The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

By Isaac Butler

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Nonfiction

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER, TIME MAGAZINE, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, VOX, SALON, LIT HUB, AND VANITY FAIR

“Entertaining and illuminating.”--The New Yorker * “Compulsively readable.”--New York Times * “Delicious, humane, probing.”--Vulture * “The best and most important book about acting I've ever read.”--Nathan Lane

The critically acclaimed cultural history of Method acting-an ebullient account of creative discovery and the birth of classic Hollywood.

On stage and screen, we know a great performance when we see it. But how do actors draw from their bodies and minds to turn their selves into art? What is the craft of being an authentic fake? More than a century ago, amid tsarist Russia's crushing repression, one of the most talented actors ever, Konstantin Stanislavski, asked these very questions, reached deep into himself, and emerged with an answer. How his “system” remade itself into the Method and forever transformed American theater and film is an unlikely saga that has never before been fully told.

Now, critic and theater director Isaac Butler chronicles the history of the Method in a narrative that transports readers from Moscow to New York to Los Angeles, from The Seagull to A Streetcar Named Desire to Raging Bull. He traces how a cohort of American mavericks--including Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and the storied Group Theatre--refashioned Stanislavski's ideas for a Depression-plagued nation that had yet to find its place as an artistic powerhouse. The Group's feuds and rivalries would, in turn, shape generations of actors who enabled Hollywood to become the global dream-factory it is today. Some of these performers the Method would uplift; others, it would destroy. Long after its midcentury heyday, the Method lives on as one of the most influential--and misunderstood--ideas in American culture.

Studded with marquee names--from Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Elia Kazan, to James Baldwin, Ellen Burstyn, and Dustin Hoffman--The Method is a spirited history of ideas and a must-read for any fan of Broadway or American film.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781635574784

Isaac Butler

Isaac Butler is the coauthor (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, which NPR named one of the best books of 2018. Butler's writing has appeared in New York magazine, Slate, the Guardian, American Theatre, and other publications. For Slate, he created and hosted Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts Working, a podcast about the creative process. His work as a director has been seen on stages throughout the United States. He is the co-creator, with Darcy James Argue and Peter Nigrini, of Real Enemies, a multimedia exploration of conspiracy theories in the American psyche, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times and has been adapted into a feature-length film. Butler holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and teaches theater history and performance at the New School and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

Book preview

Cover: The Method by Isaac Butler

Praise for The Method

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Vox, Salon, and Literary Hub

Engaging and meticulously researched … Like a good 19th-century omniscient novelist, Butler hops seamlessly among his characters’ points of view while recounting their lives and times … An indispensable account of a revolution in acting that ramified beyond the theater.

—Los Angeles Times

Lively, well-researched and marvelously readable … A rich book, highly entertaining but also gratifyingly specific, about the point of connection between actor and observer, the lightning flash between us and them.

—Time magazine

Thoroughly engrossing … Makes an airtight case for the Method as an artistic revolution on par with other mid-century advances.

—The Boston Globe

It’s hard to believe that a style of performance developed amid the turbulence of revolutionary Russia would change Hollywood forever, but Butler makes a compulsively readable case for just that in this ‘biography’ of Method acting.

—The New York Times

Delicious, humane, probing … A cultural history that reaches beyond its immediate subject to point at the currents moving under America herself

—Vulture

Intense, deeply researched, historically alert, well-written, eminently readable (and gossipy).

—The Wall Street Journal

Butler accomplishes what the Method’s devotees sought to do in their performances, bringing color and dimension to figures who might have been boxed into archetypal roles (omniscient godhead or exploitative charlatan) and presenting them to us in all their brilliant, infuriating complexity.

—Bookforum

Meticulous, immersive.

—The Atlantic

Pitch-perfect.

—San Francisco Chronicle

Butler knows how to liven up history by focusing on human personalities and foibles … He never fails to find the humor and humanity in his subjects.

—Salon

Expertly and exactingly told … Clearly parses the murky divisions that continue to define the Method, then and today.

—The A.V. Club

Intelligent and entertaining … Butler’s appreciation of acting—and art in general—as an expression of the temper of its times brings welcome insights.

—American Theatre

What a production! … A print-form master class in the Method.

