The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!

Constantin Stanislavski was a trouble maker. Late in the 19th century, the great Russian theorist and founder of The Moscow Art Theatre stood the actors' craft on its head and shook it hard enough to permanently change the way artists and audiences look at the theatrical experience.

Productions had often featured overwrought, melodramatic displays of false emotion, but Stanislavski insisted on "psychologial reality" and his work heralded a new era in natural acting and believable environment. He organized his thinking and his work into a regimen that became known as The Stanislavski System. An Actor Prepares, arguably Stanislavski's most influential book, still remains of biblical importance to actors everywhere.

Trouble Maker. That's what I said. The trouble started when American teachers and directors took Stanislavski's ideas and turned them into what has become known as "The Method." Based on Stanislavski's System, Lee Strassberg, at the Actors Studio, took the idea of truthful performance and relentlessly wrung its neck.

Early proponents of The Method produced sullen, introverted, tortured performances that were awful to watch. Today, Inside The Actors Studio has devolved into a sort of TV Clown show, presided over by James Lipton who invites celebrity actors to face a group of students and, at the end of Lipton's chatty interview, offer them a "class" . It's largely nonsense. And painful to watch

One of the seminal tools The Method offers is Emotional Memory. The idea is for the actor to take the emotional moment required by the text and find a comparable event from his own life so that he can apply his own emotional experience to the text, thus producing a "real" moment. Hordes of young actors are confused by this tedious process which, by the way, often doesn't work.

Let me give you an example. A young actor is playing a hit man. The text indicates he must blow away his next victim with near orgasmic pleasure. Let's say, for arguments sake, this young actor is the son of a Presbyterian Minister and his jolly, winsome Edinborough wife. The only things the young man has ever blown away are the feathers that somehow escape his down pillow. Near orgasmic pleasure is clearly something the young man shares only with himself - but by age 15 or so, we all, surely, know the feeling.

So trying to find the hit man hidden inside is surely a useless endeavor for this young man and finding orgasmic pleasure as he pulls the trigger is absolutely a non-starter. What to do? Well. Here's what I'd offer the troubled young actor. First of all. STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THE TEXT AS POSSIBLE!! Identify the emotion the hit man feels, find that emotion within yourself - remembering to STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THE TEXT AS POSSIBLE!! - then, at the next rehearsal, say the lines, perform the action, associating them with the emotions you found within yourself, having remembered to STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THE TEXT AS POSSIBLE!!

You provide the emotion, the text does all the rest. I believe that by the time we're teenagers - Dakota Fanning managed it earlier - we've experience a very large range of emotion and have it stored away somewhere. Don't tell me you've never gotten satisfaction from killing something. Remember the mosquito that buzzed around your head at 3 in the morning, one soft summer evening - driving you nuts - until in an absolute killing frenzy, you leapt up and ended the damned thing - with extreme prejudice. Remember that, killer? And so it goes.

How do you think Luther Adler, one of the great actors of the Yiddish Theatre, played Adolph Hitler - or Laurence Olivier managed to play the sadistic White Angel in Marathon Man? I mention Laurence Olivier because I believe all great British actors work this way. They locate emotion inside themselves and subsequently apply emotion to the text. If they define the emotion, they're able to produce it. Brits as Stanislavskiites. Whoda thunk it? And did I mention: STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THE TEXT AS POSSIBLE!! I mentioned that, right?