The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

The ever-escalating battle for the finite resource of a viewer’s attention encourages both storytelling and acting in which the choices on display are big, simple, and clearly communicated. Modern acting—in Stella Adler’s formulation—evolved to show the fundamental mysteriousness, the inconclusiveness, the insolvability of human beings and their problems in the twentieth century. Now acting and writing head instead toward clarity, worried that a surfeit of mystery and subtext risks committing the cardinal sin of art: boring the audience. While there is a kind of Chekhovian countermovement that journeys farther into mystery, lengthy pauses, seeming plotlessness, and the rhythms and desperations of real life, it is decidedly in the minority. This leads to the postmodern actor’s paradox: At a time when everything feels a little bit inauthentic, we crave simplified, clear acting that presents characters as coherent and easily knowable. We crave, in other words, a comforting lie about who we are.