In the 21st century, actors face radical changes in plays and performance styles, as they move from stage to screen and grapple with new technologies that present their art to ever-expanding audiences. Active Analysis offers the flexibility of mind, body, and spirit now urgently needed in acting. Dynamic Acting through Active Analysis brings to light this timely legacy, born during the worst era of Soviet repression and hidden for decades from public view. Part I unfolds like a mystery novel through letters, memoirs, and transcripts of Konstantin Stanislavsky's last classes. Far from the authoritarian director of his youth, he reveals himself as a generous mentor, who empowers actors with a brand new collaborative approach to rehearsals. His assistant, Maria Knebel, first bears witness to his forward-looking ideas and then builds the bridge to new plays in new styles through her directing and influential teaching. Part II follows a 21st century company of diverse actors as they experience the joy of applying Active Analysis to their own creative and professional work.

Theatres world-wide embrace Chekhov's handful of plays with a fervour second only to Shakespeare's. Whatever their native language or culture, audiences often see themselves in his Russian characters, making Chekhov seem an author who easily transcends his own culture and time. Nonetheless, students, actors, and audiences alike are often initially puzzled by Chekhov's dramatic texts. Are they comic or tragic, ironic or sincere, starkly familiar or willfully elusive? How can his often seemingly irrelevant dialogue create dynamic performances? In his stories and plays alike, Chekhov challenges his readers to diagnose his characters' desires, opinions, heartaches and joys in the same way that doctors diagnose illness by attending closely to apparently trivial details. In the plays where narrative voice is absent and characters speak for themselves reading under a microscope becomes all the more necessary. The expert attention that Carnicke pays to the performative dimensions of Chekhov's plays makes her book unique among the published guides to Chekhov's works.

This book paints a vivid portrait of Anton Chekhov - a Russian writer whose elusive personality and richly detailed plays have left an indelible imprint upon the world's theatre. Every page reveals the joys and difficulties of his short life, his comic sensibility, deep compassion, and often puzzling use of dramatic style and genre. Carnicke demystifies Chekhov's plays - forged from his literary innovations, avid theatre going, love of vaudeville, and loathing of melodrama. She interweaves biographical and cultural information with insightful case studies and close analysis to leave her reader with a full and fresh perspective on an artist, who is as foundational to theatrical traditions as are Shakespeare and Stanislavsky.

Stanislavsky in Focus brilliantly examines the history and actual premises of Stanislavsky's 'System', separating myth from fact with forensic skill. The first edition of this now classic study showed conclusively how the 'System' was gradually transformed into the Method, popularised in the 1950s by Lee Strasberg and the Actor's Studio. It looked at the gap between the original Russian texts and what most English-speaking practitioners still imagine to be Stanislavsky's ideas. This thoroughly revised new edition also delves even deeper into: the mythical depiction of Stanislavsky as a tyrannical director and teacher yoga, the mind-body-spirit continuum and its role in the 'System' how Stanislavsky used subtexts to hide many of his ideas from Soviet censors. The text has been updated to address all of the relevant scholarship, particularly in Russia, since the first edition was published. It also features an expanded glossary on the System's terminology and its historical exercises, as well as more on the political context of Stanislavsky's work, its links with cognitive science, and the System's relation to contemporary developments in actor-training. It will be a vital part of every practitioner's and historian's library.

In the 21st century, actors face radical changes in plays and performance styles, as they move from stage to screen and grapple with new technologies that present their art to ever-expanding audiences. Active Analysis offers the flexibility of mind, body, and spirit now urgently needed in acting. Dynamic Acting through Active Analysis brings to light this timely legacy, born during the worst era of Soviet repression and hidden for decades from public view. Part I unfolds like a mystery novel through letters, memoirs, and transcripts of Konstantin Stanislavsky's last classes. Far from the authoritarian director of his youth, he reveals himself as a generous mentor, who empowers actors with a brand new collaborative approach to rehearsals. His assistant, Maria Knebel, first bears witness to his forward-looking ideas and then builds the bridge to new plays in new styles through her directing and influential teaching. Part II follows a 21st century company of diverse actors as they experience the joy of applying Active Analysis to their own creative and professional work.

