Twofaced Giovanni Grasso and his great spectators, or What Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Strasberg...

Sergei TcherkaSSki

TWOFACED GIOVANNI GRASSO AND HIS GREAT SPECTATORS

or What Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Strasberg Actually Stole from the Sicilian Actor

Giovanni Grasso (1873-1930) was born into a family of famous Sicil-ian puppeteers who owned the Teatro Machiavelli in Catania. So, it is not surprising that his career began when he was only seven years old. At the age of fifteen, after his father’s death, Grasso took over the family theatre. But in the mid-1890s he gave up his marionettes and formed his own thea-tre company. In 1902, after the success of his performances at the Teatro Argentina in Rome, Grasso’s name became known throughout Italy, and in 1908, after touring to Berlin, London and Paris, he was renowned as one of the finer Italian actors of the time.

Grasso’s strength resided in the performance of Sicilian folk characters. That is why the main repertoire of his company consisted of dialect dra-mas, as well as plays by Luigi Capuana, Giovanni Verga, Paolo Giacometti, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Angel Guimera, and Herman Sudermann that were not only translated into Sicilian from Italian, Catalan or German, but were also altered according to the canons of Sicilian folk drama. In almost every play, Grasso went on stage in the role of a young peasant – oppressed (so-cial inequality), offended by fate (unjust imprisonment or disinheritance) and jealous (treason, expected or imagined, of his wife or bride). Some-times it seemed that he was not playing different characters, but one fused image (as if to underline this, the actor did not change his makeup from play to play). Having recognized early on his career his own distinctive ar-tistic personality and his charismatic gift, Grasso went on stage as himself, he played himself without trying to go beyond the limits of his own nature, and amazed the audience. Even those who did not understand the Sicilian text of the play breathlessly watched his strained pauses, unprecedented temperament and relaxed “tiger-like” movements.

But we will leave it to Italian theatre historians to tell readers of the widespread success of Grasso and to illustrate it with the itinerary of his guest tours which took place not only in Europe but also in North and South America. A list of his admirers would include such connoisseurs of

110 The Italian Method of la drammatica

the stage as Anatole France, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Henry Irving, not to mention the future Soviet People’s Commissar of Edu-cation Anatoly Lunacharsky and King Edward VII.

Our task is different – we will try to investigate the impact of Grasso’s distinctive performance on the development of the art of acting in the twen-tieth century. This impact, as we will see, is primarily linked with the eval-uation of Grasso’s acting by Russian and American actors and directors.

Grasso’s company first appeared in Russia in 1907, then re-visited in 1908–1909 and performed in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Odessa. Ironi-cally the name of Grasso, this Sicilian “man of the people” as Russian newspapers introduced him, appeared on posters as the name of a country gentleman, di Grasso. Although the Sicilian company’s tour was well cov-ered by newspapers it is difficult to deny ourselves the pleasure of making the first acquaintance with the art of Grasso not through the critical ac-counts but through the prose of a great Russian writer. Isaac Babel in his short story Di Grasso deals with the vivid impressions of his youth spent in Odessa.1 We are lucky that at the time of his acquaintance with the Sicilian guest company the future playwright had already established himself in the professional theatre world – or, as Babel clarifies proudly, he “belonged to the fearless battalion of theater ticket scalpers.”2

Babel begins his story:

I was fourteen years old… My boss was a shark with an eye that always squinted and a large, silky mustache. His name was Kolya Shvarts. I fell in with him that dark year when the Italian Opera went bust…To set things right, we were promised Chaliapin, but Chaliapin wanted three thousand a performance. So Di Grasso, the Sicilian tragic actor, came with his troupe instead. They were taken to their hotel in carts loaded with children, cats, and cages in which Ital-ian birds fluttered.

“We can’t push this merchandise!” Kolya Shvarts said when he saw the motley procession rolling in.3

The ironic story of the tragedian’s arrival, his journey to the bazaar with his old bag and then in the evening, his entrance in the theatre carrying a

1 The short story ‘Di Grasso’ by Isaac Babel (1894–1940) first appeared in the magazine Ogonek (Огонек), 20 August, 1937, and was the last to be published during the author’s lifetime.

2 Isaac Babel, ‘Di Grasso’ in Isaac Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, ed., Peter Constantine, trans. (New York-London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), p. 699.

3 I. Babel, ‘Di Grasso’, p. 699.

S. Tcherkasski - Twofaced Giovanni Grasso and His Great Spectators 111

different old bag, as well as the description of the play’s plot and the pro-vincial acting of the company – is definitely one of Babel’s masterpiece, that shows why he is ranked in the history of Russian literature alongside Gogol, Chekhov and Bulgakov:

That evening Di Grasso’s troupe performed a Sicilian folk drama, with a plot as humdrum as night and day. The daughter of a rich peasant became en-gaged to a shepherd. She was true to him, until one day the squire’s son came visiting from town in a velvet vest. The girl chatted with the visitor, tongue-tied and giggling at all the wrong moments […]

“We have a turkey on our hands!” Kolya Shvarts said during the intermission. “This is merchandise for Kremenchug, not Odessa!”4

Let us not blame the theatre connoisseur from Odessa for his hasty opin-ions. After all, he could hardly have known that a month earlier Grasso’s company was at the Grand Hall of the Conservatory, one of the best houses in St. Petersburg, and alternated its productions with Sarah Bernhardt’s performances.5 And the subsequent events at the Odessa City Theatre proved that the metropolitan entrepreneurs knew what they were doing.

Babel continues:

In the third act […] the stage set portrayed a village fair. The shepherd stood in the far corner. He stood there silently, among the carefree crowd. He hung his head, then raised it, and under the weight of his burning, fixed gaze, Gio-vanni began to fidget and squirm in his chair. He jumped up and pushed the barber away. In a cracking voice Giovanni demanded that the policeman re-move all shady and suspicious-looking people from the village square. The shepherd – played by Di Grasso – hesitated for a moment, then smiled, soared into the air, flew over the stage of the Odessa City Theater, alighted on Gio-

4 I. Babel, ‘Di Grasso’, pp. 699-700. Babel’s notebook where he recorded his theat-I. Babel, ‘Di Grasso’, pp. 699-700. Babel’s notebook where he recorded his theat-Babel’s notebook where he recorded his theat-rical experiences contains a record of his visit to the Sicilian company of di Gras-so. December 1, 1908, young Babel watched Malìa by Luigi Capuana, and, on December 5, La Morte Civile by Paolo Giacometti. There is a Russian translation of this play under the title The Family of a Criminal (Semya prestupnika) made by the famous playwright Alexander Ostrovsky. However, the plot described in ‘Di Grasso’, is apparently associated with the play Feudalismo (an adaptation for Sicilian of La Terra Baixa by Catalan author Angel Guimerà), although somewhat distorted by Babel. According to Elena Pogorelskaya, the writer could have also used the plot of Cavalleria Rusticana by Giovanni Verga. Isaak Babel, Rasskazi, Elena Pogorelskaya, ed. (St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2014), pp. 577-79.

