The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

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

“I am waging a fierce struggle against routine in our theater,” he wrote to a friend. “It is the task of our generation to banish from art tradition and routine … that is the only way to save art.”

using a conscious process to access and manipulate inspiration are the foundation of the “system”

“the purpose of art is to force people to be more attentive to each other, soften their hearts, and ennoble their actions.”

Justification is a pragmatic masterstroke, decoupling the given circumstances from motivation. No longer did staging have to flow directly from character.

Meyerhold’s études were little studies of physical action. They had names—“stab with a dagger” was one, “throwing a stone” another—and set movements.

he worried about America specifically: “They say that no one needs art there, they need work, dollars, business. They say that all they need there is vaudeville, beautiful staging with tricks, and most importantly, a spectacle and a beautiful woman.”

Until the end of World War I, plays on Broadway—particularly the ones written by Americans—were largely formulaic affairs. Melodrama ruled America’s stages. The nation’s most successful playwrights churned out readymade genre fare intended to satisfy the audience by giving them exactly what they expected.

Theater grows out of these impulses by giving the audience the mystery of existence refined—perhaps perfected—through art. Or at least it could, if properly created by real artists who shared a common way of working.

It is also likely that from his teaching we get “the beat” as a term of art in acting and writing. Stanislavski called a character’s basic unit of action a “bit.” When the task/problem changes, a new bit begins. Line the bits up, and you have the basic shape of your role, what Stanislavski called the throughline of action. When you feel overwhelmed, all you have to do is focus on the bit immediately in front of you. Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya both used this term. Owing to their thick Russian accents, however, “bit” was heard as “beat.”

We had lost it because landing steady work on Broadway was all actors cared about. Producers, meanwhile, followed the almighty dollar instead of the Muses of antiquity. Theater in America had let itself become a commodity. It needed to be the lifeblood of society.

Cheryl Crawford, meanwhile, had been relegated to a largely executive role. Clurman was a visionary, Strasberg a revolutionary; Crawford had become a functionary, the woman who made the trains run on time for the benefit of male dictators. When she went to Clurman with this problem, he dismissed it as ego on her part. What she needed was to make “her contribution on the basis of her real competence,” which consisted, coincidentally, of the jobs he and Strasberg struggled with and did not want to do. She began to worry she had left a job at the Guild to take a largely unpaid job doing the same work at the Group. The actors noticed her discontent, as well as her lack of feeling for Big Night, which was supposed to be her directorial debut.

According to Adler, Stanislavski said the Group had gotten his “system” wrong. He did not use, and did not think people should use, emotional memory exercises. Problems, action, the given circumstances, and imagination were the keys to the “system.” You got to emotion through them, not the other way around. “If your director … says, please feel [first] and then you will be able to play, tell him ‘when I know how to swim then I will go into the water,’ ” he said. “Can one swim without going into the water? One cannot feel and then do the problem—first act the problem for the physical action and then you will be able to feel.”

The job of the actor became clearer: All you had to do was move from action to action within the given circumstances. Your scene partner did the same. Conflict arose when characters’ task/problems were mutually exclusive.

that a director’s first task is to make his actors eager to play their parts,”

One reason he could be loose and begin with action was that he had well-trained performers who had spent years having their faults burned off by the scorching ray of Strasberg’s uncompromising eye. As Odets put it, “It was very easy for Harold Clurman to direct Awake and Sing … with this company that Lee Strasberg had put together.”

malapropism—the way he’d confuse “congenital” with “congenial,” or believed “idiosyncrasy” was the plural of “idiot.”

They are stand-ins for value systems: not people, but kinds of people.

Strasberg would have us delve into the self, nurture it, develop it in all its strangeness, and then figure out how to use it. Adler taught us to enlarge our soul to fit the job ahead through imagination and rigorous research, worldliness and art. Meisner instructed us to be radically present, to truly listen and respond, to give of ourselves to our partners, and to stop trying to control every outcome.