—Shelf Awareness

Elegantly written, filled with remarkable detail and incisive commentary, Isaac Butler’s sweeping historical epic is the literary equivalent of an irresistible binge-watch, propelled by emotional twists and turns, surprising cliffhangers, and a cast of the greatest actors, directors, writers, and teachers of the last two centuries. The fact that he has done all that while also writing what I think is the best and most important book about acting I’ve ever read is a major achievement. This is an essential book for anyone in the acting profession as well as for anyone who’s ever wondered ‘How did they learn all those lines?’

—Nathan Lane

"Butler is the perfect guide—brilliant, insightful, and slyly funny—through the long life of contemporary performance. The Method, like its subject, is forceful, restless, and, above all, real."

—Vinson Cunningham, theater critic, The New Yorker

An intoxicating mix of history, illuminating character studies, delicious gossip, and a persuasive and revelatory argument about how the Method has been used, abused, and misunderstood. Essential reading, glorious reading.

—Megan Abbott, screenwriter and bestselling author of The Turnout

A brilliant book that brims with exuberance, compassion and—of course—a keen eye for the dramatic.

—Glenn Frankel, author of Shooting Midnight Cowboy

Riveting and comprehensive. A narrative one doesn’t simply read, but experiences.

—Caseen Gaines, author of Footnotes

"The Method is erudite and deeply researched, but it’s also vibrant, energetic, accessible, and often very funny—rich with personalities and packed with insight."

—Mark Harris, bestselling author of Mike Nichols: A Life and Pictures at a Revolution

Vividly recreates a fascinating moment of time, filled with creativity, rivalry, artistry, and absurdity, that profoundly transformed American film and theater, with reverberations still being felt today.

—William J. Mann, author of The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

A rich, rollicking dive into one of the most influential philosophies of the century.

—Emily Nussbaum, author of I Like to Watch

A compulsively readable cultural history … I was entertained and enlightened!

—Julie Salamon, author of The Devil’s Candy and Wendy and the Lost Boys

To Anne, for more than words can express

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America with Dan Kois

CONTENTS

Introduction

ACT ONE: THE KINGDOM OF DREAMS

Chapter 1: The Only Way to Save Art

Chapter 2: New Answers to the Problems of Living

Chapter 3: The Frenzied Waltz

Chapter 4: The Superconscious through the Conscious

Chapter 5: The Stanislavski Sickness

Chapter 6: I Need a New Theatre

Chapter 7: Do You Know the Secrets of Art?

ACT TWO: TOGETHERNESS

Chapter 8: No Hack Actors

Chapter 9: The Coming of a New Religion

Chapter 10: I Am Passionate About This Thing!!

Chapter 11: It Makes You Weep

Chapter 12: We All Thought He Was God

Chapter 13: A New Inner Man

Chapter 14: The Life of a Prostitute Is Pretty Comfortable

Chapter 15: Your Secret Self

Chapter 16: Our Kind of Actors

ACT THREE: A MONSTROUS THING

Chapter 17: It Was Murder

Chapter 18: Slice-of-Life

Chapter 19: Softness and Self-Indulgence

Chapter 20: Truth, My Ass

Chapter 21: It’s Been a Terrible Evening

Chapter 22: How Do We Do All Our Stuff in Front of That Machinery?

Chapter 23: That Level of Being Real

Chapter 24: All the Means of Expression

Afterword: The Method and the Future

Plate Section

Acknowledgments

Dramatis Personae

Notes

Bibliography

Image Credits

Index

The great secret … for moving the passions is to be moved ourselves; for the imitation of grief, anger, indignation, will be often ridiculous, if conforming only our words and countenance, our heart at the same time is estranged from them.

—Quintilian, First Century C.E.

We’re actors. We’re the opposite of people.

—The Player King, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD, Tom Stoppard

INTRODUCTION

Acting is a curious thing. Practically anyone who watches Hollywood movies—which is to say pretty much everyone—spends a staggering amount of time talking and thinking about actors. We know intimate details of their private lives. We look to them to speak out about the issues of the day. We evaluate them constantly and festoon the better ones with a trunkload of different prizes. Yet when pressed to explain what good acting actually is, we usually struggle. Even we critics, who are supposed to be in the discussing-art-in-depth business, often rely on a basic shorthand of convincing or bravura or charismatic or well observed. Sorting out what makes for a good performance can be like struggling to escape quicksand without the aid of a handy tree branch. Instead, most of us are more likely to follow Justice Potter Stewart’s famous adage about obscenity: We know good acting when we see it.