5 Ira Petrovskaya, Vera Somina, Teatralni Peterburg: nachalo XVIII veka – oktyabr 1917 goda (St. Petersburg: RIII, 1994), p. 349.


vanni’s shoulders, and sunk his teeth into his neck. Muttering and squinting at the audience, he sucked the blood from the wound.

Giovanni fell to the ground and the curtain came down in menacing silence, hiding the murderer and the murdered man.6

Grasso’s jump – the famous “leap on the chest” – solved the destiny of the show:

Not wasting a single moment, we rushed off to Theater Alley, Kolya Shvarts leading the pack. The box office was already selling tickets for the following day. Next morning the Odessa News informed the few people who had been at the performance that they had seen the most incredible actor of the century.7

That was the opinion the St. Petersburg’s and Moscow’s critics too. They covered Grasso’s tour generously. However the first thing that can be noticed while you are reading these papers is the diversity and incon-sistency of the reviews. Many admired the unique physical movement of Grasso, but saw him as a “barbarian”, an “actor of intuitive impulses.”8 Others noted the emotional power of the actor, particularly his volcanic temperament”, but firmly criticized the company’s repertoire, taking a con-descending attitude toward the popular drama of the “Italian Ukrainians” as they called the Sicilians.9 Some reviewers denied Grasso’s impressive and vivid acting the very right to be called Art, referring to the Sicilian tragedian as “a man-beast.”10 In short, there is no sign of any consensus in the critical reviews.

It could have taken quite a lot of time to figure out the essence of Grasso’s acting from the controversial opinions of the theatre critics of his time, had I not run into an article by Yuri Tsivian, who also has written about Grasso. A Russian scholar, now at the University of Chicago, Tsivian writes about

6 I. Babel, ‘Di Grasso’, p. 700.7 Ibid., pp. 700-1.8 Аleksandr Amfiteatrov, Konturi (St. Petersburg: Obschestvennaya polza, 1906),

p. 176. (All translations from Russian sources are mine, unless otherwise speci-fied in the endnote – S.T.).

9 Emmanuil Beskin, ‘Tragik-kustar’, Rampa, 12 (1908), p. 184. Many critics played with this parallel: Sicily for Italy is something like Ukraine for Russia, and underlined the national colors and ethnic flavors of Grasso’s company.

10 Nikolay Efros wrote: “It is step back to the Stone Age of theatre”, Stary Drug [Nikolay Efros], ‘Siciliskie spektakli’, Teatr, 314 (1908), pp. 3-4; “Of course, there is not the slightest trace of art here. This is not a theatre; it’s not an actor-artist. This is a man-beast...”, Kn. Mishkin [Nikolay Efros], ‘Ingomar’, Kievskaya misl, 307, 5 November, 1908.


Giovanni Grasso

The Sicilian actor was popular among Odessa theatergoers – cartoons of Grasso in the Odessa News (Odesskie novosti), 1908.


the difference between two types of history of theatre – academic history and stage history:

The first is connected with the work on the comparison and perpetuation of critical judgments, the second deals with the redistribution of artistic skills. In this second type of history – stage – history secrets of the craft are transferred from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, [...] the creative professions preserve only those things that can be used practically. In a diary note on Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein succinctly named the cruel and wise mechanisms of this sec-ond history with the succinct word “rip-off.”11

Tsivian’s thought seemed immediately familiar and close to me. I clearly remember one instance from my days as a student at the directing de-partment of the St. Petersburg Theatre Arts Academy (then LGITMiK). During the defence of a diploma project Georgy Tovstonogov, Head of the Academy’s Directing Department grew tired of the unclear descriptions of the climactic scene of a production proposed by one the would-be-director students and burst out: “Your descriptions of the scene are too vague. That means you haven’t solved the scene. The director’s solution needs to be so clear that it can be stolen.”12 That was a brilliant way to formulate one of the cornerstone principles of the director’s craft. And since then I often use this phrase coined by Tovstonogov in my own teaching to explain the difference between theatrical babble and the practical craft of the director.13

11 Yuri Tsivian, ‘Prizhok na grud v literature i na scene’ in S. Gardzonio, eds., Laurea Lorae: sbornik pamyiati Larisy Georgievny Stepanovoi, (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriiya, 2011), p. 577. To my knowledge this essay contains the most de-estor-Istoriiya, 2011), p. 577. To my knowledge this essay contains the most de-, 2011), p. 577. To my knowledge this essay contains the most de-most de-tailed overview of the Russian press of the 1900s about Russian tour by Grasso’s company. That frees us from numerous citations and allows us to refer the reader interested in the judgments of the critics and reviewers about the performances of Grasso to this informative article.

12 Georgy Tovstonogov (1915-89) – great Russian theatre director, Artistic Director of the Bolshoy Drama Theatre in Leningrad for over thirty years (1956-89), Head of Directing at the St. Petersburg Theatre Arts Academy (1958-89). His writings significantly developed the understanding of the Stanislavsky System and espe-cially of the Active Analysis; one of his books was translated into English: Georgi Tovstonogov, The Profession of the Stage-Director, Bryan Bean, trans. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972).

