Method acting, known as the Method, is a range of rehearsal techniques, as formulated by a number of different theatre practitioners, that seeks to encourage sincere and expressive performances through identifying with, understanding, and experiencing a character's inner motivation and emotions. These techniques are built on Stanislavski's system, developed by the Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski and captured in his books An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role.
Marlon Brando's performance in Elia Kazan's film of A Streetcar Named Desire exemplifies the power of Stanislavski-based acting in cinema.
A diagram of Stanislavski's "system", based on his "Plan of Experiencing" (1935)
Stanislavski's system is a systematic approach to training actors that the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski developed in the first half of the twentieth century. His system cultivates what he calls the "art of experiencing". It mobilises the actor's conscious thought and will in order to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly. In rehearsal, the actor searches for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the character seeks to achieve at any given moment.
A diagram of Stanislavski's system, based on his "Plan of Experiencing" (1935), showing the inner (left) and outer (right) aspects of a role uniting in the pursuit of a character's overall "supertask" (top) in the drama.
Gorky (seated, centre) with Vakhtangov (right of Gorky) and other members of the First Studio, an institution devoted to research and pedagogy, which emphasised experimentation, improvisation, and self-discovery.
Stanislavski's production of Chekhov's The Seagull in 1898, which gave the MAT its emblem, was staged without the use of his system; Stanislavski as Trigorin (seated far right) and Meyerhold as Konstantin (on floor), with Knipper (behind).
Stanislavski considered the Italian tragedian Salvini (pictured as Othello) to be the finest example of the "art of experiencing".
