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Method Acting and the Cold War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Bruce McConachie
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Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , May 2000 , pp. 47 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2000

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References

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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31. Ibid. 355.

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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.

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41. Quoted in Garfield, A Players Place, 45.

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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.

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