13 The same idea might be found in the memoirs of the famous set designer Ed-The same idea might be found in the memoirs of the famous set designer Ed-ward Kochergin who worked with Tovstonogov for many years: “I once asked Tovstonogov about the essence of the director’s professional philosophy. Georgy Alexandrovich said, ‘It’s very simple – it is the philosophy of Klein Zaches. All that is good is mine!’ In my opinion, that is a brilliant response. He could take an idea from any person who, looking at a rehearsal of Tovstonogov’s offered


So having stolen the idea of two parallel (and hence, not overlapping or not always intersecting) histories of theatre, let us continue our analy-sis of Grasso’s acting. If Tsivian focused his research on drawing a rising trajectory along which the jump on the leap was canonized in the history of performing arts, we are interested in another perspective on Grasso’s acting – what exactly was appreciated in his art and craft by international theatre practitioners.

After all, the name of Grasso remains in the history of acting and, more importantly, in the actor’s practice only through the memories of those who can and know how to “steal”.

Therefore, we leave aside the judgment of theatrical and literary critics and will have a closer look at the recollections of different theatre prac-titioners – those who were stealing Grasso’s techniques, or academically speaking were able to enrich their own art and craft through the observa-tion of the Sicilian actor’s performances. We will cover memoirs of those who belong to a variety of artistic camps.

It is logical to start with Vsevolod Meyerhold as Grasso’s “leap on the chest” became one of the basic exercises of his biomechanics and thus finds an important (and honoured!) role in the training of the actor’s exter-nal technique.

Meyerhold saw Grasso performances in St. Petersburg in 1908, and his assistant Valery Bebutov has reported about the great director’s impres-sions on the tragedian’s craft.14 He recollects:

Once I met Meyerhold in the theatre where the Sicilian tragedian Di Grasso toured. The company performed a naive and tasteless melodrama. The hero

something different. If it resonated well with the general idea, he just took it …”. Edward Kochergin, ‘U menya ne bilo i net pisatelskih ambicii’, Nevskoe vremia, 12 October, 2011, p. 10.

14 Most likely Bebutov describes Meyerhold’s impressions of the same play which was the basis for Babel’s short story – Feudalismo (adaptation of La Terra Baixa) by Angel Guimerá. The attentive reader will notice that many authors of memoirs about Grasso’s acting almost never can remember the exact name of the play, and often reproduce its plot in a different way. The reason for this “forgetfulness” that must be kept in mind when comparing different memories is revealed by one of the St. Petersburg reviewers: “Virtually in every produc-tion Grasso had to play the role of a young peasant, always poor, always in love, and always jealous, suffering and vengeful. This was repeated so much that all the roles almost merged in your memory into a single fused image”, Alexandr Izmailov (Smolenskii), ‘Dzhovanni di Grasso (K gastolyam sicilianskoi truppi v Peterburge)’, Ezhegodnik imperatorskikh teatrov, 1 (1909), pp. 90-100.


must avenge the fact that some scoundrel seduced his bride. Di Grasso is look-ing for the abuser and finally finds him face to face. With the animal lust of a predatory panther he softly slinks toward the enemy and suddenly leaps on his chest, curled up like a cat.

The victim throws back his head with a shout, and Di Grasso bites his throat. Blood flows.

The auditorium is frenzied – some viewers thrilled, others are outraged and shudder with disgust. The majority believes that they have witnessed a painful event – psychopathology.

With the keen eye of a master Meyerhold immediately saw the essence of this technique.

– This is a clever technique, – he says. – There are three steps: the first is preparation (what is called in ballet préparation) (later in his biomechanics Meyerhold called this “otkaz” – “step back” – V. Bebutov), the second is the jump itself, and the third is the support, hand balance (as in ballet).

Meyerhold had introduced this technique into his actor training – in biome-chanics there is an etude which he named “Di Grasso”.15

Erast Garin, who was Gulyachkin and Khlestakov in Meyrhold’s pro-ductions of The Mandate and General Inspector, also remembers that dur-ing the biomechanical training at GosTIM, Meyerhold’s Theatre in the 1920s the director always pointed out the origins of the exercise “stabbing with a dagger” which Meyerhold acknowledged he “borrowed from the Italian actor Grasso.”16

An important admission was recorded by Alexander Gladkov, Meyer-hold’s secretary and the future splendid playwright. It is from the middle of the 1930s and confirms the director’s long-term interest in the art of the Sicilian actor. Meyerhold would have stated:

Many of the laws of biomechanics I first realized when I was observing the acting of the wonderful Sicilian tragedian Grasso. He seems to have on stage the most wild and unbridled temperament, but with a closer look at him I was able to realize that he was a wonderful technician. If he did not have his craft, he would have gone mad at the end of each performance.17

Throughout his professional life, Meyerhold retained the memory of Grasso’s acting. In 1937, in one of the rehearsals of his last production One

15 Valery Bebutov, ‘Neutomimii novator’ in Lubov’ Vendrovskaya, ed., Vstre-chi s Meierholdom. Sbornik Vospominanii, (Moscow: Vserosiiskoe Teatralnoe Obschestvo, 1967), p. 76.

16 Erast Garin, ‘O “Mandate” i o drugom’ in Lubov’ Vendrovskaya, ed., p. 323.17 Alexander Gladkov, ‘Meierhold govorit: Zapisi 1934-1939 godov’ in Alexander

Gladkov, Meierhold, vol. 2, (Moscow: STD RF, 1990), pp. 328-9.


Life based on Nikolay Ostrovsky’s novel How Steel Was Tempered, Mey-erhold astonished the cast by an unexpected announcement: “This scene should be resolved through the technique of the Sicilian theatre.”18

The actors froze and looked at each other – the scene was called “Con-fiscation of the Komsomol Membership Card” and took place at the site of a top-priority Soviet construction. The culmination of the rally, which seemed about to turn into a riot, was a moment when one of the angry workers claimed that he was leaving this damned work, plucked his Kom-somol Card from his breast pocket and threw it to the Komsomol leader Pavel Korchagin.19 A dead silence set in…

Meyerhold came on the stage and proposed to the actor Evgny Samoilov who performed Korchagin to watch from the side how his character might behave in that situation. The following description comes from the eyewit-ness of the rehearsal, the actor Lev Snezhnitsky:

Meyerhold was watching every movement of the protesters, standing at a height of three to four meters not far from the left of the portal. The worker who tosses away his card was standing on one of the boxes, almost on the front of the stage at the opposite portal. When the guy threw his card Meyerhold rushed forward and it seemed that he flew over the stage. When on the floor beside the bewildered worker Meyerhold almost recoiled. He stood for a moment, glaring in the guy’s face. Then, in one panther-like movement he threw himself on the enemy’s chest and pressing him downward knocked him down beside a box nearby.

