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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Triumphalist accounts of the spread of “the Method” in post-World War II America generally explain its success as the victory of natural truths over benighted illusions about acting. In Method Actors: Three Generations of An American Acting Style, for instance, Steve Vineberg follows his summary of the primary attributes of “method” acting with the comment: “These concerns weren't invented by Stanislavski or his American successors; they emerged naturally out of the two thousand-year history of Western acting.” Hence, the final triumph of “the Method” was natural, even inevitable. Vineberg's statement, however, raises more questions than it answers. Why did it take two thousand years for actors and theorists of acting to get it right? Or, to localize the explanation to the United States, why did more American actors, directors, and playwrights not jump on the Stanislavski bandwagon and reform the American theatre after the appearance of the Moscow Art Theatre in New York in 1923 and the subsequent lectures and classes from Boleslavski and others? The Group Theatre demonstrated the power of Stanislavski-derived acting techniques in the 1930s, but their substantial successes barely dented the conventional wisdom about acting theory and technique in the professional theatre. Yet, in the late 1940s and early fifties, “method” acting, substantially unchanged from its years in the American Laboratory and Group theatres, took Broadway and Hollywood by storm.
1. Vineberg, Steve,Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 7Google Scholar. For “method” history, see also Adams, Cindy, Lee Strasberg: The Imperfect Genius of the Actors Studio (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980)Google Scholar, Garfield, David, A Players Place: The Story of the Actors Studio (New York: Macmillan, 1980)Google Scholar, and Hirsch, Foster, A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984)Google Scholar.
2. Naremore, James, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 193–212, 278–81Google Scholar.
3. See, for example, the program files at the New York Public Library of Performing Arts on the Broadway Playbills for Picnic (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and J.B. (1959), where Kim Stanley, Ben Gazzara, and Pat Hingle mention the Actors Studio in their brief biographies for those productions.
4. Clurman, , “The Famous Method,” in Lies Like Truth: Theatre Reviews and Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 257Google Scholar.
5. Counsell, Colin, Signs of Performance: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre (London: Routledge, 1997), 66Google Scholar.
6. Conroy, Marianne, “Acting Out: Method Acting, the National Culture, and the Middlebrow Disposition in Cold War America,” Criticism, 35:2 (Spring 1993): 239–264Google Scholar.
7. Dolan, Frederick, Allegories of America: Narratives, Metaphysics, Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 68–69Google Scholar. Dolan draws on Baudrillard's understanding of simulation in his construction of the symbiosis between representation and simulation.
8. Zolotow, Maurice, “The Stars Rise Here,” Saturday Evening Post (18 May 1957): 84Google Scholar.
9. Lhamon, W.T. Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 140–141Google Scholar.
10. On Strasberg, see the previous books by Adams, , Garfield, , Hirsch, , and Vineberg, , Strasberg, plus Lee, A Dream of Passion: The Development of The Method (New York: New American Library, 1987)Google Scholar; Hethmon, Robert, ed. Strasberg at The Actors Studio (New York: Viking Press, 1965)Google Scholar; and the “Strasberg Clipping File,” NYPL of Performing Arts.
11. Quoted in Vineberg, Method Actors, 104.
12. Quoted in Hirsch, Method to Their Madness, 167.
13. Strasberg, Dream of Passion, 19.
14. See Hobgood, Burnet M., “Central Conceptions in Stanislavski's System,” Educational Theatre Journal, 25(1973): 149–150CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15. See Carnicke, Sharon Marie, Stanislavsky in Focus (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1998), 55–91Google Scholar, for a full description of this process and the changes that resulted in the ideas attributed to Stanislavski in the United States due to the vagaries of their oral and written transmission.
16. Stanislavski, however, did not consistently hold to this point of view. See, for example, Worthen's, W.B. comments on Stanislavski in The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of Performance (Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 1984), 145–153Google Scholar. Schmitt, Natalie Crohn, Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, on the other hand, emphasizes Stanislavski's allegiance to the playwright's authority as the source of representation. So, too, does Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 35–91.
17. Quoted in Hirsch, Method To Their Madness, 133.
18. Ibid. 223.
19. Ibid. 112.
20. Ibid. 227.
21. Brustein, Robert, “The Keynes of Times Square,” New Republic (1 December 1962): 28Google Scholar.
22. Quoted in Adams, Lee Strasberg, 207.
23. “Drama Mailbag,” New York Times [partial date only, 1956], [n.p.], “Strasberg Clipping File,” NYPL of Performing Arts.
24. Quoted in Adams, Lee Strasberg, 218.
25. Dyer, Richard, “‘A Star Is Born’ and the Construction of Authenticity,” in Gledhill, Christine, ed. Stardom: Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991), 133Google Scholar.
26. Quoted in Hirsch, Method to Their Madness, 205–06.
27. See Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1960)Google Scholar. “If the end of ideology has any meaning,” wrote Bell at the start of the 1960s, “it is to ask for the end of rhetoric, and rhetoricians, of ‘revolution’ … (406–07).
28. On professionalism, see Abbott, Andrew, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Also useful are Haskell, Thomas L., The Emergence of Professional Social Science (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1977)Google Scholar, and Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 385–390Google Scholar. Among the external criteria Abbott lists as necessary to constitute a “profession” are “governmentally sponsored licensing legislation” and “professional examinations” (16), neither of which American acting has ever had.
29. Variety (8 December 1947), 4. Variety's coverage of the 1947 HUAC hearings was extensive and fairly accurate. See the following dates of the show business weekly during the Fall of 1947: 17 September, 29 October, 5 November, 26 November, 3 December, and 10 December.
30. Navasky, Victor, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980), 348Google Scholar. See also Vaughn, Robert F., Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1972)Google Scholar.
31. Ibid. 355.
32. Malden, Karl, When Do I Start (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 213, 217Google Scholar.
33. Cited by May, Lary, “Movie Star Politics: The Screen Actors' Guild, Cultural Conversion, and the Hollywood Red Scare,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, ed. May, Lary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 146Google Scholar.
34. Kaufman, Wolfe, “Actors Studio Makes Its Bow on Broadway,” New York Times (5 September 1948), 2:1Google Scholar.
35. Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction; A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans., Nice, Richard (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. Press, 1984), 53–56Google Scholar.
36. See Hirsch, Method to Their Madness, 203–204 and Vineberg, Method Actors, 249–73, on Jason Robards, Jr.
37. Quoted in Hirsch,Method to Their Madness, 123.
38. Quoted in Hethmon, Strasberg at the Actors Studio, 395.
39. On the cold war liberal consensus, see McAuliffe, Mary Sperling, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals. 1947–1954 (University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst, Massachusetts, 1978)Google Scholar, and Hodgson, Godfrey, America in Our Time (New York: Vintage, 1976), 67–98Google Scholar. Such cold war liberals as Arthur Schleshinger, Jr., President Harry Truman, and Leslie Fiedler expressed opinions close to those of Strasberg's. Others, such as C. Wright Mills, dissented from this consensus.
40. See Berkovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar.
41. Quoted in Garfield, A Players Place, 45.
42. On the widespread assimilation of European “ethnics” during the 1950s, see Polenberg, Richard, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since 1938 (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 86–163Google Scholar.
43. Redgrave, Michael, “To Be or Not To Be Me: Notes on ‘The Method,’” in Mask or Face: Reflections in an Actor's Mirror (London: Heinemann, 1958), 63Google Scholar.
44. Quoted in Hirsch, Method to Their Madness, 219.
45. Kazan, Elia, Elia Kazan: A Life (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 467–468Google Scholar.
