ABSTRACT

By visiting the United States, Stanislavsky challenged young Americans to emulate the Moscow Art Theatre. His ideals—theatre as art, a permanent ensemble company, and a system by which to teach and understand acting—seeped into New York’s theatrical life slowly but surely. Over the next few decades, Stanislavsky’s mythic but partial portrait would come to dominate stage and screen acting throughout the country. The main highway, by which his ideas traveled, are best traced through the histories of the American Laboratory Theatre, the Group Theatre, and the Actors Studio. The process of assimilating Russian ideals began with Richard Boleslavsky, the first voice in the transmission of the System to young actors in the United States. His American Laboratory Theatre represents the first programmatic attempt to put Stanislavsky’s ideas into practice in a serious, methodical way in New York. Stanislavsky’s ideals would need translation into the idioms of American culture in order to survive.