Forgetting the rehearsal, all the actors on stage rushed to Meyerhold with happy screaming and applause. The jump seemed incredible; especially that Meyerhold was sixty-three years at that time.

While rising to his feet, Meyerhold excited and with traces of sweat on his forehead, said: “This is the actor Grasso’s technique, the craft of Sicilian theatre”.

And immediately began to explain the secret of his jump to Samoilov […].20

18 Lev Snezhnitsky, ‘Poslednii god’ in Lubov’ Vendrovskaya, ed., p. 549. The pro-The pro-duction of One Life never came to the premiere as the GosTIM (The Meyerhold’s Theatre) was closed by authorities and in a couple of years the director himself was executed.

19 Komsomol was an organization for communist youth in the former USSR. Pavel Korchagin is the main autobiographical character of Nikolay Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered. Both, the novel depicting the formation of a revolu-tionary in a Civil War, and the person of Ostrovsky himself (who wrote, in spite of severe disease, immobility and blindness) became official symbols of revolution-ary romanticisms and for all Soviet years became part of every school curricula.

20 L. Snegnickii, p. 549.


It is unnecessary to single out the fragments of Meyerhold’s movement score that practically coincide exactly with the physical movement of the Italian actor. Grasso’s lessons were learned well and for long by Meyer-hold. His stage tricks became the basis of a number of biomechanical ex-ercises that survived both the Sicilian tragedian and the Russian director-innovator. I personally became interested in Grasso while I was a student at the St. Petersburg Theatre Arts Academy in the 1980s after a presentation of biomechanical etudes that was organized by Lyudmila Chestnokova, long-term assistant of Irina Vsevolodovna Meyerhold, who had learned biomechanics directly from her father at the beginning of the 1920s.

That is how “secrets of the craft are transferred from hand to hand”. They say that Nemirovich-Danchenko loved to count up the number of handshakes that separated him from the historical figures of the past. In my case, it’s only four handshakes from Grasso...

Let us now consider how Grasso was perceived by actors and directors of another artistic camp, the opposite of Meyerhold.

Of course, it would be interesting to start with the opinion of Stanislavsky as he not only saw Grasso’s acting, but even performed with him on the same stage. That happened in a special occasion at the matinee of 6 November 1907 at the Moscow Art Theatre when the Sicilian company presented the Italian folk drama Maruzza, while the Muscovites presented the third act of Woe from Wit with Stanislavsky as Famusov.21

Unfortunately, written evidence of Stanislavsky’s own impressions has not survived. However, the memories of his close collaborators give an idea of how Grasso was perceived by the Moscow Art Theatre.

Leopold Sulerzhitsky, who led the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, wrote in his diary in 1914: “The be-all and end-all of theatre art as theatre of feelings is Grasso and Stanislavsky (intuitive and deductive approaches).”22

And Leonid Leonidov, the famous Mitya from The Karamazov Broth-ers and outstanding tragedian himself, also had vivid memories of Grasso:

I saw him in one play. The story deals with a person who has committed a crime and is exiled and condemned to penal servitude. During his absence his wife comes together with a man and gives birth to a daughter. The husband

21 Irina Vinogradskya, Zhizn i tvorchestvo K.S. Stanislavskogo: Letopis v 4 tomah, vol. 2, (Moscow: MHT, 2003), p. 146.

22 Leopold Sulergitckii, Povesti i rasskazi. Stat’I i zametki. Vospominaniya… (Moscow: Iskusstvo 1970), p. 369.


comes home unexpectedly. He enters the room and sees a woman, a lover and a girl whose existence was not known to him. He turns to the girl and asks, “Where’s Mommy?” She points to his wife. “Where’s Daddy?” The girl points to the lover. At this point when di Grasso looked at the girl and looked at his wife, it became difficult to stay in the auditorium. This moment was indescribable... Then he picked up the child, kissed her, thus showing that the child is in no way to be blamed and said: “Go away”. Now three persons were on stage. On the table there was a huge knife. With the first glance at this knife it became clear for what it was needed. Under the gaze of the husband, the woman and her lover cringed. Wordlessly the man picked up the knife. The audience felt some relief, because it was clear that everything was com-ing to an end. The lovers froze. Next to the knife there was a loaf of bread lying on the table. There was a minute of hesitation whom to use it – the lov-ers or the bread – and finally a decisive blow of the knife cut the loaf in half. Auditorium sighed. 23

In this description by Leonidov let us remember the heavy gaze of Grasso and also the bread and knife which served as adjustments for the actor to express his inner thoughts. This scene was preserved in Leonidov’s memory in such a detailed and vivid way because in his own words it remained one of the “strongest impressions in all my artistic life.”24 It seems that it might be interesting and productive to find a resonance of this episode from Grasso’s acting in the artistic work of Leonidov himself. But that is a topic for another research.

Another piece of evidence comes from Ivan Moskvin, founding member of the Moscow Art Theatre who performed Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich on the very day when the theatre was opened:

I remember the actor di Grasso in one of the plays [La Morte Civile]. After serving hard labor, he comes to the woman, who was the reason for his sen-tence. She is already married to someone else. Di Grasso played their meeting without uttering a word for three minutes, and his acting was astonishingly subtle. Entering the room and seeing her, he approached her and stood still star-ing into her eyes as if to read her attitude to him. He could not find any words.

Then, touching her head [my italics – remember this gesture of Grasso for further discussion - S.T.] he wanted to hug her, but turned away, retreated to the cupboard and started sobbing, not being able to control himself any more. The audience was captured and cried with him. Only three minutes later, he finally

23 Leonid Leonidov, ‘Proshloe i nastoyashee’ in Vilenkin, Vladimir, ed., Leonid Mironovich Leonidov: Vospominania, stat’i. (Moscow, 1960), pp. 139-40.

24 Ibid., p. 140.


Leonid Leonidov as Mitya in The Karamazov Brothers, an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel that premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1910.

Grasso in Cavalleria rusticana. There truly is something similar in the two gazes of Leonidov as Mitya and Grasso as Alfio.

