Response to An Actor Prepares- Bella Merlin

Stanislavski places importance on acting in a truthful and imaginative way that captures and evokes emotion from the audience. In An Actor Prepares, he targets actors who seek only to entertain and shows that these actors only act through their outward appearance, and never really find inward truth. An actor prepares is a guide on how to get the best out of a character and what excersizes, thought processes and objectives the actor should think about to do this successfully. 

The first things that Stanislavski works against is Melodrama and stereotypes for eg. looking down and holding a hand on your forehead to represent sadness, and making the body destorted and face ugly to represent a villain or un kind person. These actions were all put into performances where they only served as  an outward appearance. This is why one excersize or character building task he teaches is observing the body in a mirror to see whether the physical choices are truthful or not. When an actor focuses on the outward side of acting, the inward side shows emotions that aren’t there, where in fact the the actor should beleive in the character so much that the emotion just comes naturally. 

Stanislavski discredits over-acting, and states that overacting is not feeling emotions too strongly but really overcompensating for lack of real emotion. The main reason actors tend to overact is the attempt to achieve a truthful emotion that will evoke a desired response from the audience, stating that acting cannot begin from outward appearance!

Every action that the character does on stage must have a purpose that has been thoroughly thought out by the actor this will usually result in what is presented outwardly coming from within the character. The actor must know and have thought about why the character does every action, every step, every facial expression this can be helped when asking questions about the character such as: Why am I here? Where have I come from? What do I want? In asking these sort of questions, the actor also starts to understand the character’s life outside of the scene, there background, there thought process. This is called the Unbroken Line. The character’s life isn’t broken up into scenes, only what the audience see is broken up. The actor must create a life for the character that extends beyond the text.

To really have a truthful performance on stage, the actor must be fully comfortable within their character. Stanislavski states that the actor must be able to find a sort of peace or solace on stage, even in front of thousands of people. The successful execution of this technique varies for all actors, but it starts with successful creation of the fourth wall to block out the audience resulting in the actor portraying a performance where the character looks fully comfortable and naturalistic.  

Everything you learn from this book can be used in any form of acting and can transform a good peice of acting into a great peice of acting due to the dissembling of every aspect of a play or script and the peicing back together with thought, understanding and true emotion.