ABSTRACT
While Stanislavsky’s name has dominated debates about acting in the Western world for nearly a century, most actors routinely identify his System with the Method, developed in New York during the Great Depression and popularized by Strasberg. Dynamic processes gave rise to this identification: actors of the Moscow Art Theatre inspired a generation of US actors, while they themselves struggled to survive in the political climate of post-revolutionary Russia; émigré actors taught in a foreign tongue to students whose cultural assumptions differed dramatically from their own; abridgement of Stanislavsky’s books in the US and their censorship in Moscow further obscured his face; and finally, the very nature of acting practice encourages individual modifications of the System’s techniques. In the United States, conditioned by a Freudian-based, individually oriented ethos, actors privileged the psychological techniques of Stanislavsky’s System over those of the physical.
