Whenever I say the words “great actor” I think of one person: Kim Stanley. Simply put, Kim Stanley was one of the greatest actors in the history of world theatre. I suppose to most eyes and ears the word “great” is so overused thanks to advertising that it no longer carries any real meaning except as empty hype. Well, when I say Kim Stanley was a great actor I mean her art was on a level equal to Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Mozart, Anton Chekhov or any of the relatively few true artistic geniuses who have graced this planet. Most people do not think of actors as deserving the kind of recognition we reserve for artistic achievement and talent in the fields of music, painting, writing, architecture, etc but an actor in his or her medium can be just as brilliant, just as insightful, just as creative, just as original, just as poetic, just as crafted and just as important as any other great artist. Actors on this level co-create with a writer and a director – that is if the writing and directing are on the same level as the great actor’s art. Kim Stanley was an acting genius the likes of which come around maybe once every hundred years and she is all but forgotten today.
Stanley’s brilliance was such that it prompted Stark Young, the outstanding early to mid-twentieth century theatre critic, to place her acting in the same league with that of Eleonora Duse, Laurette Taylor and Pauline Lord. Young’s critical assessment was informed not only by each woman’s art but by Young’s friendship with all four women. If Stark Young is right, then Stanislavsky himself would have probably delighted in meeting Kim Stanley, considering that during the Moscow Art Theatre’s stay in New York City in 1923-1924, Stanislavsky spent much of his free time at the Riverside Drive home of Laurette Taylor endlessly quizzing her about her process as an actor. Stanislavsky understood that Taylor was one of those innate acting geniuses whose work provided the principles of creativity and craft from which the theory and practice of the ‘system’ was organically derived. In fact, Taylor was the only American actor invited to perform with the MAT during its American tour. Unfortunately, due to the usual theatrical politics, the event did not take place. (Courtney, 1955) No doubt, Kim Stanley would have been relentlessly quizzed by Stanislavsky too had their lives in art overlapped.
So, what made Kim Stanley not just a good actor or a talented actor but in the historical sense of the term a truly great actor? The late British director Tony Richardson, who directed Stanley in the William Inge play Natural Affection, put it this way:
“Until now I had only worked with one great actress – Edith Evans – but in
limited roles and in her declining years. Since then I’ve been lucky enough to
work with several – each with her own particular qualities. What they all
shared – despite their ambitions, their egos, their vanities, all those things
which make and are even indispensable to being a "star” – was
an absolute immersion of themselves in the work they
were performing and the reality they were creating. Once
they understood something, it was a total commitment.
Vanessa [Redgrave] with her emotional flow and
understanding; Peggy [Ashcroft] with her authority;
Edith [Evans] alternating between the highest style and the
humblest humanity; Jeanne Moreau with her precision,
elegance, understanding of film and how it works; Kate
Hepburn with her feistiness and humor – they were all unique
and extraordinary. And then there was Kim. Searching for an
image to describe her overwhelming talent, I can only come
up with a bag lady. But her bag was life itself. Never, before
or since, have I worked with someone of such variety
and impact. .. If you had put Edith [Evans] and Kim on the
same stage and in the same play there would have been
a difference in accents, but in their access to the portrayal
of life on stage they would have been equal. All those
technical necessities of any important actress – sense of
stage, perfection of direction, awareness of rhythms of
both character and text, grace, ease, fluency: all those
things which Method actors, immersed in their own
internal conflicts and emotions, were supposedly deficient
in – Kim had them all. Directing Kim was as if you’d been
given a piano and suddenly found you could play as well as
Glenn Gould. She was like Larry [Oliver] at his best, only
more so. And her range of understanding of human and
physical experience was endless. She could play the same
scene over and over again in a totally fresh way, yet
always respecting the others on stage with her, reacting to
and building on and up to everyone else’s reactions
and contributions, and never distorting the pacing or truth
of the play. “Infinite variety” is totally applicable to Kim.“
Bobby Lewis, who never tired of answering my many questions about Kim Stanley, wrote:
