Dramatic Correspondences

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Surrealistic Painting by Eugene Bermani

CORRESPONDENCES

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

You have to fantasize what has happened in the past, build up the previous things,

to be credible in the present. Katharine Sergava



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Katharine Sergava was obviously the real deal, although I knew hardly anything

about her when I enrolled in her acting class at Herbert Berghof Studio in West

Greenwich Village, where she told me to study the history of theatre and leave

technique to her. Art techniques are controversial and their evolution is part of the

history of the culture, but to avoid confusion and get one’s bearings it is convenient

to start with the conventional technique.

I am finally taking Madame Sergava’s advice to study modern theatre history

including acting methodology, twenty-some years after I studied with her and ten

years after her passing. I knew from the school’s scanty advertisements that she

had written a ballet primer for children, but I did not know that she had been a

prima ballerina at the nucleus of the American classical ballet movement before

she starred as Dream Laurey in Oklahoma! I knew she had been in various plays

and television features, and was presently teaching Stanislavski’s famoustechnique ala the Moscow Art Theatre. Russian culture happened to correspond to

my sentiments at the time. I was an enthusiastic reader of Russian literature from

Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn; perestroika was the rage. The Berlin Wall, officially the

“Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart,” was about to fall; in fact, during one of our

improvisation sessions I recited a little poem I had written, ‘Fall Wall,’ pretending

to be a boy bouncing his ball against a wall in hopes it would eventually fall due to

the repeated impact.

The Stanislavski “technique” is preferably referred to as a “system” because its

forty elements are more of a complex curriculum to be studied than a set

mechanical technique. It places the ultimate burden on the actor to figure things

out, to use his imagination to conceive gestures for his character, and to act

accordingly instead of striking a standard pose or gesture for a particular emotion

or attitude that an audience accustomed to the behavior would understand. For

instance, I visited an exhibit of Russian contraptions with knobs and handles used

to train actors make proper gestures: reaching across your own body for the top

knob affixed to the training board, for example, would signify a particular

emotional state.

The Stanislavski system focuses on the actors and utilizes their memorable

experiences, analyzed in terms of a triune of three psychological factors, namely

feeling (emotion), mind, and will, that correspond with their roles, producing

intelligent or objective-oriented acting instead of the actors being moved

unconsciously as if they were zombies or automatons, or manipulated by fateful



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forces perchance pulling their strings and directing them as if they were

marionettes.

Stanislavski rendered the benefit of his practical experience to all who found it

useful, and by no means intended his system to be the end-all. His psychological

system was applied at the Moscow Art Theatre to the naturalistic plays of Tolstoy

and Ibsen, and then with success to four of Anton Chekhov’s major plays,

beginning with the stupendous success of the seminal play, The Seagull, which had

flopped so dismally prior to the collaboration with Stanislavski that Chekhov, far

more depressed than usual, nearly abandoned playwriting altogether.

Dr. Anton Chekhov reading play to Moscow Art Theatre Company

The Moscow Art Theatre, the “realistic” theatre established by Stanislavski and

Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1898, virtually revolutionized theatre at the

turn of the 20th

century, abandoning romantic idealism, lurid melodrama, standard gestures and action formulas, to bring theatre into line with the so-called realistic

or scientific way of thinking of the time, which was, notwithstanding its material

objectivity, fundamentally inner-driven, willful, progressive, and optimistic. That

is to say that the idealistic factors of a mind-over-matter approach persisted so that

theatre was not merely an imitation of external reality. The Stanislavski “System”

was further developed into so-called Method Acting by Lee Strasberg and others

who trained some of America’s most renowned actors.

The Moscow Art Theatre was often mentioned in respect to Katharine Sergava’s

career. I was not alone in wrongly concluding that she had studied directly under Konstantin Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre. Sergava would have been too

young to participate, since she was born in 1910, and her family fled the 1917

Revolution. The so-called people’s theatre was patronized by Lenin and thrived

during the Revolution, but ran into debt in the Twenties. Stanislavski virtually

withdrew from the Theatre after his onstage heart attack during a 1928

performance of The Three Sisters. A line Stanislavski recited in that play, in his





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liberty, he notices birds no more than he did before. When you live in Moscow,

you'll not notice it, in just the same way. There can be no happiness for us, it exists

only in our anticipations.”

Mind you, however, that there is reason for optimism notwithstanding random

evolution, for evolution has had leaps corresponding to enlightenment.

“It seems to me that everything on earth must change, little by little, and is already

changing under our very eyes. After two or three hundred years, after a thousand—

the actual time doesn't matter—a new and happy age will begin. We, of course,

shall not take part in it, but we live and work and even suffer to-day that it should

come. We create it—and in that one object is our destiny, and, if you like, our

happiness.”

Since the whole world is a revolving stage hurling through space and we are eachand every one of us an actor upon it, everyone of us might, with the help of an

expert, climb the ladder or spiral staircase or ledges to heaven, or to the cloud-

capped apex of the mountain of being. Notwithstanding the recent setbacks, we

may still have our Age of Aquarius. What will the happiest of ages look like? How

will we get there? We have the theme, we have in mind what Stanislavski called

the Super-task or Super-objective, but we need to plot the course to the goal, step

by step, overcoming all the obstacles that were are bound to encounter along the

way. History is always a mistake for the idealist and for existentialists like Sartre

who strive never to repeat themselves, but some of us make more mistakes than

others, so a periodic review might inspire improvements.

Army Lieutenant and Baron Nikolai Lvovitch Tuzenbach would not agree with us.

Life is for the birds as far as he is concerned. He tells Vershinin: “Not only after

two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does

not change, it remains forever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or

which, at any rate, you will never be able to fathom. Migrant birds, cranes for

example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they

will still fly and not know why or where. They fly and will continue to fly,

whatever philosophers should be born among them; they may philosophize asmuch as they like, only they will fly.”



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Stanislavski in The Three Sisters and in The Cherry Orchard

If Katharine Sergava and her family repaired to France before immigrating to

London after fleeing the 1917 Russian Revolution, as is believed, she may have

gotten a glimpse of Stanislavski in action when the Moscow Art Theatre visited

Paris in 1922. Michel St. Denis, the great director, actor, teacher, and acting

theorist with whom Katharine would work later on in London, was certainly there.

