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. “There’s a really deep well of experience and emotional facility,” McDormand explained, “but it has to have a really tight lid. You have to be able to get the lid off when you need it and dip down into the well, but you can’t keep it open all the time or you won’t survive … the trauma of bringing it back.”

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. Experiencing does not mean to fully become the character, or to lose sight of the self. Instead, the actor’s living consciousness and the fictional consciousness of the part they are playing meet. 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.

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.

Acting evolves in response to technological change, and political currents, and the needs of audiences to see certain kinds of people.

It is also because he was independently wealthy, and because Russia in the twilight of the Romanovs hungered for a kind of truth that the State refused to provide. Stanislavski likely would never have seen the necessity of the “system” if Russia hadn’t had a far longer and more robust tradition of realist art than other nations, or if censorship hadn’t severely limited which plays could be performed, or if theaters weren’t getting smaller and more brightly lit.

Lee Strasberg’s adaptations of those theories were in turn shaped not only by his encyclopedic knowledge of the theater but also by his difficulty relating to other people, by his being a Jewish immigrant to the United States, by the business realities of Broadway, by shifts in American art during the Great Depression, and by the emerging popularity of psychology and psychoanalytic theory.

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.

Like atonality in music, or modernism in architecture, or abstraction in art, the “system” and the Method brought forth a new way of conceiving of human experience, one that changed how we look at the world, and at ourselves. We live today in the world—and with the aesthetic taste—that the Method helped usher in.

When ideals intersect with reality, disappointment and heartache will always result. Stanislavski knew this, which is why he loved art so much, with its ability to take real-life experience and purify it, turning it into something more beautiful and more meaningful. But it is also why he could never be content with the art he made, or the theories he devised, or the way they were implemented. The Method ultimately created standards that no one could live up to, and for some of the people who believed in it, the unrelenting pressure of these standards proved impossible to bear.

The Magic If is a state of radical imaginative empathy in which “the actor passes from the plane of actual reality into the plane of another life, created and imagined by him.”

This idea of the “peg” eventually became the sverkhzadacha, or “supertask.” Plays have latent supertasks, made apparent by each production’s specific approach: a version of Hamlet about the nature of justice will be very different from one about the Oedipal complex.

The sverkhzadacha demands truth from the actor. To Gogol, “the actor must perform such that the thoughts and aspirations of the character have been assimilated by him.”

With concentration, affective memory, the supertask, and the given circumstances, Stanislavski built upon the foundation that he had laid in Finland.

In Pushkino, they had forced actors to serve literature and the production. Now Stanislavski demanded actors serve the truth. But this truth was neither philosophical nor overtly political; it was internal, the verisimilitude of feelings that Pushkin had demanded.

Fetishizing emotional states was an abuse of the “system,” he declared. The goal of the “system” was experiencing, the state of ya yesm. True emotion was a route to that goal, not an end in itself.

These basic ideas—that at the heart of a character was action, that action arose as a result of problems, that those problems could be determined through careful textual analysis and interpretive creativity, and that they could be phrased as infinitive verbs—were Richard Boleslavsky’s great gift to America. For much of the twentieth century, they became the standard by which character was explored and acting taught.

During that first week, Clurman thrilled the cast (and Kazan) with his analysis of the play. “I learned from Harold that a director’s first task is to make his actors eager to play their parts,” Kazan recalled.

Clurman, who had the mind of a critic, cared more about the meaning of the text as revealed through action. “A play is not constructed on lines of dialogue,” he wrote a few years later. “A play is fundamentally a series of actions. A character enters a room: what is essential to know is not what he says … but what he wants, what made him enter the room, and what he intends to do to get what he wants.”

This conflict between Brando and Tandy, America and England, is also the conflict between Stanley and Blanche. Blanche is all artifice. She describes Stanley derisively as “simple, straightforward, and honest,” to which he responds, “Lay your cards on the table.” Later, Blanche declares, “I don’t want realism, I want magic!” By the end of the play, in a kind of prophecy of things to come for the Method, Blanche has discovered that her artifice doesn’t work as well as she thinks it does, while the audience has discovered that Stanley’s authenticity is another kind of veneer.

Strasberg’s concern for saying things in the exact right way often led him to overelaborate beyond the point of intelligibility. His extemporaneous speeches became a labyrinth of digressions, associations, and verbal tics like “so to speak,” “as it were,” or “you see.” The listener, entering this maze to find the secret of art at its center, might sometimes find brilliance, but sometimes they would wander down obscure pathways only to wind up right where they had started.

As Tennessee Williams told Elia Kazan when they worked on A Streetcar Named Desire, not all art exists to make a point. Sometimes, art’s job is to poetically dramatize a truth about the human condition. Raging Bull is an experience of toxic masculinity, filled with indelible images and moments that linger years after a first viewing.

Dogmas are difficult to maintain in such a marketplace, which is why America’s sole remaining dogma is the market. When we are free as consumers to pick and choose, to define for ourselves what works and what doesn’t, what is good or bad, authentic or fake, what hope could any single theory of acting, of art, of truth, have?