But how do we see it? Acting is contextual, of course. Moonstruck wouldn’t work without Nicolas Cage, but if you yanked his performance out of it and plunked it down in The Remains of the Day, the result would be risible. Nevertheless, most of us carry around a set of assumptions about what makes for good acting, independent of whatever we happen to be watching at that moment. We want performances that feel lived in—ones in which actors reveal characters’ psychology through subtle gestures and little facial expressions rather than indicating what they’re thinking and feeling. We want emotions that appear genuinely felt, not technically re-created. We want actors to remain in character and not to comment on what they’re doing. In most cases, they shouldn’t really seem aware of the audience at all. We want to feel as if the actors have on some level become the characters, collapsing the distance between the role on the page and themselves. Unless the style of the project calls for something radically different, what we crave is authenticity. We want psychological and emotional truth.

Take, for example, an actor like Frances McDormand. Over the course of her career, McDormand has shown a remarkable versatility, on both stage and screen. In the theater, she performed frequently with the Wooster Group, one of the most important avant-garde stage companies of the twentieth century, but she’s also acted to great acclaim in realistic plays by writers like Tennessee Williams and Clifford Odets. In the meantime, she’s built a career as a prolific and gifted film and television actor, and she is second only to Katharine Hepburn in the number of Best Actress Oscars she’s received. Her performances—even when pushed to the stylistic limit in films like Burn After Reading—feel specific, and rooted in psychology, which she has called the bottom line of it all.

This was true even in her first film role, as Abby in Blood Simple, a part she landed shortly after graduating from the Yale School of Drama. Abby is a deceptively difficult character to play; she’s the center of the film, the battleground over which the male characters fight, but she has few lines. Instead, the role calls for constant reacting. The camera lingers on her face as she tries to piece together what is happening and how she should respond. It’s a role with few of the big moments we usually associate with great performances. An actor possessed with a keener sense of vanity would try to call attention to all of this, but McDormand’s performance is clean, simple. She serves the material, and she makes Abby feel like a real human being.

By McDormand’s own account, she struggled playing Abby. She had never been on a film set before. The technical demands of performing in that environment are very different from those of the stage. You must position your body precisely for the camera, which is in some ways your real scene partner. There’s also a jigsaw puzzle aspect to acting on film: In a play, you perform the role from beginning to end every night. In a film, you usually shoot a role out of order, and you are often called upon to hit emotional highs on command again and again and again.

Blood Simple’s final action sequence posed particular emotional and technical challenges for McDormand. In it, M. Emmet Walsh’s grotesque private investigator Visser has come to kill Abby and her lover, Ray (John Getz), but Abby thinks the man hunting them is her husband, Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya). She sees Ray gunned down, and then, in terror, runs to his body, grabs a knife out of his pocket, and dashes to the bathroom to hide. McDormand had not read the scene closely enough to realize its emotional content, and she felt unprepared on the day of shooting. "I was like ‘Oh fuck. I’ve got to be—I must be hysterical. I’ve got to figure out how to do it fast, and then do it all day.’ She recalled an exercise from graduate school in which a classmate held on to her from behind while she struggled to get free until it had driven me insane. She asked someone on set to grab her and not let her go no matter what she did, until director Joel Coen called Action."

The results are in the film for a few brief seconds. McDormand, suffused with rage and grief to the point of hysteria, scrambles in a panic through the space and into the bathroom. When she heard Coen call Cut, she suddenly realized I was going to have to keep it up all day. She crawled under a table on set, trying to recover and protect herself. Joel Coen crawled under there with her, and calmly explained the next shot they needed, before simply asking her if she was okay. The day proceeded like this—McDormand performing at the height of emotion, retreating beneath a table, being coached by Joel Coen—before they finally got to a shot that, as he explained, was simply of her hands and wouldn’t require her to maintain the intensity she’d brought to the rest of the day’s work.

That’s when I started realizing I had to have a system that did not require me staying in an altered state under a table somewhere, McDormand said. It was unsustainable, and it was embarrassing … It’s also when [Coen] learned how to direct actors, too, because that was not going to be sustainable for him. The day’s shooting became the origin story of her mastery of film acting. It was also the origin story of her relationship with her director, with whom she fell in love that day. The two married in 1984, the year of Blood Simple’s release.