He described the Russian actors including Stanislavski’s performance as Gaev in

Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard :

“Generally, Russian actors have powerful physiques, strong featured faces and resounding voices. Stanislavski himself was something of a giant. That evening he

played Gaev, and it was an amazing experience to watch him use his side to

breathe life into this selfish, incompetent puppet who has nothing left but the

charm of his feelings and the prestige of his grand manner. Stanislavski played him

as stiffly as an old-fashioned mummy; but when he would furtively mimic a

gesture in playing billiards, Gaev’s innocent fad, what lightness! It was the

lightness of the acting that made the production enchanting. The fluidity of the

inner impulse and the swiftness of the reflexes kept the actors in mid-air; at the

tensest moment and in the most difficult movements their concentration was

undetectable. They found truth without contortion. Nothing was underscored,although the naturalistic accuracy of the slightest reaction was rendered exactly.”

ii

Michel Saint-Denis was profoundly influenced by the histrionic theories of his

uncle, Jacques Copeau, founder of the Theatre du Vieux-Columbier in Paris.

Copeau is considered by French critics to have at least equal if not greater stature



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than Stanislavski. He endeavored to rid French theatre of its cheap commercialism

and phony acting, and believed that Stanislavski’s realistic reform had been

overdone inasmuch as it detracted from the importance of inner-oriented or

idealistic characterization.

Saint-Denis ventured to London and established the London Theatre Studio, in

1935, capitalizing on the ideas of Copeau and Stanislavski, endeavoring to

interpret all theatre styles, particularly the classical, in a realistic manner.iii

He

would direct The Three Sisters at the Queens Theatre for John Gielgud in 1938. He

studied Stanislavski’s recently translated An Actor Prepares to discover the

elements that were responsible for the impression The Cherry Orchard had on him

in Paris. But his own, distinctive technique emphasized what he had learned with

Copeau and his experience as a general factotum in French theatre. He

disassociated “realism,” which he associated with Chekhov’s somewhat romantic

style, from the vulgar “mud of naturalism.” Indeed, the last thing high-minded audiences wanted to see was a realistic portrayal of vulgar life in hovels—they

wanted a mirror to reflect themselves in the most flattering or idealistic manner. At

least Chekhov portrayed some of the upper crust, but the British thought his plays

were depressing if not boring until Saint-Denis brought them to life.

Key here is the artificial analysis of the human being into mind and body, which

are inseparable in fact, and the philosophical differences between the schools of

idealism and realism. Surely what is real as far as a rational animal who stands

with his feet in the mud and head in heaven is concerned, is superior to the

physical environment including his body; yet the ground is the basis of his

existence as a mental being, wherefore existentialists put existence before being.

Realists will say that ideals are illusions, while idealists will claim that ideals are

real hence the “reality” of realism is maya or illusion. To confuse the issue even

more, idealists lay claim to ideals as the only reality hence some call their

philosophy Realism. Forsooth one complements and is inseparable from the other

unto death. It is said that the world is a grand stage upon which our diverse dreams

are lived out. May the stages on that stage not only mirror our dreams but direct

them toward the wholesome integration of mind and body. Illusions we can stand,

delusions we cannot. Above all be kind for we are kindred souls prone to be fooled by professional actors.





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Although Sergava did not directly study with Stanislavski, she certainly knew his

system well enough through her professional and personal relationships with the

members of the Moscow Art Theatre who perpetuated his system in London and

the United States. She was intimate with the revolutionary thoughts and given

circumstances of the germinal period from the plays of his collaborating

playwright, Anton Chekhov, as well as the plays of Henrik Ibsen. She virtually

relived them time and time again as an actress and teacher.

Of course The Seagull is the seminal play. Sergava coached actors in their The

Seagull roles, and helped her husband, helicopter engineer Bernard Sznycer,

translate the play into English. She herself performed the role of Madame Irina

Arkadina, a fading, age-conscious actress in her early forties. Any serious student

of the Stanislavski system is bound to be thoroughly acquainted The Seagull.

Arkadina is a melodramatic or histrionic character. Her peacock approach to acting

is superficial with an emphasis on mere appearance. Domineering and narcissistic,

wealthy yet stingy, she deems herself greater than anyone else in theatre, but her

delusion of grandiosity corresponds to her self-contempt; indeed, she feels belittled

by anything that suggests that she might be a lesser light than others. She is mother

to Konstantine Treplieff, an aspiring playwright who will present an amateur play

within the play, down by the lake in the midst of the park on the estate of

Arkadina’s wealthy brother, Peter Sorin, who really does not like life in the

country but nevertheless came down to his estate occasionally for a month of respite, and now to finally reside in retirement.

Sorin always wanted to be an author himself, wherefore he likes to associate with

literary men such as Boris Trigorin, a famous yet unhappy author who happens to

be visiting on this occasion. Eugene Dorn, a 55-year-old doctor women once

idolized, is also on hand, as is Simon Medviedenko, a schoolmaster. We also have



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among others a sort of femme fatale, Nina Zarietchnaya, the attractive young

daughter of a rich landowner. Nina is to perform in young Treplieff’s play. Her

parents do not approve of her visits to the Sorin estate, which they refer to as

‘Bohemia,’ because they are afraid she will become an actress: but the lake attracts

her just as it does the gulls, and that is what she is fated to be, and a run-of-the-mill

stock actress touring the back country at that.

Treplieff tells Sorin that as far as he is concerned, the theatre of the day is merely a

vehicle of convention and prejudice: “When the curtain rises on that little three-

walled room, when those mighty geniuses, those high-priests of art, show us

people in the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking, and wearing their coats, and

attempt to extract a moral from their insipid talk; when playwrights give us under a

thousand different guises the same, same, same old stuff, then I must needs run

from it, as Maupassant ran from the Eiffel Tower that was about to crush him by its

vulgarity.”

Treplieff as a revolutionary playwright is naturally infatuated with the star of his

play; she is fond of him too; on the other hand, she cannot help but be attracted by

Trigorin, whom the playwright’s vain mother Arkadina is attached to. Nina was so

impressed by Trigorin’s stories that she dared to criticize her undistinguished

admirer’s approach to theatre before his play commenced:

“I am not so much afraid of your mother,” Nina confided to Treplieff, “as I am of

Trigorin. I am terrified and ashamed to act before him; he is so famous. Is he

young?” Treplieff answered in the affirmative—yet Trigorin was mature enough to

see rejuvenation in a woman younger than Arkadina.

