Abstract
What follows is an examination of Method acting based on analysis of its theories, practice, and potential for future development. This work probes the accomplishments of the Method and assesses its relationship to other theories of performance. After writing an essay that summarized what Method acting is,2 I concluded that a book would be required to explain in full what Method acting means. Because much has been said in criticism about the Method, this work seeks to set the record straight. It is an attempt to tie down the variety of meanings of the term “Method acting” and to illuminate its purposes in part by clearing up prevailing misrepresentations. By exploring a balanced view of the Method as well as other theories of performance, we will bring actor training into clearer perspective. The chapters in this book, I believe, will make this possible.
TOBY: You never play anything outwards. I’ve noticed you keep it all in. So you draw in the audience. So it’s up to them. And somehow they make the effort. […] How do you do that?
ESME: It comes with the passage of time.
TOBY: You go deeper.
ESME: Exactly.
TOBY: You go on down to the core.
—David Hare, Amy’s View1
I was a tomato! A tomato doesn’t sit!
—Dustin Hoffman, Tootsie
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Notes
David Hare, Amy’s View (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 113–14.
David Krasner, “Method Acting: Strasberg, Adler, Meisner,” Twentieth-Century Actor Training, Alison Hodge, ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 129–50.
Haold Clurman, The Collected Works of Harold Clurman, Marjorie Loggia and Glenn Young, eds. (New York: Applause, 1994), 369.
Lee Strasberg, “Introduction,” The Paradox of Acting & Masks or Faces? (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), xiii.
See Sharon M. Carnicke’s discussion of the way the American Method changed Stanislavsky s ideas in her book, Stanislavsky in Focus (Australia: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), 65
Robert Lewis, Method or Madness? (New York: Samuel French, 1958), 99.
Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 143.
Steve Vineberg, Method Actors: Three Generations of American Acting Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991), 6–7.
For history of the Group Theatre, see Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1945, 1975)
Cheryl Crawford, One Naked Individual: My Fifty Years in the Theatre (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959)
Wendy Smith, Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
See, for instance, Robert Brustein, “America’s New Cultural Hero: Feelings Without Words,” Commentary 25 (January 1958): 123–29
Richard Hornby, The End of Acting: A Radical View (New York: Applause, 1992), 5
Charles Marowitz, The Other Way: An Alternative Approach to Acting and Directing (New York: Applause, 1999), 119.
Michael Quinn, “Self-Reliance and Ritual Renewal: Anti-theatrical Ideology in American Method Acting,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 10.1 (Fall 1995): 14.
Denis Salter, “Acting Shakespeare in Postcolonial Space,” Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, James C. Bulman, ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), 128.
Denis Salter, “Body Politics: English-Canadian Acting at National Theatre School,” Canadian Theatre Review 71 (Summer 1992): 13.
Elaine Aston, Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook (London: Routledge, 1999), 7.
David Mamet, True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 20.
Foster Hirsch, A Method to Their Madness: A History of the Actors Studio (New York: Norton, 1984), 207
Charles Marowitz, Stanislavsky & the Method (New York: Citadel, 1964), 43.
Geraldine Page, “Interview” Actors on Acting, Joanmarie Kalter, ed. (New York: Sterling, 1979), 21.
Robbie McCauley, Interview, “Obsessing in Public” (1993), A Sourcebook of African-American Performance, Annemarie Bean, ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 236
John Harrop, Acting (London: Routledge, 1992), 42.
Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1988), 122.
Jeanie Forte, “Women’s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism,” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Practice, Sue-Ellen Case, ed. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 258.
Deborah Warner, interviewed by Helen Manfull, In Other Words: Women Directors Speak (Lyme, NH: Smith & Kraus, 1997), 107–8.
Collin Counsell, Signs of Performance: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre (London: Routledge, 1996), 65.
Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University-Press, 1998), 4.
Morton White, The Question of Free Will: A Holistic View (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 8.
Lee Strasberg, “Acting and Actor Training,” Producing the Play, John Gassner, ed. (New York: Dryden, 1941), 142.
Morris Carnovsky, qtd. in Peter Sander, “The Actor’s Eye,” The Soul of the American Actor 1.2 (Summer 1998): 6.
Tadashi Suzuki, “Culture Is the Body” Acting (Re)considered: Theories and Practices, Phillip Zarrilli, ed., Kazuko Matsuoka, tr. (London: Routledge, 1995), 155.
Paul de Man, “Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 285
Stella Adler, “The Reality of Doing,” TDR 9.1 (Fall 1964): 149
Paul Mann, “Theory and Practice,” TDR 9.2 (Winter 1964): 87
Stella Adler, “Interview,” Educational Theatre Journal 28.4 (December 1976): 512.
Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xvi.
Daniel Joseph Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly 30.1 (Spring 1987): 14.
Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 147.
Or, as Joshua Gamson put it, “celebrity is a primary contemporary means to power, privilege, and mobility.” See, Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 186.
Jill G. Morawski, “Educating the Emotions: Psychology, Textbooks, and the Psychology Industry, 1890–1940,” Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 219.
For an interesting discussion on American individualism as it relates to the loner and the pastoral Western, see Conal Furay, The Grass-Roots Mind in America (New York: New Viewpoints, 1977), 32–36.
[Euvgeny] Vakhtangov, “Preparing for the Role,” from Vakhtangov’s diary, in Acting: A Handbook of the Stanislavski Method, Toby Cole, ed., B. E. Zakhara, tr. (New York: Crown Trade, 1955), 145.
Stephen J. Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 44.
Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 137.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Three Negro Classics, John Hope Franklin, ed. (New York: Avon, 1965), 215.
Waldo Frank, The Jew in Our Day (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944), 149.
Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923), Walter Kaufmann, tr. (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
Lee Strasberg, “Reunion: A Self-Portrait of the Group Theatre,” Educational Theatre Journal 28.4 (December 1976): 546.
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© 2000 David Krasner
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Krasner, D. (2000). I Hate Strasberg. In: Krasner, D. (eds) Method Acting Reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62271-9_1
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