Abstract
Chapter 3 provides a concise introduction to the Modern acting techniques described by: Josephine Dillon and Sophie Rosenstein, authors of manuals on Modern acting; Roman Bohnen, Morris Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, and other members of the Actors’ Laboratory in Hollywood; and Stella Adler, another member of the Group Theatre, who began to combine work as an acting teacher with her career as an actor in the 1930s. The Modern acting techniques that these teachers focused on concern the challenges of building characterizations and developing the requisite concentration and physical and vocal ability to embody those characterizations. Their shared interest in addressing a range of acting problems contrasts with the Method’s more singular emphasis on breaking down inhibitions that seem to block actors’ expression of personal feeling.
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- 1.
“Teacher’s Course – Fall 1946–1947,” Box 7, Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection, Special Collections Department, University of California, Los Angeles.
- 2.
Josephine Dillon, Modern Acting: A Guide for Stage, Screen and Radio (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940), v.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Ibid., 200.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Ibid., 182.
- 7.
Cabot was on TV from 1951 to 1965 and in films from 1931 to 1971, often ones starring John Wayne. The 1933 photo of Cabot’s coaching session could be for any of the nine films in which he appeared that year. That he was a rising star at this moment is perhaps suggested by the fact that in Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), Oscar-nominated actor Adrien Brody plays Jack, who is a screenwriter rather than the first mate.
- 8.
Dillon, Modern Acting: A Guide, 82.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Ibid., 43.
- 11.
Ibid., 42.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Ibid., 122.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid., 126.
- 17.
Ibid., 129.
- 18.
Lee Strasberg, A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1987), 6.
- 19.
Qtd. in Sophie Rosenstein, Larrae A. Haydon, and Wilbur Sparrow, Modern Acting: A Manual (New York: Samuel French, 1936), vii.
- 20.
Rosenstein, et al., 3.
- 21.
Ibid., 66.
- 22.
Ibid., 65.
- 23.
Ibid., 105.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Ibid., 46.
- 26.
Ibid., 20, 25.
- 27.
Ibid., 42, 77.
- 28.
Ibid., 2.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid., 7.
- 31.
Ibid., 2.
- 32.
Ibid., 29.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Ibid., 34.
- 35.
Ibid., 47, 48.
- 36.
News clipping and “Report – Mary Tarcai – October 1945,” Actors’ Laboratory Collection. Tarcai’s report covers Lab courses with veterans and contract players from Universal and Fox. Shdanoff is associated with the Michael Chekhov technique, developed by Chekhov, who was involved in Stanislavsky’s initial work at the Moscow Art Theatre; in the west, Chekhov was known for his opposition to Stanislavsky’s early interest in emotional memory. The 1945 article, which identifies Tarcai as an acting expert, discusses the collegiality between male teachers and students, and mentions the “sprinkling of starlets sent over by the big studios for polishing [who were not] spared in the toughening-up process.” It highlights an occasion when Carnovsky was “coaching one of these girls on a scene where she was supposed to register shock and bewilderment,” and reveals that when she failed to do this to his satisfaction, “Carnovsky, who is the soul of gentleness and patience, flew into a tantrum.” After sharing details about his attack, it continues by saying: the “girl gasped and stammered as she tried to respond. Carnovsky cut in, his face beaming. ‘Now you look right, my dear,’ he purred. ‘Now you have the right facial expression, the right way of speaking. Do the scene that way.’” This report echoes anecdotes about Strasberg’s tirades at women, Boleslavsky’s work with Irene Dunne, and Boleslavsky’s interactions with “the Creature” in Acting: The First Six Lessons.
- 37.
“Report – Mary Tarcai – October 1945,” Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection.
- 38.
“Teacher’s Course: 1945,” Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
“Teacher’s Course: October 29, 1946,” Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection.
- 41.
“Teacher’s Course: November 13, 1946,” Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection.
- 42.
“Teacher’s Course: 1945,” Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection.
- 43.
“Teacher’s Course: October 29, 1946,” Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
“Teacher’s Course: November 13, 1946,” Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection.
- 52.
Ibid. Art Smith differed from Lab colleagues, believing bit players “should be able to use things from [their] own experience” to get into the “emotional pitch” required. Lab members discussed the need to avoid any and all emotional-memory exercises with returning veterans, for they were aware that vets had many traumatic memories.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
“Teacher’s Course: November 6, 1946,” Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
In Brand’s view, using sense memories to relive emotions associated with personal experiences led to scenes with odd pacing and actors disconnected from one another (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, 2013], 60). By comparison, she and Lab members saw sense-memory exercises as essential to “training in concentration, relaxation and developing imagination,” because actors must relax to pick up an object, see what it feels like, put it down, remember what it felt like; this work thus enhances actors’ mind–body connection and helps them build characterizations (“Teacher’s Course: November 6, 1946,” Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection).
- 61.
“Teacher’s Course: October 29, 1946,” Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Rosemary Malague, An Actress Prepares: Women and “the Method” (New York: Routledge, 2012), 27.
- 64.
Ibid., 99.
- 65.
Ibid., 75.
- 66.
Sharon Marie Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 153.
- 67.
Strasberg, Dream of Passion, 30.
- 68.
Modern acting requires actors to ground performances in an understanding of a character’s physical, psychological, and sociological realities, whereas in Method acting a character’s given circumstances are replaced “by the actor’s biography, the character’s psychology by the actor’s psychology” (Robert Benedetti, Action!: Acting for Film and Television [Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001], 73). Modern actors trust that emotions suitable to a character’s actions and reactions will emerge from mental pictures created during script analysis, whereas Method acting requires actors to re-experience feelings related to events in their own lives.
- 69.
Stanislavsky saw the subconscious “as a ‘friend’ to the creative process”; he believed that when actors were “puzzled by the work on the role they should ‘throw’ their ‘bundle of thoughts’ into the subconscious and allow the unconscious mind to do its work” (Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 225).
- 70.
Bette Davis, “On Acting in Films,” Theatre Arts 25 (September 1946): 639.
- 71.
“Teacher’s Course: October 29, 1946,” Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection.
- 72.
“The Craftsman,” January 1948, Actors’ Laboratory Incorporated Collection.
- 73.
Malague, An Actress Prepares, 48. Strasberg consistently used “women as his examples to illustrate psychological, emotional, and behavioral problems” that he would then “fix” (26).
- 74.
Ibid., 26.
- 75.
Gay Gibson Cima, Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 30.
- 76.
Ibid.
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Baron, C. (2016). Modern Acting: A Conscious Approach. In: Modern Acting. Palgrave Studies in Screen Industries and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40655-2_3
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