"For me, the most vivid memories of the production of Cheri will always be centered around Kim Stanley. She was the most gifted acting artist I ever worked with. She didn’t need the usual direction – only a bit of editing here and there. "What you do with the mirror in that spot is very good, Kim” I might say, “but it’s a little like what happens in the previous act.” “All right, I’ll find something else,” she’d agree. And she would. “I’ll find something” was her refrain all through rehearsals. By “something” she not only meant a piece of “business” or a movement. It could be a thought or a feeling – some personal emotional reference that would change a particular moment from something understood to something experienced. This was her art. By the time she was finished there wasn’t a single passage in her performance that didn’t ring completely true. Did I say finished? She was never finished. She worked creatively on her part throughout the run until the closing night curtain fell. Between matinee and evening shows, I’d find her stretched out on a couch in her dressing room thinking about her part. “I’ve found something for the moment where Cheri says to Lea so-and-so and so-and-so.” Kim would announce. “I’ll try it tonight.” Thus her performances not only had the “quality of the first time,” but they improved daily.“
In his review of Horton Foote’s 1954 play The Traveling Lady starring Kim Stanley, Harold Clurman commented:
"Kim Stanley is the youngest addition to that line of American actresses whose emblematic figures are Laurette Taylor and Pauline Lord. They express the inarticulate but eloquent womanhood of those who have never learned to become ladies. They seem out of step with their environment. They have no "front,” no bright armor, no sheen of social glamour. They appear slightly damaged, incalculably hurt, rich in basic human experience. Kim Stanley has amazing naturalness; her speech is real communication instinct with the unpredictable music and the ebb and flow of a genuine connection with whoever is her partner on the stage. She rarely stiffens with false theatrical projection. Her very presence seems to emanate meaning. She is still far from the mastery which made Laurette Taylor our unmatched example of that humane stagecraft in which artist and person merge in magic integration. Yet if our theatre and her will sustain her, it may be possible for Kim Stanley to progress a long way toward that goal.“
Lee Strasberg had this to say about Kim Stanley:
” Kim Stanley to me is the epitome of the thing we are working toward.“
Even an artist such as Robert Wilson, representing a style of theatre diametrically opposed to the humane art of a Kim Stanley, had this to say about Kim:
” She seemed ‘to get past the lines,’ rising above the literal text, having ‘almost forgotten the words’ because she is ‘doing something else,’ something subtextual…
Kim Stanley is famous for the gut-wrenching, complex and thrillingly mercurial emotional truth of her acting, but one truly begins to discover the degree of human insight playing in her imagination and through her almost flawless craft when one focuses on the seemingly momentary and yet infinitely illuminating details within the complex behavior which so richly defines her art. The late actor Richard Kiley recalled just such a moment:
“Kim played my ex-wife in a play called "The Glass Wall.” Her character had had a nervous breakdown seven years before and was totally out of it until a drug miraculously brings her back. But in that time, I remarried, and while Kim’s character wants to get back together, it just can’t happen. On the day she is released I bring her to a motel, and I say, “Whatever you need, call. We’re going to get you back on your feet,” and I kiss her on the fore-head. She had some lines saying, “I’ll call you,” which we had rehearsed. We get on the air, and when I go to give her this avuncular kiss she turns around, and the tears are streaming down her cheeks. She doesn’t say her line. She just looks at me, and her eyes go to the bed and she comes back to me. Now, we’re live [It’s a 1950’s live TV play]. This silence is attenuating. I look at her, and I start to fill up. We threw all the lines out and just stood there, and I just touched her face. I never did the little kiss. It grew into the most incredible kind of powerful unscripted moment, quite deliberately by her, but honest to God, I don’t think she planned it. Kim was that kind of actress.“
Many people are not aware of it, but Kim Stanley provides the narration for the unseen adult “Scout” in the film of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird. Stanley refused billing on the film as she did it as a favor for her friends, the film’s screenwriter Horton Foote and director Robert Mulligan. For anyone who has seen this fine film, the easy naturalness and rural warmth of Stanley’s voice helps to make the depiction of life in 1930’s Macon, Georgia seem stunningly real. But Kim Stanley does much more than simply set the scene. Even while doing a voice-over, Stanley finds the moment when she can illuminate the essential meaning of the material.
