Just as Hecht was looking for his vocation, the very field he wanted to be in was interviewing students for a new school. In November 1923, Richard Boleslavsky, a Russian immigrant and former student of Konstantin Stanislavsky, opened the American Laboratory Theatre, the first school in the United States to teach Stanislavski's system of acting. Hecht was among the first students accepted to attend the new school in late 1923. While there he studied and appeared in plays with Lee Strasberg (who later took Stanislavski's system and Americanized it into the method acting system), Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, Anne Revere, Lenore Romney and Francis Fergusson.