“What beautiful stories he writes!” Nina exclaimed, to which Treplieff coldly

replied, “I have never read any of them, so I can't say.”

“Your play is very hard to act; there are no living characters in it.”

“Living characters! Life must be represented not as it is, but as it ought to be; as it

appears in dreams.”

“There is so little action; it seems more like a recitation. I think love should always

come into every play.”

Nina appeared on stage as an allegorical figure to recite Treplieff’s monologue,

designed to nebulously characterize the spirit of the universe, an all-in-one or



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permanent being which is Spirit alone; or we might say nothingness capitalized, or

Nothing, which is nothing but Being since Being and Nothing are virtually

synonymous because Nothing necessarily implicates everything that can possibly

exist. The Spirit’s metaphysical aria is unsophisticated to say the least, and is

unavoidably contradictory and ambiguous in its terms, for it speaks to the divorce

and reconciliation of no less than energy and matter. All living beings visible and

invisible have died out yet essentially reappear in the Spirit, who is alone by the

lake, represented by Nina, the lake and moon over it being the backdrop simply set

for the play and the play within it. There is the smell of sulfur as she addresses the

glowing will-of-wisps:

“…. Satan, father of eternal matter, trembling lest the spark of life should glow in

you, has ordered an unceasing movement of the atoms that compose you, and so

you shift and change forever. I, the spirit of the universe, I alone am immutable

and eternal. [A pause] Like a captive in a dungeon deep and void, I know notwhere I am, nor what awaits me. One thing only is not hidden from me: in my

fierce and obstinate battle with Satan, the source of the forces of matter, I am

destined to be victorious in the end. Matter and spirit will then be one at last in

glorious harmony, and the reign of freedom will begin on earth….”

Treplieff is in the audience with his famous mom, whom he loves but with whom

he constantly bickers, resenting her egotism and wishing she were an ordinary

woman instead of an actress always putting on airs. He in fact is as egotistical as

she: like mother like son. Arkadina denounces the ongoing play as “nonsense” and

“decadent trash.” Incensed, he stamps his foot and stops the play. Nina, seeing that

the play would not continue, prepared to leave. Arkadina congratulated her on her

performance, remarking that she must be so talented that she should make a career

of acting instead of hiding herself in the country, and she fatefully then introduces

her to Sorin, who has already exclaimed “Bravo! Bravo!”

Everyone is a critic, are they not? How would the world progress without

criticism?

“Now it appears that he has produced a masterpiece, if you please!” Arkadinaoffers. “I suppose it was not meant to amuse us at all, but that he arranged the

performance and fumigated us with sulphur to demonstrate to us how plays should

be written, and what is worth acting. I am tired of him. No one could stand his

constant thrusts and sallies. He is a willful, egotistic boy… I notice, though, that he

did not choose an ordinary play, but forced his decadent trash on us. I am willing

to listen to any raving, so long as it is not meant seriously, but in showing us this,





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trifle! Is it not strange, too, that a famous author should sit fishing all day? He is

the idol of the public, the papers are full of him, his photograph is for sale

everywhere, his works have been translated into many foreign languages, and yet

he is overjoyed if he catches a couple of minnows. I always thought famous people

were distant and proud; I thought they despised the common crowd which exalts

riches and birth, and avenged themselves on it by dazzling it with the

inextinguishable honour and glory of their fame. But here I see them weeping and

playing cards and flying into passions like everybody else.”

Treplieff, jealous over her admiration for Trigorin, imagining the worst has

happened when Nina and he are out of sight, goes hunting and appears at the

lakefront. Finding Nina there alone, he lays a dead seagull at her feet. She asked

him what it meant, what was happening with him.

“So it is that I shall soon end my own life.” Nina had grown cold to him, he said, putting him off, his play had failed, and no woman could forgive failure in her

man, and so on.

Stanislavsky as Trigorin

Trigorin shows up, Treplieff mocks him, leaves, and Nina tells Trigorin how shewould like to be as successful as him, for surely his life must be pleasing. Not

really, he avers, explaining that his life is consumed by taking notes for future

works after one is written, and the pleasure from completing one work is temporal

for the work, which is never as good as the works of the greatest Russian authors,

becomes odious to him. In fact, sometimes he fears he will be committed to an

asylum.



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He asks about the dead seagull. She tells him Treplieff shot it. He exclaims that the

bird is lovely, and proceeds to write in his notebook. “What are you writing?” she

asks. “Nothing much, only an idea that occurred to me; an idea for a short story: A

young girl grows up on the shores of a lake, as you have. She loves the lake as the

gulls do, and is as happy and free as they. But a man sees her who chances to come

that way, and he destroys her out of idleness, as this gull here has been destroyed.”

Now much has been said about what that seagull symbolized, not to mention the

lake; so much that it has become a subject for satire by disrespectful playwrights

who would make a joke of the poor bird’s significance. Playwright Josef Evans

converted the play into a musical farce, performed by Bedlam Theatre, a

independent Minneapolis company, in 2008. It is entitled The Turducken (a bird

nest).

CONSTANTIUS. Nini.

NINI. Who's that?

CONSTANTIUS. It's me. Are you alone?

NINI. Yes, I'm alone. (CONSTANTIUS jumps out brandishing an

uncooked turducken.) Aaa! It's you. (he lays it at her feet) What the

hell is that?

CONSTANTIUS. I was low enough today to kill this innocent young

turducken. I lay it at your feet.

NINI. What? What is the matter with you?

CONSTANTIUS. I killed it the same way I'm going to kill myself.

NINI. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't recognize you.

CONSTANTIUS. I didn't recognize you first. You've changed. You

hate me now. Your eyes are cold, like icy cool and refreshing Pabst

Blue Ribbon beer.

NINI. It's your own fault. You're so cranky and you talk in symbols, I

don't even know what you're saying half the time. I suppose THIS



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TURDUCKEN IS SUPPOSED TO BE SOME KIND OF SYMBOL,

TOO (holds up the turducken). Well, I don't understand it. I'm too

simple to understand you.

CONSTANTIUS. It's all because of my play. That stupid failure of a

play. I've burnt it all, every scrap of it. And now where am I? Not

even a writer. An impersonator of writers. A worthless hack, with

only a mustache and a shiny shiny wig to call his own. You say you

don't understand me. Perhaps there is nothing of me to understand.