What McDormand needed to develop was a technique that would allow her to authentically experience the emotions and psychology of her character while maintaining control over the results. There’s a really deep well of experience and emotional facility, McDormand explained, but it has to have a really tight lid. You have to be able to get the lid off when you need it and dip down into the well, but you can’t keep it open all the time or you won’t survive … the trauma of bringing it back.

This is a challenge familiar to actors at every level of the industry in America today. But if you were to build a time machine, go back eighty years or so, and show people McDormand’s films while telling them about her struggles to use real emotion, they might very well find the whole experience baffling. Why, they might ask, would you want to really experience what your character is going through? Why would you think Olive Kitteridge or Nomadland—with their colloquial, often half-articulated American vernacular and revelation of character through subtle gestures—was good? What’s the point of all of this versatility she’s worked hard to display throughout her career?

It’s not that the films and performances of classic Hollywood are worse than what came after—it’s impossible to feel that way if you’ve ever watched Barbara Stanwyck or Cary Grant—but they are different. They obey different rules, different ideas about what a good film is, about what makes for a good performance. Something happened to overturn that old order, a revolution in how we think about acting. In the United States in the 1950s, that revolution was called the Method, and while McDormand is not by most definitions a Method actor, the Method created both a system of norms and a stylistic and technical lineage from which she descends. Like her predecessors, she lives in New York, not Los Angeles; she avoids typecasting; she loves acting for the stage; and she studied an American adaptation of the theories and practices of the Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski.

Stanislavski’s ideas—and the Moscow Art Theatre, which he co-founded in the 1890s—upended hundreds of years of conventional wisdom about what acting was supposed to be, first in Russia and then in the United States. At the heart of Stanislavski’s revolution was the concept of perezhivanie, which, loosely translated, means something like experiencing, or perhaps re-experiencing. Perezhivanie occurs when an actor is so connected to the truth of a role, and has so thoroughly entered into the imaginary reality of the character, that they feel what the character feels, perhaps even think what the character thinks. Experiencing does not mean to fully become the character, or to lose sight of the self. Instead, the actor’s living consciousness and the fictional consciousness of the part they are playing meet. To Stanislavski, perezhivanie, which he also called living the part, was the highest ideal, the artistic mountaintop that all acting strove to reach.

For much of human history, however, perezhivanie in acting was undesirable. As far back as Plutarch, writers have been warning us against experiencing. In Why We Delight in Representation, Plutarch wrote that an actor who is really affected with grief or anger presents us with nothing but the common bare passion, but in the imitation some dexterity and persuasiveness appears. Therefore, the former makes us uncomfortable, whilst the latter delights us. Not only is perezhivanie discomfiting, Plutarch believed; it could also be dangerous. He relates the story of a Roman actor who once became so transported beyond himself in the heat of action that he struck with his scepter one of the servants who was running across the stage, so violently that he laid him dead upon the place.

From the time of ancient Athens until the late nineteenth century, many agreed with Plutarch and disdained perezhivanie. Acting was supposed to be mostly technical. After all, the thinking went, was not experiencing the character’s state of being a kind of madness? Was there not something cheap and vulgar about it? How could an actor swept away in the experience of a part remember their lines or their blocking, or, as Plutarch mentioned, avoid harming their co-workers?

During the Enlightenment, experiencing’s irrationality made it an easy target, particularly for the French philosopher Denis Diderot. In his unfinished dialogue The Paradox of the Actor, Diderot argued that rationality and control were the key to great performances. Extreme sensibility makes middling actors, he wrote; middling sensibility makes the ruck of bad actors; in complete absence of sensibility is the possibility of a sublime actor.

The style of acting that most aligned with Diderot’s views was called the symbolic style. It was presentational, not realistic. Using pure technique, actors performed highly conventionalized physical and vocal gestures that represented the emotions. Acting education involved the training of one’s voice and body and the learning of the proper way to deliver specific kinds of text, usually through imitating an instructor. The greatest of these actors was the nineteenth-century French thespian Sarah Bernhardt, whose grand performances and eccentric offstage antics were the stuff of legend during her lifetime. Today, owing to the highly contingent and socially determined nature of how we think about acting, she’s often treated as a joke.

