Given these difficulties with the texts, no summary of Stanislavsky's system can claim to be entirely accurate or hope to please all of Stanislavsky's admirers and critics. Nevertheless, the main outlines can be sketched.

• (1) The actor's body and voice should be thoroughly trained so they may respond efficiently to all demands.
• (2) Actors should be schooled in stage techniques so they can project characterization to an audience without any sense of contrivance.
• (3) Actors should be skilled observers of reality as a basis for building a role.
• (4) Actors should seek inner justification for everything done on stage. In doing so, actors depend in part on "the magic 'if'" (that is, the actor says, "If I were this person faced with this situation, I would . . . ") and "emotion memory" (a process by which actors relate the unfamiliar dramatic situation to some analogous emotional situation in their own lives, although Stanislavsky was eventually to downgrade the importance of emotion memory).
• (5) If actors are not merely to play themselves, they must make a thorough analysis of the script and work within the "given circumstances" found there. The actor must define a characters motivations in each scene, in the play as a whole, and in relationship to each of the other roles. The character's primary "objective" becomes the "through line" of the role, around which everything else revolves.
• (6) On stage, actors must focus attention upon the action as it unfolds moment by moment. Such concentration will lead to the "illusion of the first time" and will help actors to subordinate their own egos to me artistic demands of the production.
• (7) Actors must continually strive to perfect understanding and proficiency