(TREY enters) Oh, but here comes the true genius. I am not worthy of

his presence. I leave you to your love and enlightened conversation.

(he exits)

Well, the meaning intended by Treplieff was obvious, and he would eventually die

by his own hand—the fact that Treplieff commits suicide as threatened sheds mayshed some light on Madame Sergava’s mysterious advice to never fall in love with

an actor in your play. Nina would debut on the Moscow summer stage then go on

to country towns, always signing herself “The Seagull.” We reserve the analysis of

that usage to the Freudian analysts and drama critics. Suffice it to say that the

seagull can symbolize, like other birds, both good and evil.

We would fain add this for speculation, that a seagull is sacred to sailors because it

is a guide to land and food, wherefore to kill one is very bad luck, for a dead

seagull is a death omen. The only way a sailor may be reborn after he kills a

seagull is to keep a piece of caul with him at all times.

Without such historical continuity we are nothing and neither are the characters we

represent: How may anyone know who he is or is supposed to be without a sense

of history, without knowing what his task in life has been, and what it may be in

the future? And when we are not certain of the past of the character we have been

or would be, we need to use our imagination, for a person without a past is

incredible.

Now the job of an actor is to represent the thoughts of the playwrights, whose perspectives on life and manner of characterizing them may be philosophically

controversial. Take, for example, the controversial, Nobel Prize-winning

playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, who was profoundly influenced by the Immanuel

Swedenborg’s theory of correspondences, the language of angels.



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Emanuel Swedenborg

“The science of correspondence has been concealed since the time of Job, but is

now made known,” said Swedenborg. “Correspondence is between those thingswhich appertain to the light of heaven, and those things which appertain to the light

of the world: that is, between those things which appertain to the internal or

spiritual man, and those which appertain to the external or natural man, and

representation is whatever exists in the things appertaining to the light of the

world, that is, whatever exists in the external or natural man, considered in respect

to the things appertaining to the light of heaven, or to the internal or spiritual man.

Correspondences were especially cultivated in Egypt and were perverted to magic.

When correspondences were turned into idolatry and magic, the knowledge of

them was providentially obliterated. There is a correspondence of sensual things

with natural things, of these with spiritual things, of these with celestial things, and

of celestial things with the divine of the Lord. Man is continually preserved in

correspondence with heaven by the Lord, that he may, if he chooses it, be led from

hell to heaven, and by heaven to the Lord. There is not given the least thing with

man, with which there is no correspondence.”

Maeterlinck felt that marionettes were an excellent alternative to actors; he and

wrote several plays for puppet theatre. His discrediting of the human actor’s

scientific ability to represent something besides himself did not deter Katharine

Sergava from applying her Stanislavski indoctrination to represent fateful forceswhen she played Mélisande opposite Michael Simone as Pélléas in Maeterlinck’s

romance, Pélléas and Mélisande, directed and adapted by Herbert Victor

Gellendre.

Gellendre, who studied acting under former Moscow Art Theatre member Richard

Boleslawski, performed in numerous Broadway plays in the Twenties. He taught



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drama at Nellie Cornish’s School of Music in Seattle. The Cornish School of

Music, which expanded to include allied arts, was intended to nurture the creativity

of average people, and was the locus of Russian artists fleeing the Revolution. The

faculty included dedicated artists who would become luminaries, such as Martha

Graham. Both Gellendre and Graham would teach at The Neighborhood Playhouse

School of the Theatre in New York in the Thirties. American actor Sanford

Meisner, famous for his development of an acting technique based on the

Stanislavski system, joined the Playhouse faculty in 1935 and became head of the

school in 1940.

Gellendre and his first wife Mildred Kate Kuhn (Sherman), a professional

puppeteer and stage manager whom he met while she was teaching at Cornish,

founded the Repertory Playhouse Associates in 1931, which ran several theatres in

New English and New York, including the Gellendre Theatre Studio on 67th

Street

in New York City directed by Mildred from the 1940s to the mid-1960s. TheGelledres divorced and she married vaudeville actor Joseph T. Sherman in 1957.

iv

Correspondences in Pélléas and Mélisande

Gellendre was hired to direct the Pittsburg Playhouse’s 1935-1936 Season, for

which he produced idealistic, experimental programs. His plays were allegedly beautifully mounted and superbly produced but were criticized for being

“continental.” The second production of the season, Pélléas and Mélisande,

utilizing Debussy’s music and starring Edward Komperda and Eda Toldi was

enthusiastically received, lauded as a technical triumph. Nonetheless, Gellendre

was fired, purportedly for doing the unforgiveable: “over-professionalization” of

the local theatre. The attempt to commercialize the local theatre was deemed



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suicidal. After all, local actors can be found who are as good as any Equity-card-

carrying Broadway ham actors. Furthermore, professionals from out of town will

bore audiences. In fine, local theatre must correspond to local mores including

parochial pricing.

At this writing we do not know exactly when and where Sergava starred in

Gellendre’s adaptation of Pélléas and Mélisande, but suppose it was at the

Gellendre Theatre Studio. Madame Sergava cut a great figure on the world stage,

and became one of the best Stanislavski teachers of our age, yet she was too

modest in our opinion, failing to show off her laurels. It is often difficult and

expenses to retrieve at a distance whatever information may be in institutional

archives. Furthermore, paranoid or envious friends and colleagues may refuse to

provide information or insist on controlling biography content. Lazy biographers or

penny-pinching publishers may fantasize to fill in the gaps, as the London Daily

Telegraph did in Sergava’s premature and spurious obituary, perhaps mistaking her advice to actors: “You have to fantasize what has happened in the past, build up

the previous things, to be credible in the present.” Do not assume that you are not

famous enough now to become famous posthumously. Few people remember the

best sellers of yesterday, but the classic works of art, many of them lowly regarded

in their day, are of perennial interest. Some of them, like Shakespeare’s plays, were

and still are popular; Shakespeare, regrettably, did not keep his obituary updated

and published; he certainly existed, but whether he wrote the plays was cast in

doubt. Every performing artist should keep her portfolio obituary updated and

backed up with scans of playbills, images, letters and such, and posted on a

convenient Internet site lest archiving institutions make it overly difficult and

expensive to retrieve whatever information there is from their archives; to that end

we have proposed a Universal Memorial Homesite for everyone no matter how

humble or noble.