Biomechanical etude “The Leap to the Chest” performed by Z. P. Zlobin and S. V. Kozikov, GosTIM, Meyerhold’s Theatre, 1927.


found the strength to utter the first word. However, he was pale as a sheet. I saw a face with wide eyes [my italics - S.T.], and all the time believed him.25

One has to wonder how Babel, just fourteen years old, grasped and re-membered the tiny details of di Grasso’s acting technique and reproduced them in his story. The coincidence of Babel’s description with the memo-ries of the Moscow Art Theatre actors would be even clearer if Babel had used another of his recollections from the performance he had seen in the Odessa City Theatre and described the scene with bread from the second act of Feudalismo. It is so close in its acting adjustments to the scene de-scribed by Leonidov; in this scene a young husband

has learned from mocking songs, as well as from the confession of his wife that she does not love him and that she was not a virgin. Full of despair, rage, and still loving her he cuts a loaf of bread with his knife as if he is cutting his rival’s throat, and keeps screaming, rising his voice: ‘mange!’. Being refused, being turned down all around, in one second he shatters all the dishes standing on the table into pieces.26

However, in his short story Di Grasso Babel does not cite this vivid episode from the play he saw. Not because he forgot it – he just had already “stolen” the image of these plates, cakes, jams and dishes flying to the floor – the playwright used the same adjustments (stage business) to portray “the peculiar, exotic, and sometimes scary and gross” family conflicts in the house of Mendel Krick in his 1928 play Sunset (compelling evidence of this is found in the quoted article of Tsivian).27

Continuing to collect descriptions of Grasso’s acting in the memoirs of various theatre practitioners we will turn our attention now to the story of Grasso in the US, a story that has never been analyzed by Russian theatre critics who have written earlier about Grasso or Babel.

25 Ivan Moskvin, ‘Besedi s molodimi akterami’ in Isaak Kruti, ed. Ivan Mihailovich Moskvin [Collection of materials] (Moscow: VPSh, 1948), p. 43.

26 Vasiliy Rozanov, ‘Sicilianci v Peterburge’, Zhurnal teatra Literaturno-Khudoz-hestvennogo obschestva, 3-4 (1908-9), p. 10.

27 Y. Tsivian, pp. 508-9.


Grasso visited New York twice, in 1921 and in 1928,28 and during his second tour Lee Strasberg, the future creator of the Method29 and one of the most influential theatre teachers of the twentieth century, was a part of the audience. In 1928 he was a young actor at the Guild Theatre, who had just started trying his own hand at directing. Previously Strasberg had not miss a single performance during the tour of the Moscow Art Theatre in New York in 1923-24 and was fascinated with the acting principles of Stanislavsky. Now he was carefully observing the acting of the Sicilian tragedian who performed in a language that was incomprehensible to the young American actor.

Strasberg was thrilled with Grasso’s “extraordinary performance of Othello. Tigerlike in his movements as he watched for signs of betrayal in Desdemona, Grasso demonstrated an overwhelming emotional range.”30 Later Strasberg was to discover that the physical business and outline of Grasso’s performance were taken from the great Italian tragedian Tommaso Salvini (one more example of theatrical “rip-off”). But Strasberg underlined that “Grasso’s performance was so filled with passion, emotional intensity, and power that it never seemed like an imitation of anybody else’s behavior. Grasso created reality with such physical and emotional conviction that it almost transcended what I thought of as acting.”31

But the most vivid of Strasberg’s memories are connected with Grasso as Corrado, the lead in La Morte Civile by Paolo Giacometti, the very role that twenty years ago was admired by Babel, Moskvin, and many Russian viewers.

In the beginning of the play Corrado has just escaped from prison, and arrives on the scene tired and hungry. Here’s how Strasberg recreates this episode:

28 Grasso made his New York debut on 8 September 1921 with Feudalismo in the Major Royal Theatre in the heart of the Italian quarter. It was the same production seen by Meyerhold and Babel. The performances of Grasso’s company lasted for five months.

29 We use the term the Method for the US branch of development of the Stanislavsky System. It was formed in the practice of the Group Theatre (1931-40) and the Actors Studio (since 1947) and in many ways establishing the foundation for the American school of acting in theatre and in film. Among leading Method actors are Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Maureen Stapleton, Anne Bancroft, Geraldine Page, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Robert de Niro.

30 Lee Strasberg, A Dream of Passion, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), p. 23.31 Ibid., pp. 23-4.


A young girl brings him some food and a flagon of wine. Grasso’s character breaks the bread and starts to stuff it into his mouth. As he looks at the girl (I know this is impossible to believe, but this is what I saw), he falls in love with her in that one instant: love at first sight. Now this was great acting that I rec-ognized; Grasso had created the character’s inner realization.32

But the most powerful moment of the role, according to Strasberg, ap-peared at the end of the play:

Grasso’s character decides to take his own life by poison. The poison was in a little sack around his neck. I remember him putting the little pills into his mouth. The residue of the pills seemed to remain on his tongue as he swallowed them. Then, desperately, he tried to dislodge the poison from his throat. I don’t know to this day whether the effect was created physically by the pills or by his acting. But certainly in the rest of the scene, he could only have relied on his acting skills. His death throes were so real, so convincing –.his face drained of blood, his entire body convulsed. […]. I had to hold on to the sides of my chair in order not to call out for help. It seemed to me that there was a man dying in front of me. […] The physical conviction and emotional reality which he had summoned was extraordinary, terrifying, and very exciting.33

Immediately after the show, the young director, stunned by Grasso’s act-ing, decided to invite his friends to share an extraordinary experience of “a great actor presumably nobody knew about.”34 Within a few nights, among those who came to see the art of the Sicilian tragedian were the actors who later became members of the Group Theatre, Morris Carnovsky and Stella Adler among them. How terrified was young Lee, when the first and sec-ond act did not meet his expectations – Grasso sluggishly paced the stage as if “having an off night”.

32 Ibid., p. 24. It is worth mentioning that the plot of the story in Strasberg’s descrip-tion is different from the text available in the Russian translation by Alexander Ostrovsky. But as we have already pointed out, all sorts of inaccuracies in the rendering of the plots of Grasso’s performances are frequent. Grasso, like many Italian touring performers treated the text of the play freely, believing it to be only a material for his acting.

