Acting Strategies, Modern Drama, and New Stagecraft

Baron, Cynthia

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-40655-2_2

Cynthia Baron³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Screen Industries and Performance ((PSSIP))

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Abstract

Chapter 2 demonstrates that Modern and Method acting represent two distinct reactions to modern drama and new stagecraft: Modern acting sees actors as artists and facilitates their abilities to analyze scripts; Method training prepares actors to respond to directors, who become the key artists of the theatre. The chapter opens its exploration of Modern acting techniques by contrasting them with strategies specific to Lee Strasberg’s Method. Offering readers a look at the actual steps of Strasberg’s actor training plan, the chapter clarifies the profound disparity between the Method and Stanislavsky’s System. It shows that the Method has no connection to Stanislavsky’s approach, but instead rests on a different view of acting, actors, the relationship between actors and scripts, and the role of actors and directors.

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Notes

1.
Richard Boleslavsky, “Boleslavsky Lectures from the American Laboratory Theatre,” in Acting: The First Six Lessons: Documents from the American Laboratory Theatre, ed. Rhonda Blair (New York: Routledge, 2010), 125.
2.
Lee Strasberg, A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1987), 104, 26. Strasberg’s book borrows its title from the 1978 film A Dream of Passion by blacklisted director Jules Dassin. In the film, an actress (Melina Mercouri) interviews a woman (Ellen Burstyn) convicted of killing her children, as a way to prepare for her role in Medea. Dassin’s film garnered critical acclaim, including a Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Film. The story dramatized Strasberg’s emphasis on links between traumatic experience and performance and his romantic notion of art as individual self-expression, a view at odds with Modern acting’s vision of art as collaboration.
3.
Ibid., 27.
4.
Ibid., 26.
5.
Ibid., 27.
6.
Ibid., 27, 28.
7.
Ibid., 29.
8.
Ibid., 151. See Olga Taxidou, The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998). Taxidou discusses Craig’s professed admiration for his mother, actress Ellen Terry, and his claims that women should be “banned from the stage” (90). Analyzing Craig’s notion that women must leave the stage “‘if the theatre is to be saved,’” Taxidou observes: “Craig’s Ubermarionette, lacking biological gender, still has ideological gender; he is most definitely a man” (95, 94). Strasberg’s high regard for Craig and his own use of women in examples of actors’ problems thus require the type of analysis found in Rosemary Malague, An Actress Prepares: Women and “the Method” (New York: Routledge, 2012).
9.
Josephine Dillon, Modern Acting: A Guide for Stage, Screen and Radio (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940), 264.
10.
Walter Prichard Eaton, “Acting and the New Stagecraft,” in Theatre Arts on Acting, ed. Laurence Senelick (New York: Routledge, 2008), 5; Julia Walker, “‘De New Dat’s Moiderin’ de Old’: Oedipal Struggle as Class Conflict in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape,” in Art, Glitter, and Glitz: Mainstream Playwrights and Popular Theatre in 1920s America, eds. Arthur Gewirtz and James L. Kolb (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 21.
11.
Claude King, “The Place of the Actor in ‘the New Movement,’” in Theatre Arts on Acting, ed. Laurence Senelick (New York: Routledge, 2008), 6; italics added.
12.
Ibid., 7.
13.
Ibid., italics added. See Brenda Murphy, American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Murphy describes the 1870s as “a period of transition”—when romantic star Edwin Forrest was replaced by: classical performer Edwin Booth; Matilda Heron, associated with “emotionalism”; and Joseph Jefferson, known for his “attention to detail in a unified characterization” (17, 18). The new generation included James A. Herne, E. H. Sothern, and Richard Mansfield. Murphy sees Mansfield’s “projection of personality… onto a character [as] one step in the move toward psychological realism in acting” (19). She explains: the ideas that “the character was a ‘person’ rather than a series of attitudes or emotions was important and one that was to be carried to fruition by such actors in the next generation as Minnie Maddern Fiske and George Arliss” (19).