However that may be, we do know that Sergava starred in Pélléas and Mélisande,

and she also starred under Gellendre’s direction in George Bellak’s Edge of the

Sword , presented at the Abbe Practical Workshop in New York City, date

unknown. In Pélléas and Mélisande, King Arkël of Allemonde (All World), whose

grandson Mélisande married after he found the princess forlorn by a stream in theforest, remarked, “I am a very old man, and yet I have never been able to

understand myself; how then can I judge others? I am not far from the grave, and I

do not even know how to judge my own actions... Unless we close our eyes we are

always deceived.”



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Really, how can any actor be wise enough to truly represent someone else, or an

ideal, or a metaphysical entity? If truth in acting is the ideal, to what truth does the

act correspond? Is it the ideal or the real, or is it both, and, if both, then to what

balance? And what is reality? Our culture overemphasizes the material reality:

ideals along with angels fell from heaven into hell with the assassination of God.

Dirty minds ruled by devils are the norm.

Frederick Nietzsche equated the Christian God with Death. He was discomfited by

a Christianity he felt responded to the inevitability death with a specious or pretty

promise of a better place thereafter. In Birth of Tragedy, he reiterated his belief that

a metaphysic true to life, a metaphysic correspondent to sensuality, is found in art

and not in morals: “The preface to Richard Wagner already proposed that art—and

not morality—was the essential metaphysical human activity. In the book itself

there appears many times over the suggestive statement that the existence of the

world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.” v

Wagner opined in Art and Revolution that, “Art is pleasure in itself, in existence, in

community; but the condition of that period, at the close of the Roman mastery of

the world, was self-contempt, disgust with existence, horror of community. Thus

Art could never be the true expression of this condition: its only possible

expression was Christianity. Christianity adjusts the ills of an honorless, useless,

and sorrowful existence of mankind on earth, by the miraculous love of God ;who

had not as the noble Greek supposed created man for a happy and self-conscious

life upon this earth, but had here imprisoned him in a loathsome dungeon: so as, in

reward for the self-contempt that poisoned him therein, to prepare him for a

posthumous state of endless comfort and inactive ecstasy.”vi

An actor’s actions should correspond with the playwright’s intentions. A play may

have to correspond to the playwright’s perception that life is really a tragedy, and

that the means of denying death are structures of evil. The effects of the cure may

be worse than the disease. Perhaps it is better to die in battle than in the bush.

Perhaps the existence of good gods needs evil devils, and that what we perceived

as evil is the basis of good. Nietzsche literally shocked the intelligentsia when he

proclaimed that there is beauty in tragedy, that joy is based on suffering: “Wherethen must tragedy have come from? Perhaps out of joy, out of power, out of

overflowing health, out of overwhelming fullness?”

As far as Nietzsche was concerned, Christian morality and modern science had

sickened mankind; the cowardly norm was itself neuroses. Dionysus shows up at

Delphi, where Apollo killed the Pytho the Dragoness or Earth Goddess, and



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prescribes passion-inducing wine as an antidote to Apollo’s medicinal mead.

Apollo the proverbial immigrant is always running away from himself; he is a far-

flung god out of cowardice, shining his rational light on the heroic deeds of bold

Dionysian colonists.

But Nietzsche was confused, and he knew it before he descended into madness and

signed his name ‘Dionysus.’ He was actually ambivalent on Christianity and took

his antithetical stance for the sake of rebellion against conventions, which is what

artists tend to do. After all, Jesus the Christ is the divine man, a self-contradiction

if spirit and matter are contradictory one to the other. But the dichotomy is

artificial. Jesus the Christ is at once Apollonian and Dionysian, and more of the

later than the former if wine and the sanguine people known as his Vine have a say

in the matter. Christ is the Logos, the precedent to reasoning that may make a

Christian appear to be foolish. Jesus the Christ perfectly corresponds to the tragedy

of individual human beings and therefore represents Man; that the joy is in thestruggle;—hence the popularity of the Passion Play.

And is not the Passion Play another version of the same theme mentioned by

Wagner in his praise of Greek tragedy? “To see the most pregnant of all tragedies,

the "Prometheus," came they; in this Titanic masterpiece to see the image of

themselves, to read the riddle of their own actions, to fuse their own being and

their own communion with that of their god; and thus in noblest, stillest peace to



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live again the life which a brief space of time before, they had lived in restless

activity and accentuated individuality.”

Primitive humans accustomed to waking up every day reasoned they would live

forever unless evil spirits intervened, so death was deemed unnatural—it certainly

must seem so to animals. Men and women strove to obtain their ideals and

ultimately failed in death but their will to live forever would not admit that death

was the end. So-called Christian mores rooted in the evolution of the race have

evolved and everyone is unavoidably influenced accordingly. The jihad of Jesus is

present in everyone regardless of their faith or lack thereof; wherefore it is not the

resurrection of Christ that is longed for but the resurrection of God, and may God

help people for not being careful about what they wish for.

Montrose J, Moses, in his preface to Pélléas and Méisande (Thomas Y. Crowell,

New York: 1894), said that, “It is science, as Soissons again avers, which hasdestroyed the deceptions of medieval mysticism, which has forced a recognition of

the two sides of the essence of things, the ideal factor and the real factor.”

Wagner and Nietzsche associated the development of modern science with

Christianity, and Christianity with the Greek rationalists. Wagner rued the fracture

of ideal and real, “The Art of Christian Europe could never proclaim itself, like

that of ancient Greece, as the expression of a world attuned to harmony; for reason

that its inmost being was incurably and irreconcilably split up between the force of

conscience and the instinct of life, between the ideal and the reality.”

Now the real factor is the object or thing. The thing-in-itself may not be known but

the thing sensed may be perceived or adjudged to be something or the other by the

subject. Scientific or objective knowledge about a small number of things

including events that everyone would agree upon does not fully correspond to the

truth about objects for truth includes feelings and sentiments.