33 Ibid., pp. 24-5.34 In his memoirs Strasberg clarifies that later he found out that Stark Young and

many other critics had written about Grasso well before Strasberg’s “discovery”. Alexander Woolcott, ‘An Actor in the Bowery’, The New York Times, 10 Septem-ber, 1921, p. 12:3; Walter Littlefield, ‘Il tesoro d’Isacco’, The New York Times, 26 January, 1928, p. 17:1.


After many years (not after twenty years as with Babel, but after fifty or so) Strasberg recollected the story about that particular theatre visit in his book with vivid and bright style. Strasberg recollects:

As the first two acts of the performance went on, I sank deeper into my chair, hoping that no one would pay attention to me […] Grasso obviously knew the performance wasn’t going well. This evidently didn’t bother him, […] Grasso’s attitude seemed to say, “I am not responsible for inspiration: that comes from above, and if you, the spectator, come on an off night, it is something that I cannot help.” As a professional actor, Grasso was quite prepared for this type of event, but for me it was a real calamity, a blow to both my ego and my reputa-tion. There was no way in which I could demonstrate to my friends what it was that I had previously seen. As they kept turning to me during the first two acts, I sank even lower.35

However, we are aware that Strasberg and his friends were not the only spectators at Grasso’s performances, who wondered whether he would find his whimsical inspiration or not. Even such an expert in actor’s psycho-technique as Kolya Schwartz after the first act of the play at the Odessa City Theatre in the autumn of 1908 was wrong in his assessment of the tra-gedian’s acting (do you remember his “We have a turkey on our hands!…This is merchandise for Kremenchug, not Odessa”?)

Strasberg was also expecting financial claims from his friends. He con-fessed in his book: “When I say that I have ‘invited’ my friends, that is hardly the word, because I didn’t buy their tickets; I barely had enough money to buy my own. But, nonetheless, I invited them […] and, therefore, I felt responsible for him.”36

Nevertheless, in New York, as earlier in Odessa, subsequent events disproved gloomy forecasts. A comparison of Strasberg’s memories with those of the actors of the Moscow Art Theatre and with Babel’s story pre-sents an opportunity to extract further details of Grasso’s acting technique and notice something important in his creative laboratory.

Strasberg continues by recollecting the scene of confrontation between Grasso’s character and his wife, who has fallen in love with his best friend:

Grasso had an odd way at times of contacting the actress playing his wife. He would put his hand on her head and sort of lift her by the hair, I don’t know

35 L. Strasberg, p. 25.36 Ibidem.


whether that was Grasso-like or Sicilian. He walked over to her as he was talk-ing to her, put his hand on her hair, and started to lift her […].37

The audience came to a standstill. Suddenly Grasso ran his hand over his wife’s hair, and in that strange gesture – whether Sicilian or his own – lifted her by the hair in order to look into her face…

Strasberg continues:

I have seen inspired performances, but I have not seen the moment of inspi-ration strike as suddenly as it did then. He touched her, and the touch seemed to create impulse [my italics - S. T.]. Suddenly the blood rushed into Grasso’s face; his eyes distended. This wasn’t acting: this was real – real blood, real bursting of blood vessels. From that moment on, his face, his whole body, and his entire performance changed. I sat upright in my chair, willing to take bows. The great actor had suddenly proved that he was a great actor!38

The jealousy and bitterness of the character’s feelings spread to the hall in a powerful wave. As Babel wrote, Grasso played “convincing us with every word and movement that there was more justice and hope in the frenzy of noble passion than in the joyless rules of the world.”39

It is worth noting that both Strasberg’s description of the 1928 perfor-mance (Grasso touched the female’s hair – blood rushed into his face – his eyes distended), and the description of the 1908 performance in Babel’s story (Grasso slowly raised his head – fixed a weighty gaze – a burning glare) register the actor’s entry into a creative state through a small circle of attention and through the work of the five senses. Both descriptions register “fire in the widened eyes” of the actor as evidence of this creative state.

Moreover both Strasberg and Moskvin indicate repetitive moments – Grasso’s inspiration is triggered by touching of his partner’s hair. Here Strasberg vigilantly scrutinised how emotional memory is provoked by tactile sensations. It appears that Grasso repeatedly used this psychophysi-ological property of human beings, as there is a gap of twenty years be-tween the productions seen by Moskvin and Strasberg.

The importance of these observations can be assessed only in the context of the Stanislavsky System’s history and the timeline of his quest for the authentic emotional life of an actor. In the 1910s Stanislavsky’s attention was focused on the use of emotional (affective) memory. Having relied on

37 Ibid., pp. 25-6.38 Ibid., p. 26.39 I. Babel, ‘Di Grasso’, p. 701.


the experiments of Théodule Ribot that proved the existence of memory of emotions, Stanislavsky sought ways to use this human psycho-physiologi-cal property in acting.40 However, his attempts at the direct use of an actor’s personal memories to trigger the emotional life of a character onstage soon encountered obstacles (after repeated use of personal affective memories they quickly wore out) and Stanislavsky decided to abandon the “capricious feelings” and shifted his attention to the use of psychophysical action as a more reliable path to an actor’s creative state of mind and body. It was Strasberg who should be credited with the further development of the prin-ciples of using emotional memory in the work of an actor. He agreed with Stanislavsky that the emotional life of a character can’t be directly evoked through the past personal memories of an actor, and developed robust and reliable ways to switch on his/her affective memory through the use of sense memory. It is likely that, when touching his partners’ hair, Grasso used this mechanism of sense memory almost unconsciously (otherwise, he could have used this path earlier in order not to torture himself and his spectators with a lack of inspiration on some evenings). It is appropriate to recall here the visionary remark of Sulerzhitsky who saw both Grasso and Stanislavsky as vivid representatives of the “theatre of feelings”, but sharply delineated the ways in which these artists learned an actor’s craft and art – an intuitive approach by Grasso and a deductive one by Stanislavsky.41

As for Strasberg, he had repeatedly checked his observations of Grasso and many other actors, and became firmly assured that the correct process of inducing an emotional response is through the senses (to activate emo-tional memory you need to start with sense memory). He put this discov-ery as the foundation of the future Method – one of the most important branches in the methodological development of the Stanislavsky System and the theatre of experiencing in twentieth century.