At the end of the film, Stanley’s character sums up the events of that long ago summer when so much happened in the young Scout’s life. The dialogue lists the mementos and memories of the time. The last thing Kim Stanley’s character says concerns the film’s mysterious character Boo Radley. While (re)experiencing the deepest gratitude, Stanley does a simple verbal action; she thanks Boo with the words, "and our lives.” There is a tiny vibrating pause within this moment that says it all. Harper Lee’s novel is written from a feeling of deep gratitude embodied in the relationship the young Scout has with her father, Atticus Finch. Kim Stanley – with just three words and a living, experiential understanding of the material’s theme, gives her audience the emotional core of the story – gratitude – “Stand up, Scout, your father is passing” – gratitude – “and our lives” – gratitude – and we never even see Kim Stanley on screen.
Over the course of her career, Stanley not only met Clurman’s artistic challenge but far surpassed it. It is obvious we still live in a male dominated society when we list our leading so-called ‘Method’ actors: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro – the ‘three O’s’. With the notable except of Meryl Streep, the female equivalents to the ‘O’s’, such as Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight, Jo Van Fleet, Sally Field, Lois Smith, Maureen Stapleton, Lois Nettleton, Gena Rowlands, etc, are rarely mentioned in such lists and yet their work, more often than not, outshines that of their male counterparts – particularly when it is viewed from the point of view of the theatre rather than film. The sad fact is that the majority of our best Stanislavsky oriented American male actors did not develop as theatre actors. Brando did several plays and quickly left the theatre behind. The only recorded performance of his that can truly be described as theatre based acting is, oddly enough, his most famous film performance: Stanley Kowalski. Brando’s other work is pure film acting.
And just for the record, there is no such thing as a ‘Method’ actor. It’s a journalistic, media and critical invention. Actors are either good or bad; good actors (re)experience when they act – i.e. “Method actors”; whereas, bad actors do not. The ‘Method’ – or Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ - is a collection of techniques for training the actor’s organic psycho-physiological-physical instrument; as well as, a set of analytical tools for script analysis and rehearsal process. It is not, nor can it ever be, an artistic style or result. The artistic reality Stanislavsky created in his work was not the same reality the Group Theatre or the actors from the heyday of The Actors Studio (1947-1965) created, although each used the ‘system’ as a means to their individual ends. The real differences involved had to do with the highly subjective and separate artistic visions these people or institutions possessed as well as the vastly different national and theatrical cultures each operated within and not with the “use of”, “emphasis on” or “lack of” this or that technical element of the ‘system’/ ‘Method’.
What is the difference between film and theatre acting? It has little to do with the usual assumptions concerning technology, literature, size, projection, and/or the degree of realism. The difference centers on two things: 1) the language used in film is usually sparse and rather conversational in tone; whereas, on stage, language is an integral part of the scenic events – i.e. conflict - and thus, on stage, language becomes psychologically motivated event-based verbal action (verbal behavior) and 2) acting for the stage is structured differently than film acting for the simple reason that a theatre performance has to be (re)experientially repeated and a film performance - once captured - does not. This gives the film actor craft and even artistic options the theatre actor does not possess to the same degree, if at all. The extraordinary artistic advantage film acting holds over stage acting is largely responsible for the seemingly endless line of exciting film performances we have seen ever since Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan fully revolutionized film acting. During this same period, particularly starting in the mid-1960’s, stage acting has slowly returned to a kind of external, purely verbal driven type of text based performance and, in the process, has lost all its meaning and excitement. Performances are often interchangeable and utilitarian. To compete with film acting, a certain kind of theatrical environment coupled with a deep working knowledge by directors and actors of what truly creative acting is on stage is necessary. That environment no longer exists in the American theatre and hardly anywhere else.
