I

		creature swimming about somewhere in the middle of this. . . ." 46 For Richard III, he did not hesitate to enhance his performance by modeling some bits after Hitler. All in all, the goal here is to acquire what Jerzy Grotowski called an "arsenal:" enough ammunitions to carry the character through the play.47 It is not that actors working in this fashion actually disappear behind their characters after all we see them on the stage or on the screen but that they see their job as constructing as well as possible this other human being, someone who, in the final analysis, has little or nothing to do with their own selves. For it is the impersonated others who must move the audience through their doubts or ambitions, it is the characters who must scream or cry. The goal of the traditional actor then is to externalize the protagonist, to flesh out the words, to bring a believable voice and a consistent body to what would otherwise remain but a literary construct.

		IX

		Early in the century, a Russian theatre director rebelled against this manner of acting, thinking it phony, much too mechanical, not real enough. The words spoken on the stage did not seem to him to originate with the people speaking there, they did not feel spontaneous enough. Actors were merely pretending to be someone else. They had nothing at stake really. Things were done in general rather than by this person experiencing tonight these particular circumstances. Confronted with a specific situation, as Jean Renoir observed, "the actress pulls a little drawer, a symbolic drawer, and she finds four, five expressions she's used already a hundred times and other actors in the world used millions of times."48 Worse, actors had also become too dependent on conventional ideas for the interpretation of their role: what this character is supposed to be like, what this play is reputed to be about. In view of these failures, Konstantin Stanislavski proposed a radical alteration to the typical relation between the actor and the part. His key idea was to "go from yourself."49 It consisted in using the self rather than others (real or imagined) as the source of details, emotions, and characterizations for the part. The actor, he insisted, "can't expel his soul from his body and hire another to replace it."50 In other words, the actor needed to use his or her own soul to get at the core of a situation. When successful, the technique allows the actor to escape the trap of trying to imitate someone who will always remain an