Excerpts from:
The Stanislavski System,
the Professional Training of an Actor
by Sonia Moore
THE MAGIC IF:
The actor should approach the role of asking, "What would I do if I were this character in this particular situation?" He must find out all he can about the character and the situation.
GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES:
Include the plot of the play, the epoch, the time and the place of the action, the conditions of life, the director’s and the actor’s interpretation, the setting, the properties, lighting, sound effects — all that an actor encounters while he creates a role. A person’s psychological and physical behavior is subject to the external influence of his environment, and an action makes clear what a certain character does in the given circumstances of the play and why he does it....
"The actor must become so familiar with the environment of the play that he becomes a part of it. [When he reaches this point he no longer has to stop each tie to ask himself, "What if?"]
IMAGINATION:
"A playwright rarely describes the past or the future of his characters and often omits details of their present life. an actor must complete his character’s biography in his mind from beginning to end. . . If an actor does not fill in all these missing events and movements, the life he portrays will not be complete." Stanislavski called this missing material [what the playwright wrote between the lines] the SUB-TEXT. He wrote: :Spectators come to the theatre to hear the sub-text. They can read the text at home."
BUILDING A CHARACTER:
"In building a character, an actor should be influenced by the author, by the director, by contact with the other performers, and by all the hints about the character that are found in the script. A character is a human being with his own thoughts, actions, appearance, mannerisms, experiences, habits, and so on. Though conceived by the author, the character must express the actor’s individual ideas, his emotions, his intuitions—analogous, of course, to those of the character. Only when the actors personality fuses with that of the character will he live the role. Facing a new personality in every new play, an actor has the possibility of endless discovery." The quality of an actor’s performance depends not only upon the creation of the inner life of a role, but also upon the physical embodiment of it....Spectators learn about the characters on the stage the way we learn about people in life—through their physical actions, which are dictated by their aims.... If an action helps to express the character, it is artistically right; if it does not, it is wrong. An action cannot be accidental or superfluous. The choice of actions must be guided bu the main idea of the play, and of the role...The role is ready when an actor knows concretely what the character does each moment on the stage and why he does it...If an actor wants the words to be his own, he must understand the reason for which the author gave them to eh character. A character’s lines will be alive if he needs them—i.e., if he has a purpose in saying them and makes others see his purpose.