About Book
"Creating a Role "is the culmination of Stanislavski's masterful trilogy on the art of acting." An Actor Prepares "focused on the inner training of an actor's imagination, while "Building a Character "detailed how the actor's body and voice could be tuned for the great roles he might fill.
This third volume examines the development of a character from the viewpoint of three widely contrasting plays: Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, Shakespeare's Othello, and Gogol's The Inspector General. Building on the first two books, Stanislavski demonstrates how a fully realized character is born in three stages: "studying it; establishing the life of the role; putting it into physical form."
Tracing the actor's process from the first reading to production, he explores how to approach roles from inside and outside simultaneously. He shows how to recount the story in actor's terms, how to create an inner life that will give substance to the author's words, and how to search into one's own experiences to connect with the character's situation. Finally, he speaks of the physical expression of the character in gestures, sounds, intonation, and speech. Throughout, a picture of a real artist at work emerges, sometimes failing, but always seeking truthful answers.
About Author
Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski (17 January [O.S. 5 January] 1863 – 7 August 1938) was a Russian actor and theatre director. His system of acting has developed an international reach. Stanislavski treated theatre-making as a serious endeavour, requiring dedication, discipline and integrity. Throughout his life, he subjected his own acting to a process of rigorous artistic self-analysis and reflection. His development of a theorized praxis – in which practice is used as a mode of inquiry and theory as a catalyst for creative development – identifies him as the first great theatre practitioner. Stanislavski's work was as important to the development of socialist realism in the Soviet Union as it was to that of psychological realism in the United States.