Structurally, the film actor only has to (re)experience the inner life of the character until the director yells “cut and print”; whereas, in the difficult work of the inspired theatre actor, the artistically designed inner life of the character – i.e. artistically chosen organic, living, yet still innately improvisatory affective feeling - has to be (re)experienced in each performance over days, months or years. (Re)experiencing is, without a doubt, the single most difficult demand acting places on the actor. The presence of (re)experiencing in each performance is the quintessential quality, regardless of style or technique, found in all good, great and genius acting; the psycho-physiological-physical reality of the acting seems to be organically happening as if for the first time. If acting’s innate creative nature is recognized and honored then there is no avoiding this penultimate requirement.
The demand for (re)experiencing in acting led Stanislavsky’s premier student Yevgeny Vakhtangov to call affective memory the basic material for the actor’s inner reality on stage; it led Stanislavsky to call affective memory the basic material of the art form and it led Lee Strasberg to embrace affective memory’s seminal importance in the successful understanding, training and application of the principles and procedures which comprise the ‘system’. Affective memory is the “Ur” source of what the ‘system’ seeks: inspiration and truth in acting – i.e. (re)experiencing.
This makes the popular opinion of the ‘Method’, that it is a technique best suited to film acting, profoundly shortsighted, anti-Stanislavskian and inherently damaging to acting and the theatre. What is labeled the ‘Method’ is every bit as fundamental to achieving (re)experiencing in theatre acting as it is to satisfying the camera lens’ intimate love affair with the process of (re)experiencing in film acting. The real difference or, in actuality, the problem involved in the use of what is labeled the ‘Method’ in theatre acting is that on stage, as opposed to film, the ‘Method’ requires a level of commitment, sense of truth, understanding, passion, expressivity, opportunity, study, training, mastery, direction, degree of talent, and plain, old, hard, sweaty, frustrating work that few in the theatre still seek and that the day-to-day structure of theatre production in America does not in any way encourage but, in fact, deeply discourages. Therefore, the kind of acting the ‘Method’ supports is hardly if ever to be found in the American theatre as it exists today. Or to put it another way, the theatre and its workers have failed what is labeled the ‘Method’ in acting, not the other way around.
While film acting uses the same techniques and possesses the same qualities as stage acting, in the final analysis, (re)experiencing in film acting has to be achieved and sustained only for, relatively speaking, a single moment. Once the acting is in the “can” the work never has to be recreated. This fact does not diminish film acting; it opens possibilities to the film actor that a stage actor can only dream of possessing! It simply makes film acting different from stage acting and, in the “big picture”, somewhat easier on the human nervous system. It is one reason why in today’s world great acting appears more often on film than in the theatre. One rarely - if ever - sees the elemental emotional power and fluid organic design of truly great acting in the theatre anymore; what is called “great” stage acting today is usually only that which the critics and various other cultural arbitrators tell us is “great” acting. Most of these people are too young to have ever seen the real article in the theatre so they settle for and promote the best of what is at hand.
Whether or not she was on stage, appearing in a film or acting in a television show, Kim Stanley was a theatre actor in the deepest sense of the term. Stanley’s acting did not just exist for the moment – although she certainly (re)experienced moment-to-moment when acting. No, her acting was built, regardless of the medium, so that its psycho-physiological-physical artistry could organically exist again and again and again, performance after performance. What other actors achieved only once, maybe accidently through an improvisation, Kim Stanley could consciously plan and achieve by design. This is one reason the playwright Paddy Chayefsky said that Stanley was the only actor he knew who could sit down and intellectually analyze a script and then get up and organically create everything she had just articulated.
Kim Stanley: Acting Teacher
Kim Stanley entered my life when I sent her a note after watching her late one night on television in the 1958 film The Goddess. By this time, Stanley had retired from acting in the theatre and was teaching. I stayed up all night composing my letter to her. It had to be perfect. Her address – 24 King Street – was listed in the New York phone book, so I took a chance and sent my letter. A week later, on a cool Sunday morning, the phone rang and my roommate answered it. He turned and said, “It’s for you.” As he handed me the receiver, he added, “I think it’s Kim Stanley.” Well, my heart started going POW, POW, POW. “Hello,” I said. It was Kim Stanley. I would recognize her velvety voice anywhere. I said “Hello, Ms. Stanley.” She said, “Call me, Kim.” Kim said that she had received my letter and found it very interesting. She then surprised me by saying she hated her performance in The Goddess, even though she knew many people liked it. What I will always remember is what she said next, “I do not like my work in the film, but in your letter, you chose to point out the two moments of my performance that required extra special work, and if you can do that, you must certainly have an eye for acting.”
