DOES THE ACTORS STUDIO OFFER COURSES OR CLASSES TO ANYONE WHO IS NOT A MEMBER?

No, The Actors Studio does not offer courses or classes for non-members to apply and pay for.

It is a “studio” where only its members can use the facilities to work in private on scenes,
characters, plays, projects, alone or with other members. This is self-directed work. There are
other organizations that offer courses that you pay for, such as an “acting class”. The Actors Studio
is not structured to operate this way. It is not a commercial operation. The Actors Studio has been
likened to be like a gymnasium for athletes. Athletes go to their gym to improve their talent, skills
and techniques and the members of The Actors Studio go to the Studio to work out for the same
purposes. Membership is gained solely through a free audition process. If you pass successfully
through the series of auditions, you will be invited to join the membership, for free.

CAN OUTSIDERS OBSERVE THE WORK OF THE ACTORS STUDIO?

Professional Observers’ privileges are rarely, though sometimes, available to actors, directors and
writers with sufficient theatrical experience for a limited period of time. Those interested should
apply in writing to the Studio Offices well in advance of arriving and include their resumes. Please
do not show up at the door and expect to be allowed access.

A very limited number of internships are available to actors and theatre professionals willing to
volunteer a predetermined number of hours a week in return for the opportunity to observe a
Studio session.

You must apply in writing and request consideration for these limited opportunities. You must
include your resume and a cover letter outlining your relevant skills.

The general public is not allowed to observe the work at The Actors Studio.

ARE DIRECTORS AND WRITERS WELCOME AT THE ACTORS STUDIO?

Yes. Playwrights and directors are welcome as part of our storied Playwright/Directors Units
(PDU), our Playwright/Director’s Workshops (PDW), and our Directors Units available to members
on both coasts.
. A History of The Actors Studio

Written by Andreas Manolikakis

The Actors Studio was founded in New York by Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis in
1947. For seven decades it has been devoted to the service and development of theatre artists –
actors, directors and playwrights. To our members, who are primarily actors, The Actors Studio
offers free lifetime membership, with no fee or tuition required, which entitles them to a unique
opportunity to explore and improve their craft in a safe, laboratory environment with colleagues
with whom they share the same process of work.

The roots of The Actors Studio go back to the Group Theatre (1931-1941) whose work was inspired
by the discoveries of the great Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski and his best
student Eugene Vakhtangov as revealed in the legendary productions that the Moscow Art
Theatre toured in America in 1923. In fact Stanislavski’s dedication to his book, ‘My Life in Art,’
(1924) reads: “I DEDICATE THIS BOOK IN GRATITUDE TO HOSPITABLE AMERICA AS A TOKEN AND A
REMEMBRANCE FROM THE MOSCOW ART THEATRE WHICH SHE TOOK SO KINDLY TO HER HEART.”

When the Moscow Art Theatre ended its American tour, several members of the theatre stayed
behind and trained artists, including Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman and Stella Adler, who would go
on to form the Group Theatre along with other artists such as Elia Kazan, Sanford Meisner and
Robert Lewis. These artists studied, explored, developed and improved the work of the Russian
masters with extraordinary results that were unique in the history of the American theatre and a
new kind of acting was born.

After the Group Theatre closed, in 1941, many of its members went their separate ways. Elia
Kazan has stated that one of the principal reasons he created The Actors Studio, in 1947, was in
order to preserve and develop this new American acting. He wanted to create a not-for-profit
organization that would provide a laboratory, a private workshop in which the professional actor
could work on his or her craft, far away from the commercial pressures of casting, rehearsal and
performance. It was to be a place that would offer its member-artists an ongoing training, a
continuity of work and the feeling of an artistic home like they had at the Group Theatre.

At the Studio, it was eventually decided that membership should be achieved through an audition
process of preliminary and then final auditions where the only requirements are talent and the
possibility of improvement.
In 1948, Lee Strasberg was asked by Elia Kazan to join the Studio as one of its teachers and in 1951
he became its Artistic Director, a position he maintained until his death in 1982. Strasberg’s deep
understanding of the Stanislavski System and the reformulations of Vakhtangov, together with his
own personal discoveries and improvements on the acting process, provided the foundation on
which The Actors Studio based its work.