Stanislavski’s ideas about acting did not come out of nowhere, however. Running alongside—or perhaps underneath—the dominant symbolic style was another one, founded on and dedicated to experiencing. Aulus Gellius, who lived shortly after Plutarch, tells us of an Athenian actor named Polus, who had been tasked with playing Electra in the eponymous tragedy by Sophocles. One scene of the play requires Electra to lament and bewail her dead brother Orestes while holding an urn filled with his ashes. To pull this moment off, Polus used an urn holding the actual ashes of his dead son and filled the whole place not with the appearance and imitation of sorrow but with genuine grief and unfeigned lamentation. There have always been actors who followed in Polus’s footsteps. One of them, the Italian tragedienne Eleonora Duse, became Sarah Bernhardt’s chief late-career rival. Duse’s style of acting—dubbed verismo, or realism—was filled with unexpected pauses and unconventional line readings. Duse was known for occasionally turning her back to the audience if the moment demanded it, or speaking so quietly the crowd had trouble hearing her. She was, for the champions of perezhivanie, perhaps the greatest actor in the history of the world, a lodestar guiding Stanislavski and all who followed him.

Over the course of his career, Stanislavski inverted Diderot’s hierarchy of acting. He dismissed the symbolic style as hackwork, a series of clichés that one could literally learn from a textbook. The best actors, he argued, were the ones who had the greatest sensibility. Talent, to Stanislavski, was an actor’s capacity to experience. Yet at times his own talent deserted him. He faced the same problem that everyone from Polus onward had: There was no way to summon experiencing on demand. Inspiration might be the key to great acting, but how do you control something as mercurial and ineffable as inspiration?

This book tells the story of how Stanislavski and the artists who followed his teachings solved this problem. (A list of many of those artists may be found in a dramatis personae at the end of the book.) Or, depending on whom you ask, failed to solve it. It is also the story of how those teachings evolved into a set of techniques that Stanislavski dubbed the system, and how this system, in part because of the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war, traveled to the United States, where it transformed into the Method. During the course of that transformation, the Method in turn changed how Americans think about acting—first onstage during the Great Depression, then on film in the postwar era. Along the way, it ushered in a whole series of new ideas about the nature and purpose of art, about acting and writing and directing, that revolutionized American popular culture. From its very beginnings, the system was controversial, and was considered quite possibly dangerous. The fights over the system and the Method—over what Stanislavski really taught and whether it has any value—have never ended. Perhaps they never will. So this book is also the story of a century of arguments, hashed out in rehearsal halls and gossip columns, on Hollywood sets and in the chambers of Congress, about what it means to be a good actor. By moving the focus of acting away from types of people and toward specific individuals, away from externalities and toward interiority, away from representation and toward ideas of authenticity and personal truth, the Method challenged norms about not only what it meant to be a good actor but what it meant to be a human being.

By the time I encountered the Method in the mid-1990s, it had entered a period of decline from which it has not emerged. I doubt that the people teaching me would even have used the term the Method unless they were speaking with disdain. The Method has many definitions, but to instructors of stage acting, it refers very specifically to the techniques and values taught by Lee Strasberg, the most famous and prominent adapter of Stanislavski’s ideas in the English-speaking world. By the 1990s, many of the other Stanislavski-influenced schools thought Strasberg was a dangerous charlatan, so instead, I simply studied Principles of Realism and Character and Emotion as a teenager at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. I started taking classes there because I was a child professional actor. I had been in a couple of local musicals and plays, and Joy Zinoman, the Studio’s indomitable founder, thought I would benefit from adult-level acting instruction. She had been urging me to take acting more seriously ever since my thirteenth birthday, when she gave me a copy of Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons, the first English-language book to explain Stanislavski’s approach in detail.