What were the two moments that required “special work” from Kim? Not surprisingly, they were quite small, but exposed the core of the character. One was in a scene by a swimming pool after Kim’s character has undergone an emotional breakdown. Her mother is visiting and they are sitting by the pool when unexpected company drops by. Kim insists that her visitors stay for lunch even though they keep telling her they cannot. Kim’s character is manic in her need for them to stay. She is walking toward the house to tell the cook they are staying when they finally get it across to her that they cannot stay for lunch. Kim momentarily stops and her whole being and demeanor change. It’s as though the character realized for a moment what she was doing and then is instantly alone in a personal hell. Kim’s words trail off as she mumbles an excuse and leaves. It is a small moment, easily lost within the big emotional ones, but its penetrating (re)experiential behavior is humanly and artistically telling.
The other moment was equally tiny. Kim’s character is now a world famous movie star dependent on those around her. She is drunk or drugged most of the time. Her mother dies and she goes home for the funeral. Her (first) ex-husband and their (and her) only child are there. Kim’s character gave up this child to her ex-husband – just as Kim’s character’s mother tried to physically abandon her before settling for emotional abandonment. The ex-husband steps forward out of a line of fans at the graveyard to greet Stanley’s character and they momentarily speak. At one moment, Kim Stanley turns to the young girl standing beside her ex-husband and starts to form the first word of, "Oh, who is this?” With stunning subtlety it hits Kim that it is her daughter. The flash of guilt-ridden shame/pain is so intense that Kim seems lost and must turn and walk away. A few moments later, Kim’s character lets out a blood curdling primal scream as her mother’s coffin is lowered into an open grave. That little moment when she recognizes her child is breathtaking.
August, 1979, a Thursday, top floor, 78 Fifth Avenue, 7PM; I walked into Kim’s class for the first time. I was early so she was there with only one other person. She was dressed in an old, calve-length, faded blue denim “moo-moo,” with a down-turned white sailor’s cap on top of her still lovely and flowing blonde hair. She greeted me. I was awed by her simple presence. She never gave me a reason to be as she was as unpretentious as her dress. Still, I was. There was a reserved quality about her, a certain protective distance, an extraordinary sensitivity, a sense of unspoken depths, but she never once made me feel I was in the presence of a legend – much less one of the greatest actors of all time. She was as unpretentious as a country waitress. She quickly told me again to call her, “Kim” and added that she would introduce me to the class as, “Robert.” When I asked why, Kim said, “You do not want to end up like Bobby Lewis, still being called “Bobby” when you are in your 70’s.”
The class was large, maybe 25 people. Kim explained that the new students would be doing the exercises that night as a “working” audition process and that this audition process would continue through the next three or four classes. She said that she needed to see us do a series of warm-up exercises; a series of sensory improvisations; a series of what she called positive need exercises and, finally, a series of relationship/circumstance based improvisations.
I would like to point out something before I continue with the description of Kim’s classes. Kim Stanley is the only acting teacher I have ever known who actually required a meaningful audition process to assess the talent of the actor. She had no use for monologues as audition material. She said they had nothing to do with acting, as acting is what happens between people. She was not interested in even seeing rehearsed scenes as are used at The Actors Studio’s auditions. Such scenes under an audition’s stressful circumstances are often worthless. No, Kim auditioned actors as they had at Boleslavsky’s American Laboratory Theatre in the 1920’s and at the Habima Studio in Moscow in 1919. She gave the actors all sorts of exercises and improvisations to test their total psycho-physiological-physical instrument in an act of creation. She wanted to see the actor work with him or her self – not show how well the actor had rehearsed a professional performance. She wanted to see how the imagination functioned. She wanted to see if the affective memory flowed naturally or if it was in need of exercise and training. She wanted to see if the actor could relate to others while pursuing a need (Kim’s word for objective, task or problem). In short, she wanted to test the actor’s sense of truth. It was a humane as well as a revelatory audition process.