At the same time, the work of Elia Kazan as a theatre and film director demonstrated in the most
powerful way the extraordinary results of the deep and personal process of acting espoused by
The Actors Studio.

For seven decades, the very existence of The Actors Studio, the principles and values that it
represents, the methodology of its work process, its consistency and long life have established the
Studio as a unique theatre organization and a guiding light for actors, directors and playwrights
around the world. For many it is considered the temple of the acting process.

Today the work that is done at The Actors Studio continues the Stanislavski-Vakhtangov-American
approach, and most of the leading members of the Studio today have studied with more than one
of these great American teachers: Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan, Stella Adler, Sanford
Meisner and Robert Lewis.

Currently, Ellen Burstyn, Alec Baldwin and Al Pacino serve as co-Presidents of the Studio. Beau
Gravitte serves as Artistic Director in New York and Salome Jens and Lou Antonio serve as interim
co-Associate Artistic Directors in West Hollywood at our Actors Studio West branch, which opened
in 1966. The Actors Studio is governed by a Board of Directors comprised of members from both
coasts.

After 70 years, The Actors Studio continues to thrive because it is needed. Goethe has said that,
“The actor’s career develops in public, but his art develops in private.” The Studio provides its
members with this special kind of privacy, along with a group of colleagues who share the same
passion for what Studio members refer to as “The Work.”
In spite of the presence of The Actors Studio over many years and its extensive influence in
America and worldwide, there still persist many misunderstandings of the Studio, its mentors, its
philosophy and its process. These errors most often arise from discussions by some academics,
theoreticians, historians and even by some theatre professionals who attempt to analyze and
interpret a process of work that they have never learned through serious practice. The work of
Stanislavski, Vakhtangov and The Actors Studio was arrived at through deep and lengthy practical
experiments that elude rational analysis by non-practitioners.

In 1994 The Actors Studio entered a major new phase with the creation of The Actors Studio
Drama School MFA (Master of Fine Arts) Program in acting, directing and playwriting, in order to
bring the Studio’s method into a university setting. In September 2006, the Actors Studio Drama
School moved to Pace University in downtown New York City, which also is the home of one of the
program’s most visible teaching platforms, INSIDE THE ACTORS STUDIO, hosted by James Lipton.

Andreas Manolikakis is a Board Member of The Actors Studio and Chair of The Actors Studio
Drama School at Pace University in New York City.

Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski (né Alexeiev; Russian: Константи́ н Серге́евич Станисла́вский;

17 January [O.S. 5 January] 1863 – 7 August 1938) was a seminal Russian theatre practitioner.[2]
He was widely recognised as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he
directed garnered a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation.[3] His
principal fame and influence, however, rests on his 'system' of actor training, preparation, and
rehearsal technique.[4]

Stanislavski (his stage name) performed and directed as an amateur until the age of 33, when he
co-founded the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) company with Vladimir Nemirovich-
Danchenko, following a legendary 18-hour discussion.[5] Its influential tours of Europe (1906) and
the US (1923—4) and its landmark productions of The Seagull (1898) and Hamlet (1911—12)
established his reputation and opened new possibilities for the art of the theatre.[6] By means of
the MAT, Stanislavski was instrumental in promoting the new Russian drama of his day—
principally the work of Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Bulgakov—to audiences in
Moscow and around the world; he also staged acclaimed productions of a wide range of classical
Russian and European plays.[7]
He collaborated with the director and designer Edward Gordon Craig and was formative in the
development of several other major practitioners, including Vsevolod Meyerhold (whom
Stanislavski considered his "sole heir in the theatre"), Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Michael
Chekhov.[8] At the MAT's 30-year anniversary celebrations in 1928, a massive heart attack on-
stage put an end to his acting career (though he waited until the curtain fell before seeking
medical assistance).[9] He continued to direct, teach, and write about acting until his death a few
weeks before the publication of the first volume of his life's great work, the acting manual An
Actor's Work (1938).[10] He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of Lenin and
was one of the first to be granted the title of People's Artist of the USSR.[11]