In Character and Emotion, we had each been tasked with bringing in an object that held a strong emotional attachment for us. We were then to tell the class about our object and why it was important. There were two goals behind this exercise. First, the class would be able to observe how strong emotion actually worked, as opposed to the clichéd ways we indicated emotion onstage. The other purpose was to help us find potential keys to unlock our emotions so we could use them in our work. One man brought in the cane of his recently deceased father. Another, his wedding ring. He was HIV+, and his relationship with another man could not be legally recognized, so in case his health rapidly declined, they wanted to codify what they meant to each other. I brought in the obituary of a friend, a man who had worked at the Studio Theatre and died of AIDS the year before. I was seventeen. While speaking of my friend’s death, I became so overwhelmed that I sobbed, and gasped, and lost all track of how long I had been talking. Nancy, our wonderful teacher, cut the exercise short. I can see, she said with warm finality, that this is a very powerful object for you.

During the exercise I had re-experienced an extreme emotional state. If I could learn how to control it and funnel it into my work, the thinking went, it could aid me in my own search for perezhivanie. It would help me join the ranks of good actors stretching back to Polus and his urn. But it was never to be. A couple of years later, while working on another play in college, I retreated so deep into the recesses of my own personal darkness that I had trouble emerging. After performances, I would stare at a wall in my dorm room for hours trying to come back to normal. It got so bad that a friend of mine told me she was worried about me after watching me perform in the show. I was worried too. I hated the person I became during rehearsal as the nastiness of the character bled into my own personality, and I was not tough enough to manage the emotions my performance dug into. Since this was what I thought real acting demanded of me, I quit, and took up directing.

I was not the first person for whom Stanislavski’s techniques had proved dangerous, nor would I be the last. That experience left me with many questions and few answers. Questions like: What did Stanislavski really believe and teach? Did the Method destroy American acting, or usher in its golden age? How does cultural change this massive even happen in the first place?

My attempt to answer these questions led me here, to the book you’re about to read.

---

When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumblings toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline. Some people even claim that it is dead.

The biographical approach also created a structure through which the arc of the Method’s century-long development, emergence, and explosion to widespread prominence could be brought together in one narrative. There are many books dedicated to explaining the various post-Stanislavski methods or litigating the doctrinal schisms between various teachers. There are individual biographies of people important to the Method’s history. Many of these books are wonderful, and, as the bibliography in the back of this one makes clear, The Method would not have been possible without them. But they do not make the Method the protagonist in its own story. I wondered what would emerge if you did, particularly if you placed the Method in its broader cultural context in order to see the remarkable, transformative, chaotic, and controversial life it led. What new ways of seeing the Method and its era might emerge?

One thing that became clear was that the Method and especially Stanislavski’s system were perfect models for the delicate dance between individuals and their contexts that creates cultural change. Particular artists and their work move our culture forward, but they arise only because of and within a given environment, one they both respond to and transform with their art. Previous generations looked at the story of the Method as one of dueling larger-than-life geniuses. There are plenty of those in this story, and their peculiarities absolutely shaped the Method’s conception and development. But the Method’s story is also the story of its era. Acting evolves in response to technological change, and political currents, and the needs of audiences to see certain kinds of people.

Stanislavski liked to claim that he was merely observing great actors and codifying their habits into a series of exercises. Stanislavski doth protest too much, methinks. It is unlikely that the system or the Method would exist without him. But this is not only because he was a great artist, and a serious thinker, and a lay scholar of the actor’s art. It is also because he was independently wealthy, and because Russia in the twilight of the Romanovs hungered for a kind of truth that the State refused to provide. Stanislavski likely would never have seen the necessity of the system if Russia hadn’t had a far longer and more robust tradition of realist art than other nations, or if censorship hadn’t severely limited which plays could be performed, or if theaters weren’t getting smaller and more brightly lit. His vision of acting was heavily shaped by other artists of his time, and also by his Russian Orthodox faith. His way of writing about acting, and even the drive to systematize it, arose in part because he lived in an era of great scientific development. Lee Strasberg’s adaptations of those theories were in turn shaped not only by his encyclopedic knowledge of the theater but also by his difficulty relating to other people, by his being a Jewish immigrant to the United States, by the business realities of Broadway, by shifts in American art during the Great Depression, and by the emerging popularity of psychology and psychoanalytic theory.