40 A series of long-term experiments of French psychologist Théodule Ribot (1839-1916) that were executed in the 1880-90s and became known to Stanislavsky in 1908 confirmed the existence of memory of emotions. In the same way as we have muscle memory, which helps us to memorize dance movements, and logical memory that makes possible the mastery of mathematical operations and abstract concepts, each person (of course, to various degrees) has the ability to recall and experience the emotions of his previous life.

41 The term theatre of feelings is used by Sulerzhitsky following the term initially used by Stanislavsky for the theatre of experiencing. This type of acting is op-posed to the theatre of representation characterized by emphasis on the external technique and absence of living through the part (moment to moment acting).


Let us make some conclusions. The above analysis of descriptions of Giovanni Grasso’s acting brought us to a paradoxical result. It turns out that watching the same actor, different professional audiences saw him as an actor either of theatre of representation or of theatre of experiencing. And, relying on what he saw in Grasso’s acting, Meyerhold formulated the principles of biomechanics, while followers of Stanislavsky, including Strasberg formulated internal laws of the actor’s psycho-technique, with circles of attention and affective (emotional) memory in the work of an actor. Moreover Grasso became an icon for their perception of actor’s art, and their vision of fundamentals of acting – Sulerzhitsky affirmed that “The be-all and end-all of theatre art as theatre of feelings are Grasso and Stanislavsky”, and Meyerhold avowed that “Many of the laws of biomechanics I first realized when I was observing the acting of … Grasso. [in both quotes italics is mine - S. T.]”

So who was the true Giovanni Grasso on stage – an actor of a psycho-logical theatre (theatre of feelings) or a biomechanical actor (external tech-nique)? Or, we could formulate this question from another perspective – why did theatre practitioners who watched Grasso acting saw him differently?

Undoubtedly the answer to these questions requires to recollect again at what point Stanislavsky and his followers met Grasso and his art. The Sicilian company toured in Moscow (1907 and 1908) at the time when Stanislavsky had focused all his efforts on the creation of a “grammar of acting” (the word “System” was introduced a year later, in 1909). Today we usually call this period the early period of the Stanislavsky System.42 In its essence it was a period of analytical study of the objective laws of nature in acting, a purposeful collection, a “database” (as we would say to-day) for subsequent conclusions, an isolation and “collecting” of elements in the creative state of the actor’s mind and body.

42 The author of this article already has had a chance to challenge the simplified view that has taken root in the perception of many theatre practitioners: early Stanislavsky (where the System’s leading element is affective memory) vs. late Stanislavsky (where the System’s leading element is action). According to this view the late period cancels the early one, and even the name early itself has a judgmental quality and becomes a synonym for immature. Thorough research reveals that any period of the System contains ideas and elements, traditionally connected only with the early period of its development. This allows one to formulate a new attitude to the early period of the development of the System. The early period of the development of the Stanislavsky System is essentially a basic, fundamental period, an integral part of the System and of the modern methodology of acting. Sergei Tcherkasski, ‘The System Becomes the Method: Stanislavsky - Boleslavsky - Strasberg’, Stanislavski Studies: peer-reviewed e-Journal, 3 (2013), pp. 92-138 or Stanislavski Studies, http://stanislavskistudies.org, accessed 15 January 2014.


Stanislavsky in 1912, when he founded the First Studio to convey his research of an actor’s internal technique.

Lee Strasberg in the 1930s, the Group Theatre period.

Isaac Babel in 1908, at age fourteen when he saw Grasso’s performances.

Meyerhold in 1907, portrayed in the role of Pierrot in his famous produc-tion of Alexander Blok’s The Fairy Booth. Drawing by Nikolai Ulyanov.


Stanislavsky wrote:

The main subjects of my observations were great talents both Russian and visiting guest artists. As these talents are able to achieve a creative state on stage more often, almost always, than any other actors, – who is more suitable for my study?43

And Grasso’s natural talent was perfectly suitable and gave a lot of ma-terial for such a study of the elements of an actor’s internal techniques to Stanislavsky and his followers, the Moscow Art Theatre’s actors.

Similarly, Meyerhold at the moment of his meeting with the art of Gras-so was on his way to creating his own acting technique that disagreed with the principles of the Moscow Art Theatre, and on his way to founding the Studio on Borodinskaya, where close attention to Commedia dell’ Arte of-fered a basis for the fundamentals of biomechanics, based on the notion of the primacy of external technique and the priority of a physical reaction over an emotional reaction. He avidly collected elements of the actor’s ex-ternal technique, and extracted laws of the future biomechanics out of the theatre around him as well as out of his dreams. In so doing, Grasso with his superb movement skills became an important subject for observation for Meyerhold too.

Finally, Strasberg who was noticing the special features in Grasso’s act-ing two decades later was also forming his own views on the technique of an actor and was reinterpreting the experience of the Moscow Art Theatre’s visit and the lessons of Boleslavsky. He was anticipating his own new ap-proaches in the use of Stanislavsky’s discoveries about emotional memory.

Once again Grasso’s acting and even the capriciousness of his tech-nique, whether intentionally or not, provided an excellent opportunity for observation and study – this time for Strasberg.

The general public and the critics admired some aspects of Grasso’s talent, resented his taste, and discussed his stage manners. It was theatre practitioners who extracted the essence of the actor’s craft out of his per-formances, and made discoveries of general laws of the actor’s art.

After all, the analytical period in the creation of any actor training sys-tem inevitably involves splitting up the unified creative state of an actor into its constituent elements for a better cognition of the holistic process. While Stanislavski was looking for elements of inner technique for actors, and broke down the indivisible creative process into “circles of attention”,

43 Konstantin Stanislavskii, ‘Moya zhizn v iskustve’ in Konstantin Stanislavskii, Sobranie sochinenii v 9 tomah, vol. 1, (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988), p. 376.


“logic of feelings”, “bits” “objectives”, and “lines of mental life”, Meyer-hold was looking for elements of outer technique for actors, and specified his own physical movement alphabet – “otkaz (refusal)”, “posil (the send-ing)”, “tochka (dead stop)”, “tormoz (the brake)”, and “throw”.