Arthur Schopenhauer observed that, “Every work of art accordingly really aims at

showing us life and things as they are in truth, but cannot be directly discerned by

every one through the mist of objective and subjective contingencies. Art takesaway this mist. The works of the poets, sculptors, and representative artists in

general contain an unacknowledged treasure of profound wisdom; just because out

of them the wisdom of the nature of things itself speaks, whose utterances they

merely interpret by illustrations and purer repetition. On this account, however,

everyone who reads the poem or looks at the picture must certainly contribute out



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of his own means to bring that wisdom to light; accordingly he comprehends only

so much of it.”vii

The “reality” that realistic theatre brings us must leave plenty of room for what

Schopenhauer called the fancy: “Every work of art can only produce its effect

through the medium of the fancy; therefore it must excite this, and can never allow

it to be left out of the play and remain inactive. This is a condition of the aesthetic

effect, and therefore a fundamental law of all fine arts. But it follows from this

that, through the work of art, everything must not be directly given to the senses,

but rather only so much as is demanded to lead the fancy on to the right path;

something, and indeed the ultimate thing, must always be left over for the fancy to

do.”

The word for actor used to be hypocrite, someone who play-acted or acted-out.

Jewish scribes took the word in its pejorative sense, and Christians took their cuewith a vengeance. But Christians certainly did not invent hypocrisy as it is the

underlying crisis upon which human progress turns. Wagner characterized

Christian eras as hypocritical, as if they were antithetical to art. He spoke of the

Puritan model hence was not too far from the mark. Perhaps he would speak of

Taliban Islam today. Absolute idealists are likely to correspond with transcendent

archetypes and impugn the world by way of comparison.

“Art is the highest expression of activity of a race that has developed its physical

beauty in unison with itself and Nature; and man must reap the highest joy from

the world of sense, before he can mould therefrom the implements of his art; for

from the world of sense alone, can he derive so much as the impulse to artistic

creation. The Christian, on the contrary, if he fain would create an art-work that

should correspond to his belief, must derive his impulse from the essence of

abstract spirit (Geisf), from the grace of God, and therein find his tools. What,

then, could he take for aim? Surely not physical beauty, mirrored in his eyes as an

incarnation of the devil? And how could pure spirit, at any time, give birth to a

something that could be cognised by the senses?”

Can the deeds of an actor perfectly correspond to or be true to ideals or to realityso-called? Either way, a hypocrite’s deeds may never match his words because he

is not the virtual person whom he projects. If he is asked to simply be true to

himself, what is that self? Every man and woman bears the Cross, the intersection

of the ideal and real. The hypo-krisis or underlying crisis of an individual man is

that he cannot realize perfection and live. Perfection may be to live forever without

impedance but without resistance there is no individual. The obstacle called the



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world stands in the way of eternal life, determining one’s fate. The Absolute in

itself allows for nothing else.

As for Maeterlinck’s philosophy of life, he was a fatalist who believed that human

behavior essentially yet inadequately corresponds to the archetypical forces

independent of or external to the actor. For example, the purpose of his play, Blue

Bird , a bird symbolizing Celestial Truth, was to figuratively characterize Man’s

ascension to the highest spiritual being. Ah, so may the blue bird of paradise fly up

your nose. The emotions and physical behavior peculiar to particular actors are

superfluous, and a hindrance to the symbolic expression of universal forces. As far

as he was concerned, marionettes would better express his ideas, or rather his

ideals, than human actors. Frustrated writers and directors today might agree.

Francois Delsarte (1811-1871) and Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949)

Whether or not man has free will, what does it matter what the actor thinks and

feels when playing the role of a character as long the audience enjoys the illusion

that she or he is in character?

Francois Delsarte opined that the audience sees through the opaque physical body

of an actor to the inner character, therefore he mingled with people and carefully

observed their behavior, and from that information developed a system of conventional poses and vocalizations or a stock of attitudes that corresponded to

the emotions directors would have actors portray. He analyzed body into its parts

and their corresponding relation to inner states; for example, there are, “Three

centres in the arm: the shoulder for pathetic actions; the elbow, which approaches

the body by reason of humility, and reciprocally (that is, inversely) for pride;

lastly, the hand for fine, spiritual and delicate actions.”



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Swedenborg looked to scripture for his divine analogies, particularly to the worldly

remnant of the Ancient Word of angels, the first eleven Genesis novels, the first

seven related verbatim, for his correspondences and significations: “‘Put thy hand

in thy bosom’ refers to the appropriation of divine truth. A hand upon the head

represents shame. The hand is the omnipotence of truth from good, and arm, the

omnipotence of good by truth. The hand is power, arms still greater power and

shoulders all power. Communication is produced by the touch of the hand,

inasmuch as the life of the mind, and thence of the body, exerts itself in the arms,

and by them in the hand; hence it is, that the Lord touched with his hand those

whom he restored to life and healed, To hold up the hand is faith looking towards

the Lord.”

Affirmation & Repulsion gestures ala Delsartre

Now Delsarte is misunderstood: he did not say that acting should be wooden. Quite

to the contrary; the actor should be flexible, wherefore the physical exercises that

some folks turned into a gymnastic system. High art does proceed by means of

mechanical expertise that becomes habitual, a sort of framework which frees the

artist to express himself in an orderly fashion. “Correspondence” is the key to

representation; the correspondence theory truth. Whereas Maeterlinck would

represent celestial truths, Delsarte strove to represent or relive through art the

human being’s inner agencies, emotions, motivations. “Art is an act by which life

lives again in that which in itself has no life.” An actor is a god, as it were, whocreates or recreates living characters. As far as Delsarte was concerned, every

movement a person makes, no matter how slight, betrays his or her character,

expressing one way or another the principles of his triunal nature i.e. intellectual,

sensual, and emotional, or mind, body, and soul.



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If naturalism is the illusion of natural reality that we conventionally prefer, a

properly formed and programmed android robot might convince us that it had

mind, feeling, and a will even if it is not aboard Starship Enterprise. Animated

movies create the illusion of reality without human actors. Robots might serve our

projections even if they do not look human: Recall Gloria, the little girl in Isaac

Asimov’s I-Robot story, who so loved Robbie, a robot especially created to be her

attendant: Gloria could not be happy without the machine her mother would

dispose of for her own good even though the First Law of Robotics is that it is

impossible for robots to harm humans, which makes them better than many parents

although perhaps too selfish. ‘“He was not no machine!” screamed Gloria, fiercely

and ungrammatically. “He was a person just like you and me and he was my

friend. I want him back. Oh, Mamma, I want him back.”’ Her mom said to her

sympathetic father: “You want her to be normal, don’t you? You want her to be

able to take her part in society.” To which he replied: “You’re jumping at shadows,

Grace. Pretend Robbie’s a dog. I’ve seen hundreds of children who would rather have their dog than their father.” A recent study of infants showed that the most of

them preferred their I-pads to their moms.

