SUGGESTED READING

-- click on image to enlarge and see the table of contents --

Talking after class today, a few students wanted to know of a book that might shed light on a way of looking at a scene in the way that Joe and I have spoken about it in class. Especially, a way to understand how the concepts of "action", "objective", "super-objective" and "beats" might relate to one another. When I was just starting out, Sonia Moore's book was very useful to me, in clarifying these concepts and how they related to one another. (the Amazon link)

"Sonia's earliest understanding of Stanislavski's final deductions came from P.V. Simonov's book, The Method of K.S. Stanislavski and the Physiology of Emotion, which had not yet been translated into English. Simonov, a neurophysiologist, was the first to study Stanislavski from a scientific point of view, and he confirmed that the method of physical action is physiologically correct. According to Simonov, in Sonia's 1973 translation: "Stanislavski presents the thesis that in every physical action there is something psychological, and that the most complex psychological situations are expressed through physical actions ... In essence, Stanislavski's views exclude any possibility of subjective experience without physical expression." Stanislavski concluded that "direct reproduction of emotions is impossible," and that an actor could perform truthfully only by finding the physical behavior that would connect with the appropriate subconscious state."

-- Stanislavski's Champion: Sonia Moore and Her Crusade to Save the American Theatre, Journal article by Felicia Hardison Londre; Theatre History Studies, Vol. 24, 2004.

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."