is table stakes. The only mechanical instruction Tortsov gives in on muscle relaxation, and that only happens after a scene in which Kostya grips a glass too tightly breaking it, sending a shard into an artery, sending himself to the hospital where the other students visit to fill him in on the lessons he misses about releasing tension and using the fewest muscles necessary to act.

It’s a surprising choice given that Stanislavski is in control of the structure of both his real and fictional classes. If muscle relaxation is so important, he could have included it in the syllabus originally. On the other hand, it is in keeping with his format of showing the students’ bad, naive mistakes before the Director corrects them. Tension usually won’t lead to a hospital visit, but it will block your subconscious from taking over the way it needs to.

The other notable lesson is one in which Tortsov claims that you can communicate nonverbally by letting your feelings escape as rays through your pores (and that this will one day be the subject of scientific inquiry!) He demonstrates this by first making himself seem cold, grumpy, and distant, and then by changing nothing perceptible, he seems warm and avuncular to the students. I’ll give him the benefit on the doubt on this one and interpret this as something closer to: if you are truly feeling some emotion (and your muscles are relaxed) you body language will reflect that in ways you may not be consciously aware of.

An Actor Prepares clearly has applications in other performing arts. In fact, I learned about it from a pianist who read it at Juilliard. As I’ve noted, it’s surprisingly applicable to improv. Tortsov even claims that a small mistake, like knocking a chair over, is one of the greatest gifts to an actor because it gives them a chance to respond to it in character which makes their portrayal all the more convincing. Improv is just like acting where people are constantly knocking over metaphorical chairs.

I know there’s a special lobe off the circle of Hell for self-help writers for people who read regular books as if they were self-help, but once something becomes applicable to improv it’s approximately 0 steps from being applicable to life. In this case, I’m trying to gain a reputation as someone who’s a little too into saying, “Be yourself” (via an anonymous book review contest). The common understanding is something like: strive to be yourself rather than attempting to be / imitating some higher status person. But another option is that you should “live” yourself rather than mechanically perform according to prepared notions about how you think you should act. This kind of “live” living comes naturally to many people (or so it seems), but if you take an intro to acting class, you’ll see that everyone is bad at acting when they’re conscious of the audience.