As for Schopenhauer, he would not appreciate a fully realistic representation of

reality including virtual human actors, for that would fail to evoke the audience’s

fancy or imagination, and leave it bored: “From the fundamental aesthetical law we

are speaking of, it is further to be explained why wax figures never produce an

aesthetic effect, and therefore are not properly works of fine art, although it is just

in them that the imitation of nature is able to reach its highest grade. For they leave

nothing for the imagination to do. Sculpture gives merely the form without the

color; painting gives the color, but the mere appearance of the form; thus both

appeal to the imagination of the beholder. The wax figure, on the other hand, gives

all, form and color at once; whence arises the appearance of reality, and the

imagination is left out of account.”

Now it is not unusual for film directors to dismiss the theories of acting schools as

utter nonsense. Playwright and film director David Mamet, for one, has

characterized the teachings of drama schools and workshops as “hogwash.” He

attributes the success of actors to accident and natural talent in his book, True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor , wherein he opines that there is no

such thing as character but written words on the pages, and that an effort by the

actor to relate his own experiences to non-existent characters is a waste of time and

harmful.



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Perhaps we do not give directors and available technology enough credit for

creating scenes and pulling the strings of actors to create illusions of conventional

reality if that is what we prefer over fantasy. Why does the acting of a Method

actor in a dated film appear to be stilted or wooden when the behavior of an actor

in a current movie or television production appears to be completely natural? Then

again, we might have realistic reasons for preferring the old films.

On the other hand, we should not condemn the schools. Actors learned on the job

before the evolution of the schools. That is, the theatre was the acting school, and

the practical school became an adjunct to the theatre before it stood alone,

organized to spread its learning from experience to multiple stages.

Would-be actors are not going to be hired to flounder around and make fools of

themselves and owners, producers and directors. We need a foundation to begin

anything. The best way to get some knowledge and practical acting experience beforehand is to attend the schools—a teacher in the first drama school I attended

even allowed us to forge our names on his photocopied union card to get

auditioning experience. We need to start somewhere. One might as well start with

schools influenced by the highly influential Stanislavski system and go on from

there. The duty of the actor, like the dancer who steals whatever looks good, is to

steal whatever works well. If it looks and quacks like a duck it is a duck.

Actors might do well to study the history of the world to find their selves and their

characters therein in order act responsibly within their own theatres of operations

given the advice of our sages on how to best accomplish their chosen objectives.

Madame Sergava wanted us to study the history of the theatre, which reflects the

history of culture, leaving the technique to her technique to begin with, saving

beginners at least from the confusion of competing techniques. Yet a technique is a

cultural artifact too, and a most important one at that since it provides the culture

with a methodic or systematic means to deal with itself without having to stop and

think everything out again and again before each act instead of acting irrationally.

Acting is not so much about learning technique as learning how to act therefore

live intelligently. That requires dealing with the world, with obstructions, resolving

conflicts no matter how dramatic.



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Jacob Moreno handing down wisdom

The acting profession itself is not a therapeutic business nor is drama school group

psychotherapy. Sergava’s colleague at HB Studio, Uta Hagen, cautioned actors toavoid examining experiences they did not want to talk about. Sigmund Freud

believed that the key to curing neuroses was to have the patient remember the bad

experiences for which the neuroses were defensive reactions, formed to avoid any

further pain. Drama teachers are not trained psychiatrists although acting schools

tend to attract neurotics. The day may come when acting teachers and directors

will have to be credentialed and licensed by the state to protect the public.

Stanislavski soon discovered that dredging up traumatic personal memories in

order to establish a sympathetic or magic correspondence with the imaginary

characters they play may have traumatic consequences on actors; an early example,

Michael Chekhov had a nervous breakdown. Still, since the Stanislavski system

and its methodological applications are fundamentally inner-oriented and actor-

centric, the psychoanalytical approach to acting prevails, and seems more

practicable than witchcraft and alchemy.

Although drama classes are not intended to be group therapy sessions, actors may

still tell us that great teachers like Madame Sergava literally saved their lives.

Naturally people in all walks of life would like to act more effectively and

therefore to succeed no matter what their ideals might be. Successful businesses

commonly utilize psychodrama techniques to achieve their goals given variousscenarios set up for experimental resolution of impediments to progress.

Adam Blatner, M.D, following in the footsteps of Jacob Moreno, has elaborated

the theoretical foundations of psychodrama for the establishment of a program of

general therapeutics that goes far beyond the medical model. Dr. Blatner believes

psychodrama can assist everyone willing to become flexible enough to make the



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necessary adjustments to realize their potential in their pursuit of happiness. That

is, their behavior would better correspond with their ideals within the given

society.

“Psychodrama should be considered to be a complex of ideas and methods within

the larger fields of psychotherapy, and beyond that, beyond the medical model, that

is, the even broader arena I call ‘applied psychology.’ This includes education,

business, social skills training, religion, recreation, community building, and

personal growth-this broader perspective was also the goal of the human potential

movement.”

The pioneering Dr. Moreno apparently corresponded with God: He strove to

cathartically enrapture souls participating in his socio-dramatic, purgative group

therapy method for socio-metric adaptation, which he created after he asked

himself what God would do, then played God’s part after creating God beforehand:“The genesis of psychodrama was closely related to the genesis of Godhead. I tried

to draw in my mind a picture of what God looked like on the first day of

creation…. Hovering over the chaos on the first day, he was there to create, not to

take apart and analyze…. If he had started with psychoanalysis he would hardly

have begun to create anything, the world would have remained uncreated.

Therefore, I conclude that God was first a creator, an actor, a psychodramatist. He

had to create the world before he had the time, the need and inclination to analyze

it. He must have given a lot of good thought to the creation before he began with

it….”

Psychodrama would become “a religion of a new sort,” wrote Dr. Moreno in his

prelude to Who Shall Survive? The creed of the new salvation religion comprises

three hypotheses: 1) “the hypothesis of spontaneity-creativity as a propelling force

in human progress beyond and independent from libido and socio-economic

motives…. 2) the hypothesis of having faith in our fellowmen’s intentions…the

hypothesis of love and mutual sharing as a powerful and indispensable working

principle…. 3) the hypothesis of a super-dynamic community based upon these

principles….”

