The Method by Isaac Butler

Author:Isaac Butler [Butler, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub

The decade or so that had passed since the collapse of the Group had done nothing to soften Stella Adler’s or Sanford Meisner’s view of Lee Strasberg. Even though all three teachers were united in their belief in experiencing, Strasberg was, in Stella’s and Sandy’s eyes, a fraud who preached a theory of acting that was as unhealthy as it was unhelpful. As they would tell their classes—or, when asked, reporters—Strasberg’s internalized focus, along with his passion for true emotion, ruined actors.

By the early 1950s, Adler and Meisner had also established themselves as teachers of renown in New York along with Strasberg. All three taught specific, divergent techniques that derived from their encounters with the “system,” the conflicts of the Group Theatre, and their own personalities. If you were a serious-minded young actor in New York, you hoped to study with one of the three as much for their point of view and critical eye as for their brilliant aphorisms and the wisdom gleaned from decades of experience.

This was particularly true of Lee Strasberg. Throughout the twentieth century, people often struggled to articulate in concrete terms what Strasberg taught them. Much of Strasberg’s teaching was based on the specificity of his feedback, the way he scoured clichés from his actors, and the spontaneous wisdom he scattered before his adoring charges. Mike Nichols, who studied with Strasberg in the 1950s, remembered one class in which Lee asked an actress what she was working toward while doing a scene.

“Oh,” the actress responded, “spring, and just the feeling of longing.”

Strasberg’s response came seemingly out of nowhere: “Do you know how to make a fruit salad?” he asked. When she said yes, he asked her how to do it. She described the making of a fruit salad, step by step. Strasberg said, “That’s right. That’s how you make fruit salad … you can sit in front of it for weeks, saying, ‘fruit salad.’ But you will never have fruit salad until you pick up each piece, one at a time.’ ” Nichols described it as “the most useful metaphor I’ve heard for working on a play.” A session with Strasberg was filled with observations like this, little proverbs about the actor’s art, which make up a kind of Apocrypha of the Method.

But Strasberg did teach concrete techniques, the most important of which was a line of interconnected exercises. “They’re meant to get your instrument working,” Estelle Parsons explained. “Like you had a dirty violin, they’re meant to clean it up so it will play well.” The exercises connected you to yourself, to your experience, and to your memories, particularly in their sensory and affective forms. As Patricia Bosworth, a biographer and member of the Studio, explained, the exercises unlocked “that special something inside the actor” to impel him to “come alive on stage.”

You started, much as you would have in the American Lab Theatre, with relaxation and concentration. In Strasberg’s classes you would search your body for muscular tension and release it; in later

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