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.
