The week marks the beginning of our first unit of study: Stanislavski applied using Chekov’s Three Sisters. As someone who has never been formally trained in a specific acting technique, I am most familiar with Stanislavski’s work (or, I thought that I was). The “Father of the System” was an inspiration for many of his students who became acting teachers themselves including Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner.
One of Stanislavski’s most graspable principles is understanding your character’s given circumstances. Your choices as an actor must be motivated by the given circumstances of your character and the characters you are interacting with in a scene. In a class discussion, many students mentioned that previous acting teachers or coaches would devalue the importance of given circumstances. Some teachers would create new circumstances that did not fit the context of the entire play, often just to stir bigger emotions out of the actors! Even worse, other teachers would provide zero context and allow the actors to come up with their own given circumstances based on their short scene assignments. I believe that these two practices are very dangerous for growing actors, because they promote laziness and incorrectly use one of Stanislavski’s other principles, imagination. By either giving an actor incorrect circumstances or letting the actor come up with their own circumstances, the teacher is allowing the actor to incorrectly color the scene with their imagination in ways that would not create an accurate, multidimensional character.
Our class tackled this issue through a group activity that confirmed our understanding of each character’s relationships. In groups of three (because of the three sisters), we made a “Three Sisters Family Tree”. Each group was given a set of markers and large piece of Post-It paper to connect the characters of the play together using symbols, basic “family tree structures”, and decorations to emphasize the different relationships. My group began with the title characters -Olga, Masha, and Irina- and expanded the tree to form connections between siblings, lovers, husbands, wives, uncles, servants, and friends. We decided to take a modern approach and use emojis to represent each of the characters in the play.
My group’s Emoji Family Tree
What did I discover from doing this activity? As a visual learner, I was able to get a clearer picture of every specific relationship involved in Three Sisters. Chekov can be particularly complicated for me, especially because of all of the complicated Russian names. But, by painting a full picture of the cast of characters, I can move forward into my scene work knowing exactly who I’m talking about and how I feel about them.
If you’re looking for other ways to delve into the given circumstances of a character that you are playing, here are some other activities that you can do by yourself or with scene partners:
– Tableau Arc: Create a frozen image depicting how your character feels at the beginning and end of each act. See how the image shifts throughout the play. (This can be done by yourself or with a group.)
– Be Your Own Dramaturg: Do your research on the world of the play. Research the time period, setting, social circumstances and important world events surrounding the context of the play. If you can, share the information you find with your scene partner(s)!
– Diary Entries: In character, write a diary entry to yourself at the end of each act describing what has happened and how you feel about it. Avoid making up portions of your entry unless you can provide evidence from the play
Melanie Ridgway is a BS Candidate in the Program in Educational Theatre at NYU. She is on track to obtain her New York State Teacher’s Certification in Theatre (PreK-12) by summer 2016, with plans to graduate in May 2016. Her passions include: arts integration, improvisation, playwriting and creating new works with youth.