ABSTRACT
While Stanislavsky has indeed informed acting theory and training throughout the world since his tours to the US, his ideas have been viewed through pervasive veils of assumptions. In the West, his System is still often mistaken for Strasberg’s Method with its overemphasis on psychological Realism and therapeutic self-expression. In Russia, Soviet Marxism limited Stanislavsky to the physical world, behaviorist psychology, and Socialist Realism. Acting lore envisions “Stanislavskian” actors either as those who seek genuine emotional truth through personal identification with their characters or as acolytes of a dogmatic approach to acting that has been scientifically verified. By the mid-1950s his statue in the United States depicted a tyrannical patriarch of acting, whose piercing eyes could see into the psyches of psychologically naked actors. By the end of the 1930s the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics painted an icon of him as a scientist who had discovered the physical laws of acting.