Class started off with group animal exercises. Kim called maybe twelve students to the stage and asked them to develop farm animals. She gave detailed instructions concerning the level of reality she expected the actors to bring to the work. This was not playtime, pretending or creative dramatics. She asked them to use their life long observation and experience to create the physical reality of the animals. Kim allowed the exercise to run for 45 minutes. Watching Kim watch the actors was a lesson in and of itself. One could literally “see” her collect her concentration. It was as if she ordered the energy surrounding her by focusing the energy within her. Her eyes were locked on the stage, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. She took in everything. When an exercise was over Kim could trace the work of each individual actor almost moment-by-moment over the entire 45 minute period – without taking any written notes! It should not have surprised me that she possessed such total and disciplined concentration as her acting, like the acting of all geniuses, is a vivid example of an almost terrifying intensity of attention. It was unnerving and intimidating to witness it in the flesh. I have never seen anything like it before or since.
Next, we moved to sensory memory improvisations such as creating the moment-to-moment reality of the sensory based behavior of coming indoors out of the rain, snow, heat, etc. Kim spent a good deal of time coaxing the truth of the specific sensory reality out of each actor. The sensory conditions were not to be indicated through superficial and intellectualized muscular “memory” activity but recreated and (re)experienced as the organic basis of living human behavior. Kim did not teach the ‘Method's’ formal sequence of sense memory exercises, but like many of her generation of Actor Studio actors who taught, placed the sensory work within the context of the improvisation’s or scene’s given circumstances and psycho-physiological-physical actions, similar to the Russian tradition of teaching sense memory through etudes rather than training and drill exercises.
From there, we moved to the centerpiece of Kim’s classes: the positive need exercise. Kim was adamant about the word POSITIVE in her need exercise. She said actors can only play positives as opposed to negatives. The positive need must propel the actor into the other actor’s life and a mutual inter-influence or exchange ensues. A choice must actively motivate (re)experiencing and aspiring action rather than simply verbally explain something which should happen but is not happening in real time and space in the etude, improv or scene. This exercise was somewhat similar to the earliest version (around 1958-1961) of Sanford Meisner’s repetition exercise. Kim asked each actor to choose a deeply felt positive need from his or her life and a single ordinary word having no particular connection to the chosen positive need. This word would be the only word the actor could use in the exercise. Kim would call two actors to the stage, have them sit on separate rehearsal boxes and let the exercise slowly develop. Each actor had to remain on the box through-out the exercise. (I have altered this in my own use of the exercise and now allow actors to fully behave.) Kim might suggest a positive need to a confused or frightened actor but at this time I was not aware of an official “list” of positive needs as it seems she developed later in California. That said, I recently discussed this with Kim’s long time student and my old friend, the actor Brett Cullen, and Brett said he did not remember an actual list of approved positive needs. He said there were certain positive needs Kim often recommended but she did not limit the motivations of human behavior to a few set desires. This echoed the impression I received from my all too brief time with Kim.
Each positive need exercise lasted anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes. The actor brought the positive need alive within him or her self and placed its object of fulfillment in the other actor. Then, through the motivated use of the chosen word but, overwhelmingly, through the moment-to-moment silent but mutually connected interactive inner behavior arising out of organic impulses, thoughts and feelings, each actor tried to get what was needed from his or her partner, while still fully taking in and responding to the influence and demands of the partner’s positive need.