Dr. Blatner expansively declared in a brief description of the foundations of

psychodrama theory published on his website in 2006, that his “broader

perspective was also the goal of the human potential movement. I am using

psychodrama in its broadest sense, that is, the general thrust of Morenian

ideas….This includes Moreno’s vision that his approach transcended the activity of



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healing the sick, psychiatry, and extended to taking on the challenge of healing the

society as a whole….”

Surrealistic Painting by Eugene Berman

Jerzy Grotowski, one of the most influential and controversial directors of the

twentieth century, himself influenced by Stanislavski’s notions of an experimentaltheatre, eschewed merely entertaining theatre, and attempted a renaissance of

theatre’s originally cathartic and integrative function. That is, a Holy Theatre or

quasi-religious, ritual theatre purified of dross and distilled to its essence, a theatre

requiring the utter devotion of actors who do not “represent” a character or attempt

to be “natural,” but revive their suppressed emotions and alchemically conjoin

themselves spiritually and physically with the dramatic text, a process which

supposedly has a purgatory effect during a spontaneous self-revelatory sequence

dubbed the Total Act. Such is Reality.

Encouraging people to engage in creative art including inner-driven, creative

acting may very well have a therapeutic effect. Creating alternatives to the neurotic

or ineffective habitual defensive patterns of behavior may result in dramatic

solutions to conflicts.



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Elliot Benjamin, Ph.D. in a paper entitled ‘Art and Mental Disturbance’ posited

that “some people who are considered to be mentally ill may have significant

creative artistic potential that can be highly therapeutic for them to engage in.”

Who knows? Maybe they will become highly regarded actors with more self-

esteem than they ever craved. Dr. Benjamin proposed that a theory be established

called “The Artistic Theory of Psychology.”

“The Artistic Theory of Psychology stresses a different focal point of comparison

for our criteria of mental health and normality. I shall define the successful creative

artist to be a person who has received the respect and acknowledgement for his

work by a community of his peers or society-at-large, and who also is considered

both psychologically and ethically to be a ‘well adjusted’ member of his society

and the greater world.”

Well adjusted to what? Basically the self, whatever that is, in society. That is, theactor is to play himself, or rather to be himself, to be all that he can be, and so on.

That is to some extent determined by his given circumstances, the mores and

norms of his culture. Still, the objective is open-ended, and amounts to no less that

the realization of the actor’s highest potential. He looks to philosophers and

psychologists for “criteria,” such as the individualistic, egoistic, self-actualizing

yet self-transcending, autonomous, and integrated striving for the highest moral

and spiritual stages. The heroic characters in this dramatic endeavor are the likes of

Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Abraham Maslow.

Obviously, any protagonist who wants to save himself must save the chorus or

society from its base inclinations, perhaps represented by Satan. The chorus seems

to have the overwhelming voice, to be the ultimate director of the play, which is

likely to be a tragedy.

“I shall take my definition of the successful creative artist as an ideal of what is

‘natural,’ which I believe includes individualized self-motivated creative

expressions, and healthy in my own society, i.e. the United States in the year

2006,” Dr. Benjamin says.

What is healthy? What is natural, and how can that be idealized? How in the world shall an actor’s behavior correspond to such nebulous notions? Pastors and

psychiatrists and drama coaches would be of some avail. An actor may find it

somewhat difficult to represent that well-adjusted creative artist he simply is that

person. Then again, maybe not, maybe he can represent that artist if it is not his

own person, given his personal experience and the great historical examples to

study. For his or her behavior need not mystically correspond to metaphysical



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entities or to the vagaries of psychological definitions but to how people actually

behave i.e. how they act and respond in their circumstances. An actor’s inner state

may not be important since the audience cannot see that in itself but only can see

action and hear dialogue. A robot might do but only if perfectly made to

correspond to a human being, for anyone who acts like a machine today will be

deemed mad or inhuman.

The actor would do well to take Madame Sergava’s advice to study the history of

theatre, which is a passive reflection of culture as well as an active influence on

culture. He must then risk the danger of becoming a thinker instead of an actor, and

study at length the philosophies underlying cultures including their techniques. He

may discover that Herbert Marcuse’s statement about technique in One-

Dimensional Man is true: “The developing technological reality undermines not

only the traditional forms but the very basis of the artistic alienation—that is, it

tends to invalidate not only certain ‘styles’ but also the very substance of art.”

For Marcuse, truth is found in fiction: “In the form of the oeuvre, the actual

circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself

as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself, its language ceases to be that

of deception, ignorance and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and

the reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be

mutilated and false.”

An actor would naturally be interested in theories of correspondence, so he would

want to examine the history and correspond with the dead, to study, for example,

Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, particularly the section on the

sense of propriety, to see if his representation of a character is appropriate in its

correspondence to and harmony with the sentiments of the audience.

“We may judge of the propriety or impropriety of the sentiments of another person

by their correspondence or disagreement with our own, upon two different

occasions; either, first, when the objects that excite them are considered without

any peculiar relation, either to ourselves or the person whose sentiments we judge

of; or, secondly, when they are considered a peculiarly affecting one of other of us.”

A reading of Smith and will reveal that Stanislavski and his ilk did not spin

theories out of thin air, that they were actually teaching common sense.



“As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea

of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves

would feel in the like situation. Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we

ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They

never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it by the

imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.”

In our next and last section of this celebration of the life and times of Katharine

Sergava, the author shall give an account of students’ experiences with her and

quote some of her common-sense teaching.

--To be continued in Part III--

i Eugene Berman (1899-1972), a friend of Katharine Sergava, was born in Russia, trained in Paris,

andimmigrated to America. He was known for his surrealistic paintings and his set designs for dance

companies at the time Katharine Sergava was dancing with Ballet Theatre and Ballet Russe de Monte

Carlo.ii Stanislavski and America, Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett 1967iii Saint-Denis, Michel, Theatre - The Rediscovery of Style, London: Heinemann Educational Books 1969iv Mildred Sherman Papers (1894-2000) New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division,v Translated by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canadavi Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 1, Transl. William Ashton Ellis, Kegan, Paul, Trench. Trubner &

Co, London: 1895 vii

Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Idea, Transl. R.B. Haldane & J. Kemp, Trubner & Co. London:1886

Documents

Dramatic Correspondences