The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

What McDormand needed to develop was a technique that would allow her to authentically experience the emotions and psychology of her character while maintaining control over the results.

At the heart of Stanislavski’s revolution was the concept of perezhivanie, which, loosely translated, means something like “experiencing,” or perhaps “re-experiencing.” Perezhivanie occurs when an actor is so connected to the truth of a role, and has so thoroughly entered into the imaginary reality of the character, that they feel what the character feels, perhaps even think what the character thinks.

To Stanislavski, perezhivanie, which he also called “living the part,” was the highest ideal, the artistic mountaintop that all acting strove to reach.

The style of acting that most aligned with Diderot’s views was called the symbolic style. It was presentational, not realistic.

The best actors, he argued, were the ones who had the greatest sensibility. Talent, to Stanislavski, was an actor’s capacity to experience. Yet at times his own talent deserted him. He faced the same problem that everyone from Polus onward had: There was no way to summon experiencing on demand. Inspiration might be the key to great acting, but how do you control something as mercurial and ineffable as inspiration?

By moving the focus of acting away from types of people and toward specific individuals, away from externalities and toward interiority, away from representation and toward ideas of authenticity and personal truth, the Method challenged norms about not only what it meant to be a good actor but what it meant to be a human being.

The Method has many definitions, but to instructors of stage acting, it refers very specifically to the techniques and values taught by Lee Strasberg, the most famous and prominent adapter of Stanislavski’s ideas in the English-speaking world.

To theorize about acting is to theorize about what a human being is and how a human being works. It is to theorize about what good art is and how good art is made. Denis Diderot, as a soldier of the Enlightenment, needed a rational model of acting to reflect his rational model of human nature. In America in the 1950s, a time of great pressure to conform, the Method showed that we were not rational, but repressed. Its model of the human was one in which roiling seas of emotion and discontent lay beneath all of our frozen, placid surfaces.

Until the aftermath of the French invasion of Russia in 1812, cultured Russians spoke and—as Tolstoy dramatized in War and Peace—even thought in French. When Pushkin began his writing career, “Russian” was a hodgepodge of Church Slavonic, borrowed Latinate words, and a bureaucratic jargon called Chancery. The Russian language lacked words for many articles of clothing, and for important concepts like privacy and imagination.

With victory in war, Russia became a newly great nation. And like Elizabethan England, or the United States after World War II, this newly great nation needed a homegrown national culture to proclaim its prominence and define its character. Censorship loosened and literacy rates grew, as did the number of people writing in Russian. As the State controlled what could be said on public stages, theater flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century on Russian private estates.

One must love art, and not one’s self in art. Today Hamlet, tomorrow a supernumerary, but even as a supernumerary you must become an artist. The poet, the actor, the artist, the tailor, the stagehand serve one goal, which is placed by the poet in the very basis of his play. All disobedience to the creative life of the theater is a crime. Lateness, laziness, caprice, hysterics, bad character, ignorance of the role, the necessity of repeating anything twice are all equally harmful to our enterprise and must be rooted out. There are no small parts, there are only small actors.

When Spielberg made Jaws in 1975, the fully realized, complex humanity of his characters was part of the film’s appeal. But in the 1980s, rounded, naturalistic, human characters only got in the way of the dependable delivery of huge thrills. In the work of directors like James Cameron, characters struggle to have more than one dimension; they’re flecked with a light dusting of humanity so you can easily root for them.

On the page, Joanna is a man’s idea of a woman. Streep makes her an actual woman, and, at the director’s request, she rewrote important lines of dialogue to make the character more realistic.

Open a newspaper—if there are still newspapers where you live—and read the reviews of films. See how they judge a performance by whether it feels true, like a reflection of our lives and souls. You can find the “system” and its children there. You can find them everywhere in American culture. They are the foundation of how we think about acting, the dramatic interpretation of text, and the truth of being human. The Method—still taught, and misunderstood, and championed, and maligned—is both here and not, hovering over us, ever present and invisible all at once.

perezhivanie?