The originality of Grasso’s movements was noted by many (“It is pos-sible to draw him from any angle”44, a critic wrote). His performances were highly praised (“This is the music of gestures”45, wrote another critic). His famous leap was documented many times in an attempt to capture its es-sence (“Grasso is jealous, he is looking for the offender, leaps towards him like a tiger, seizes his hair, sharply bends back his head so that his whole neck is bent forward, then jumps aside, and finally leaps on the rival’s shoulders and cuts his throat”46 – in this description by a third critic one can see all the elements of the future biomechanics). But there was a need in the sharp analytical eye of Meyerhold not only to admire the tiger-like movement of the Sicilian tragedian, but also to figure out the separate notes of the “scales” of movement, and put them into the basis of the biome-chanical etudes.

Similarly, Grasso’s audiences repeatedly observed his manner of touch-ing his partner’s hair. Let us again confirm with quotations this Grasso’s habit of triggering his emotions through tactile sensations: “The jealous man rushes to the poor woman and having grabbed her by the hair begins to drag her... One can’t play with Di Grasso in a wig”47; “I like this moment, when grasping the whole handful of his hair, he [Grasso] turns his face to himself.”48 Many also saw the uncontrollability, the untamed quality of Grasso’s inspiration. But you need to have the analytical mind of a “fanatic of emotional memory”, as Strasberg was called by another Group Theatre co-founder, Harold Clurman, to see in the flashes of inspiration and even in the flops and failures of the great actor the general principles of triggering and controlling emotional (affective) memory in the actor’s craft.

So, the answer to the above questions seems inevitably clear. Since Grasso always proceeded from his own artistic individuality (“he played himself”49, wrote a critic, or he was acting from himself, as Stanislavsky might clarify) and was truly a gifted actor (“talented by the unmistakable

44 Sergei Gorniyi, ‘Teatralnie silueti’, Obozrenie teatrov, 585 (1908), p. 9.45 Ibidem.46 Kn. Mishkin [N. Efros], ‘Ingomar’, Kievskaya misl, 5 November, 1908, (page

unknown).47 Nikolay Driezen, Sorok let teatra, (Petrograd: Prometei,1917), p. 171.48 V. Rozanov, p. 11.49 A. Izmailov (Smolenskii), p. 99.


grace of God”50), his powerful and free creative organism, not distorted by mannerism or professional shortcomings (muscular tensions, stiffness of imagination, etc.), executed on stage in accordance with the laws of nature, the supreme truth, in which one can discern both elements of the Stanislavsky System and elements of biomechanics.

Hence Grasso appeared twofaced, turning to his sensitive professional audience precisely the very aspect of his natural talent that they were ready to see in his acting.

This is one more proof of the scale of the great Sicilian actor’s talent.51

Bibliography

Amfiteatrov, Аleksandr, Konturi (St. Petersburg: Obschestvennaya polza, 1906).Izmailov, Alexandr (Smolenskii), ‘Dzhovanni di Grasso (K gastolyam sicilian-

skoi truppi v Peterburge)’, Ezhegodnik imperatorskikh teatrov, 1 (1909), pp. 90-100.

Driezen, Nikolay, Sorok let teatra. Vospominaniya (Petrograd: Prometei, 1916).Woolcott, Alexander, ‘An Actor in the Bowery’, The New York Times, 10 Septem-

ber, 1921, p. 12:3.Littlefield, Walter, ‘Il tesoro d’Isacco’, The New York Times, 26 January, 1928,

p. 17:1.Kruti, Isaak, ed., Ivan Mihailovich Moskvin [Collection of materials] (Moscow:

VPSh, 1948).Vilenkin, Vladimir, ed., Leonid Mironovich Leonidov. Vospominania, stat’i, (Moscow:

Iskusstvo, 1960).Vendrovskaya, Lubov’, ed., Vstrechi s Meierholdom. Sbornik Vospominanii (Moscow:

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Iskusstvo, 1970).Freidin, Gregory, ‘Fat Tuesday in Odessa: Isaac Babel’s “Di Grasso” as Testament

and Manifesto’, Russian Review, 40, 2 (1981), pp. 101-21.Strasberg, Lee, A Dream of Passion (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987).

50 Ibid., p. 93.51 It is both my honor and pleasure to express my gratitude to the theatre director

Andrei Malaev-Babel, who introduced me into the circle of the leading Babel’s experts, as well as to the scholars Gregory Freidin, Elena Pogorelskaya, and Yuri Tsivian, who kindly sent me copies of their publications on Babel. Special thanks to Boris Rotenstein for information on Angel Gumerá and his playwriting, and Evgeny Golybovsky for finding out cartoons of Grasso. Besides that, I would like to extend my particular gratitude to Vreneli and Paul Farber who generously spent their time and efforts to edit the English text of this article.


Stanislavskii, Konstantin, ‘Moya zhizn v iskustve’ in Stanislavskii, Konstantin, Sobranie sochinenii v 9 tomah, vol. 1 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988).

Gladkov, Alexandr, Meierhold, in 2 volumes (Moscow: STD RF, 1990).Petrovskaya, Ira, Somina, Vera, Teatralni Peterburg: nachalo XVIII veka – oktyabr

1917 goda (St. Petersburg: RIII, 1994).Zappulla Muscarà, Sarah, Zappulla, Enzo, Giovanni Grasso: Il più grande attore

tragico del mondo (Acireale: Cantinella,1995).Babel, Isaac, ‘Di Grasso’ in Isaac Babel The Complete Works of Isaac Babel,

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Golubovskii, Evgenii, ‘Isaak Babel: Ia nichego ne vidumivaiu’, Deribasovaskaya – Rishelevskaya , 34 (2008), pp. 41-43.

Tsivian, Yuri, ‘Prizhok na grud v literature i na scene’ in S. Gardzonio et al., eds., Laurea Lorae: sbornik pamyiati Larisy Georgievny Stepanovoi, (St. Peters-burg: Nestor-Istoriya, 2011), pp. 560–78.

Tcherkasski, Sergei, ‘The System Becomes the Method: Stanislavsky – Boleslavsky – Strasberg’, Stanislavski Studies: peer-reviewed e-Journal, 3 (2013), pp. 92-138. http://stanislavskistudies.org, accessed 15 January 2014.

Babel, Isaak, Rasskazi, Elena Pogorelskaya, ed. (St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2014).

Twofaced Giovanni Grasso and his great spectators, or What Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Strasberg...

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