14.
Ibid.
15.
Ibid.
16.
See Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke, “Stanislavsky: Players’ Actions as a Window into Characters’ Interactions,” in Reframing Screen Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). The chapter uses script analysis concepts to analyze a scene in The Grifters (Frears 1990). See also Cynthia Baron, “Stanislavsky’s Terms for Script Analysis: Vocabulary for Analyzing Performances,” Journal of Film and Video 65:4 (Winter 2013): 29–41. The article uses the vocabulary to explore scenes in Fargo (Coen 1996) and The Last King of Scotland (Macdonald 2006).
17.
Gay Gibson Cima, Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 30.
18.
Stella Adler, The Technique of Acting (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 7, 116.
19.
Ibid., 106.
20.
Ibid., 116.
21.
Sophie Rosenstein, Larrae A. Haydon, and Wilbur Sparrow, Modern Acting: A Manual (New York: Samuel French, 1936), 128.
22.
Adler, Technique of Acting, 106.
23.
Dillon, Modern Acting: A Guide, 243.
24.
Ibid., 9.
25.
Rosenstein, et al., Modern Acting: A Manual, 61.
26.
Ibid., 62.
27.
Strasberg, Dream of Passion, 160.
28.
Ibid., 103.
29.
Ibid., 160, 102, 159–160.
30.
Ibid., 20.
31.
Ibid., 138.
32.
Ibid., 160.
33.
Ibid., 95.
34.
Ibid.
35.
Ibid., 75.
36.
Ibid., 76.
37.
Ibid.
38.
Ibid., 76–77.
39.
Ibid., 77.
40.
Ibid., 164.
41.
Ibid.
42.
Ibid., 78.
43.
Ibid.
44.
Ibid., 60.
45.
Ibid.
46.
Ibid., 104.
47.
Ibid.
48.
Ibid.
49.
Ibid., 173.
50.
Ibid., 114.
51.
Ibid.
52.
Ibid., 173.
53.
Ibid.
54.
Ibid., 174.
55.
Ibid.
56.
See Rhonda Blair, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Acting: The First Six Lessons: Documents from the American Laboratory Theatre, ed. Rhonda Blair (New York: Routledge, 2010), xi; Helen Krich Chinoy, The Group Theatre: Passion, Politics, and Performance in the Depression Era, eds. Don B. Wilmeth and Milly S. Barranger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 54–55.
57.
See Strasberg, Dream of Passion, 67.
58.
Ibid., 68.
59.
Ibid.
60.
Ibid., 63.
61.
Ibid., 69.
62.
Ibid., 69–70.
63.
Ibid., 113.
64.
Ibid., 71.
65.
Ibid., 72.
66.
Ibid.
67.
Ibid., 138.
68.
Ibid., 103.
69.
Ibid., 139.
70.
Ibid.
71.
Ibid., 140.
72.
Ibid., 102, 143.
73.
Ibid., 132.
74.
Ibid., 135.
75.
Ibid., 134.
76.
Ibid., 138.
77.
Ibid., 141.
78.
Ibid., 142.
79.
Ibid., 143.
80.
Ibid., 145.
81.
Ibid.
82.
Ibid., 146.
83.
Ibid., 115–116.
84.
Ibid., 116. Strasberg mentions that Method actors explore the emotional-memory exercise early on “without demanding immediate and intense results” (148). These private experiments are entirely distinct from the classroom performance of the emotional-memory exercise that takes place only after the student has performed the preceding exercises to the teacher’s satisfaction.
85.
Ibid., 149.
86.
Ibid.
87.
Ibid., 115, 149.
88.
Ibid., 149.
89.
Ibid., 115.
90.
Ibid., 115, 149.
91.
Ibid., 152, 148.
92.
Ibid., 151.
93.
Ibid.
94.
Sharon Marie Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 203.
95.
Ibid., 88.
96.
Ibid., 133.
97.
Ibid., 153, 152.
98.
Ibid., 90.
99.
Ibid., 91.
100.
Ibid., 161, 160.
101.
Ibid., 142.
102.
Ibid., 166, 177.
103.
Lillian Albertson, Motion Picture Acting (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1947), 63.
104.
Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 204.
105.
Strasberg, Dream of Passion, 5.
106.
Ibid., xi.
107.
Chinoy, The Group Theatre, 53.
108.
Ibid., 54.
109.
Ibid.

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Department of Theatre and Film, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, USA
Cynthia Baron

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Baron, C. (2016). Acting Strategies, Modern Drama, and New Stagecraft. In: Modern Acting. Palgrave Studies in Screen Industries and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40655-2_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40655-2_2
Published: 19 August 2016
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-40654-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-40655-2
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