First published in her Chekhov: Four Plays and Three Jokes , Sharon Marie Carnicke's eye-opening translation of Three Sisters appears in this edition with a new Introduction that expands upon her discussion in Four Plays & Three Jokes of Chekov's innovative dramaturgy--especially as seen in this subtle melodrama turned inside out.

First published in her Chekhov: Four Plays and Three Jokes , Sharon Marie Carnicke's eye-opening translation of Three Sisters appears in this edition with a new Introduction that expands upon her discussion in Four Plays & Three Jokes of Chekov's innovative dramaturgy--especially as seen in this subtle melodrama turned inside out.

Stanislavsky in Focus brilliantly examines the history and actual premises of Stanislavsky’s 'System', separating myth from fact with forensic skill.

The first edition of this now classic study showed conclusively how the 'System' was gradually transformed into the Method, popularised in the 1950s by Lee Strasberg and the Actor’s Studio. It looked at the gap between the original Russian texts and what most English-speaking practitioners still imagine to be Stanislavsky’s ideas.

This thoroughly revised new edition also delves even deeper into:

the mythical depiction of Stanislavsky as a tyrannical director and teacher

yoga, the mind-body-spirit continuum and its role in the ‘System’

how Stanislavsky used subtexts to hide many of his ideas from Soviet censors.

The text has been updated to address all of the relevant scholarship, particularly in Russia, since the first edition was published. It also features an expanded glossary on the System's terminology and its historical exercises, as well as more on the political context of Stanislavsky's work, its links with cognitive science, and the System's relation to contemporary developments in actor-training. It will be a vital part of every practitioner's and historian's library.

Table of Contents



Preface: Stanislavsky Enters the Twenty-First Century Part 1: Transmission From Moscow to New York. New York Adopts Stanislavsky. Part 2: Translation The Classroom Circuit. The Publication Maze. Part 3: Transformation Stanislavsky’s Lost Term. Emotion and the Human Spirit of the Role. Action and the Human Body in the Role. Conclusion: A Legacy for the Future. Appendix I : Reading Between the Lines. Appendix II: Stanislavsky and Modern Dance. The System’s Terminology: A Selected Glossary

This volume offers lively and accurate translations of Chekhov's major plays and one-acts (complete contents listed below) along with a superb Introduction focused on the plays' remarkably enduring power to elicit the most widely divergent of responses, the life of the playwright in its historical and aesthetic contexts, suggestions for reading the plays under a microscope, and notes designed to bring Chekhov's world into immediate focus--everything needed to examine his drama with fresh eyes and on its own artistic terms.

This volume offers lively and accurate translations of Chekhov's major plays and one-acts (complete contents listed below) along with a superb Introduction focused on the plays' remarkably enduring power to elicit the most widely divergent of responses, the life of the playwright in its historical and aesthetic contexts, suggestions for reading the plays under a microscope, and notes designed to bring Chekhov's world into immediate focus--everything needed to examine his drama with fresh eyes and on its own artistic terms.

PISCHIN. Well . . Dashenka told me. Now I'm in such a position, I wouldn't mind forging them . . . I've got to pay 310 roubles the day after to-morrow . . . I've got 130 already. . . . Feels his pockets, nervously] I've lost the money The money's gone Crying] Where's the money? Joyfully] Here it is behind the lining . . . I even began to perspire.

PISCHIN. Well . . Dashenka told me. Now I'm in such a position, I wouldn't mind forging them . . . I've got to pay 310 roubles the day after to-morrow . . . I've got 130 already. . . . Feels his pockets, nervously] I've lost the money The money's gone Crying] Where's the money? Joyfully] Here it is behind the lining . . . I even began to perspire.