Stanislavski wrote that "there is nothing more tedious than an actor's biography" and that "actors
should be banned from talking about themselves".[12] At the request of a US publisher, however,
he reluctantly agreed to write his autobiography, My Life in Art (first published in English in 1924
and in a revised, Russian-language edition in 1926), though its account of his artistic development
is not always accurate.[13] Two English-language biographies have been published: David
Magarshack's Stanislavsky: A Life (1950) and Jean Benedetti's Stanislavski: His Life and Art (1988,
revised and expanded 1999).[14]

While recuperating in Nice at the end of 1929, Stanislavski began a production plan for
Shakespeare's Othello.[250] Hoping to use this as the basis for An Actor's Work on a Role, his plan
offers the earliest exposition of the rehearsal process that became known as his Method of
Physical Action. He first explored this approach practically in his work on Three Sisters and Carmen
in 1934 and Molière in 1935.[29]

In contrast to his earlier method of working on a play—which involved extensive readings and
analysis around a table before any attempt to physicalise its action—Stanislavski now encouraged
his actors to explore the action through its "active analysis".[251] He felt that too much discussion
in the early stages of rehearsal confused and inhibited the actors.[252] Instead, focusing on the
simplest physical actions, they improvised the sequence of dramatic situations given in the
play.[253] "The best analysis of a play", he argued, "is to take action in the given
circumstances."[31] If the actor justified and committed to the truth of the actions (which are
easier to shape and control than emotional responses), Stanislavski reasoned, they would evoke
truthful thoughts and feelings.[254]

Stanislavski's attitude to the use of emotion memory in rehearsals (as distinct from its use in actor
training) had shifted over the years.[255] Ideally, he felt, an instinctive identification with a
character's situation should arouse an emotional response.[256] The use of emotion memory in
lieu of that had demonstrated a propensity for encouraging self-indulgence or hysteria in the
actor.[256] Its direct approach to feeling, Stanislavski felt, more often produced a block than the
desired expression.[256] Instead, an indirect approach to the subconscious via a focus on actions
(supported by a commitment to the given circumstances and imaginative "Magic Ifs") was a more
reliable means of luring the appropriate emotional response.[257]

This shift in approach corresponded both with an increased attention to the structure and
dynamic of the play as a whole and with a greater prominence given to the distinction between
the planning of a role and its performance.[258] In performance the actor is aware of only one
step at a time, Stanislavski reasoned, but this focus risks the loss of the overall dynamic of a role in
the welter of moment-to-moment detail.[259] Consequently, the actor must also adopt a different
point of view in order to plan the role in relation to its dramatic structure; this might involve
adjusting the performance by holding back at certain moments and playing full out at others.[260]
A sense of the whole thereby informs the playing of each episode.[261] Borrowing a term from
Henry Irving, Stanislavski called this the "perspective of the role".[262]

Every afternoon for five weeks during the summer of 1934 in Paris, Stanislavski worked with the
American actress Stella Adler, who had sought his assistance with the blocks she had confronted in
her performances.[263] Given the emphasis that emotion memory had received in New York,
Adler was surprised to find that Stanislavski rejected the technique except as a last resort.[264]
The news that this was Stanislavski's approach would have significant repercussions in the US; Lee
Strasberg angrily rejected it and refused to modify his version of the 'system'.[263]

Political fortunes under Stalin

Following his heart attack in 1928, for the last decade of his life Stanislavski conducted most of his
work writing, directing rehearsals, and teaching in his home on Leontievski Lane.[265] In line with
Joseph Stalin's policy of "isolation and preservation" towards certain internationally famous
cultural figures, Stanislavski lived in a state of internal exile in Moscow.[266] This protected him
from the worst excesses of Stalin's "Great Terror".[267]

A number of articles critical of the terminology of Stanislavski's 'system' appeared in the run-up to
a RAPP conference in early 1931, at which the attacks continued.[268] The 'system' stood accused
of philosophical idealism, of a-historicism, of disguising social and political problems under ethical
and moral terms, and of "biological psychologism" (or "the suggestion of fixed qualities in
nature").[268] In the wake of the first congress of the USSR Union of Writers (chaired by Maxim
Gorky in August 1934), however, Socialist realism was established as the official party line in
aesthetic matters.[269] While the new policy would have disastrous consequences for the Soviet
avant-garde, the MAT and Stanislavski's 'system' were enthroned as exemplary models.[270]