Kim taught that the secret to what is called “playing the objective” or “going for what you want” in acting is to validate the partner’s positive need to such an extent that one can almost see one’s self giving in and going the partner’s way. One doesn’t give in completely, but definitely wants the resulting degree of complexity in thinking, feeling and doing which arises from at least entertaining the possibility. This approach produces the profoundly human emotional conflict necessary in great plays dealing with the truth of the human psyche as opposed to the far more popular aggression/territorial/individualistic based idea of conflict practiced as a sort of psychological game with one clear winner and a bunch of losers. Furthermore, emotionally validating but resisting one’s partners’ positive need opens up levels of (re)experiential truth in the subtext and helps to solve the crippling problem of anticipation in acting.
To successfully create positive needs, Kim taught that one must drop the “win or lose” mentality of our hyper-individualistic cultural conditioning and approach the give-and-take process of acting as one does when successfully solving a real life relationship problem – sharing as much as struggling. It is a “yes and” world rather than an “either/or” world. The character may want to win but the actor wants to make the event of the scene come alive and that requires two people empathetically exploring, working together - even when their characters are in conflict. If the actor does not in some way feel his or her partner’s positive need as being equally valid to his or her own positive need then the mutual emotional and behavioral life of the scene will never catch fire and both actor(s) and audience are left with a conventional, overly aggressive, tense, forced, usually melodramatic playing out of what should always be complex human relationships, emotions and situations. Kim never allowed these exercises to fall into such humanly pointless traps for long. She guided them so they would help the actors reveal their innate (re)experiential richness and undercover the inherent depth within real human communication.
During the positive need work; Kim acted a bit for us. Once she told us we could not take “to humiliate” as a positive need. She said that to play “to humiliate” was too easy; we did it every day on the streets of New York City. She told us to take “to destroy” as our positive need. “Doing that one will cost you,” she said, "and if acting class does not cost you something in emotional nakedness each time, then it is worthless.” She then proceeded to create the positive need “to destroy.” Within seconds, standing still, simply looking at us, Kim Stanley became the essence of Medea.
By the time we were finished class with the positive need exercises it was already 2 AM and Kim decided to end her 7 hour class. I left and floated down 14th Street. One is rarely in the presence of genius, much less given an opportunity to share in its secrets.
By the way, Kim’s classes were not expensive. She simply put a large straw purse in the center of the room and told everyone to drop in their $15 dollars for that night’s class. It was about the art of acting never the money for the now almost forgotten Kim Stanley.
When Laurette Taylor died in 1946, Harold Clurman wrote a short essay on her life. Earlier, I quoted Clurman saying that Kim Stanley was, at the start of her career, the “youngest member” of that line of female American actors whose emblematic figures are Laurette Taylor and Pauline Lord, so it should not be surprising that what Clurman had to say about American show business’s failure to support the art and person of Laurette Taylor also applies to the life story of our last great acting artist, Kim Stanley:
Laurette Taylor’s life was tragic. Her appearances in the past fifteen years were so infrequent that when she arrived in The Glass Menagerie most people spoke of her as a discovery. She had made a “comeback.” But Laurette Taylor’s fate in this regard is very similar to that of many other players – particularly actresses – beaten by the brutal anarchy of our stage. It would be dolefully instructive to draw up a list of the really talented actresses – living and dead – who have been unconscious sacrifices to our mindless theatre. To speak of their personal vices in order to explain their destiny is to mistake the effect for the cause. Most of the actresses who do survive our system of theatrical production, so that at the age of fifty they may be considered at the height of their effective powers, are endowed with a kind of toughness that rarely accompanies the most sensitive of talent.
Kim was strong but she wasn’t tough. The best rarely are. Had she been a member of a Moscow Art Theatre performing in true rotating repertory, she might have been able to successfully negotiate the delicate balancing act her alcoholism, perfectionism, artistic intelligence, extreme empathy, naked sensitivity and genius level performances required. She tried the impossible task of forming such a theatre in America during the last decades of her life but her efforts led nowhere. Alone, working in American show business where there is little real respect for acting and actors, little time for creative actor-centered rehearsals, a system based on doing the same show 8 times a week, week after week, and with the box office calling all the shots, Kim Stanley lost her balance. She is one of the tragedies in the history of the American
theatre.
pixelskylines
dailybridgerton
snowghoul
janainaart