We tend to think about the Method as some goofy hocus-pocus that actors, particularly the more self-important ones, get up to in order to do their job. Or, as someone seated across from me at a wedding once explained to his husband after he heard what my forthcoming book was about, it’s remembering the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to you in order to make yourself cry. But the Method is much, much more. To theorize about acting is to theorize about what a human being is and how a human being works. It is to theorize about what good art is and how good art is made. Denis Diderot, as a soldier of the Enlightenment, needed a rational model of acting to reflect his rational model of human nature. In America in the 1950s, a time of great pressure to conform, the Method showed that we were not rational, but repressed. Its model of the human was one in which roiling seas of emotion and discontent lay beneath all of our frozen, placid surfaces.

The Method is not merely an acting theory, or a reliable way to cry on cue. It is a transformative, revolutionary, modernist art movement, one of the Big Ideas of the twentieth century. Like atonality in music, or modernism in architecture, or abstraction in art, the system and the Method brought forth a new way of conceiving of human experience, one that changed how we look at the world, and at ourselves. We live today in the world—and with the aesthetic taste—that the Method helped usher in.

Like many of the twentieth century’s Big Ideas, there was something romantic, beautiful, compelling about the system and its disciples. They had cracked some code, some way of creating art that was more alive and spoke to the human condition in a more direct and urgent way. In the beginning, it was hopeful, generative, inspiring. But both the system and the Method could create as many problems as they solved, particularly when wielded by dogmatists who thought that there was only one right way to get to the truth.

When ideals intersect with reality, disappointment and heartache will always result. Stanislavski knew this, which is why he loved art so much, with its ability to take real-life experience and purify it, turning it into something more beautiful and more meaningful. But it is also why he could never be content with the art he made, or the theories he devised, or the way they were implemented. The Method ultimately created standards that no one could live up to, and for some of the people who believed in it, the unrelenting pressure of these standards proved impossible to bear.

But before all of that could happen, a number of unlikely events had to occur. Two men who barely knew each other had to meet and decide to create a theater together. They had to raise the money for it, and enlist actors who would be open to their approach. They had to pry scripts out of the tight grip of the tsar’s censors, and they had to produce box office hits. One of them had to weather a crisis of confidence in his own work. A revolution had to occur in politics that would drive their revolution in art across the Atlantic to the United States. All of these events, and all the ones that followed, were contingent. In many ways, the odds were against the Method’s developing at all.

So to see what the Method is, we have to go back to that beginning. We have to go to a study in the Ekaterinoslav steppes where a playwright and teacher named Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, having reached a turning point in his career, decided to write a letter, one that would divert the stream of culture in a new direction, changing the course of art in the Western world.

ACT ONE

The Kingdom of Dreams

The behind-the-scenes existence of actors is always tremulous, always tense, and everything comes together—the joy, and the tears, and the exasperation.

The kingdom of dreams. The power over the crowd.

—Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, My Life in the Russian Theatre

CHAPTER 1

The Only Way to Save Art

The revolution began quietly, with an awkward note sent between near strangers on June 7, 1897. Are you in Moscow? … I drafted a huge, great letter to you but as I shall be in Moscow I shan’t send it … If this letter finds you out of Moscow then I’ll send the long one I wrote earlier. But where to? The sender was a man named Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Behind his scrim of jovial self-deprecation, Nemirovich had something urgent on his mind, something so important it had to be described in person. He wanted nothing less than total transformation—of his job, his future, and the nature of Russian theater. But he knew he couldn’t do it alone.

Over the past few years, Nemirovich had become dissatisfied with his life. By any outward measure, it was a good one. He was one of the most respected and popular theater professionals in the country, a leading light among the intelligentsia, Russia’s caste-transcending group of learned individuals who shaped its culture. He had steady employment teaching aspiring actors at the Philharmonic School, and his plays were staples of the Maly Theatre, the most prestigious of the state-run imperial stages. He had won prizes, the praise of his colleagues, and the friendship of many of the greatest writers and artists of his day.

Yet, if he was honest with himself, he knew that he risked settling into the comfortable life accorded to mediocrities. No one read more plays than Nemirovich, no one had more knowledge of how a play worked, but all he saw around him were plays not working. Everything was conventional—a weary, stale, flat, and artistically unprofitable recitation of familiar gestures in front of familiar sets. Some of his acting students were brilliant, but many came to class only to pick up girls. His prizewinning, technically exquisite plays lacked the spark of life, that certain something, almost impossible to describe, that separated a dance of automatons from real drama.

If you couldn’t find life in the theater, what was the use in making it? Even the Maly, which had been his theatrical home, had sunk beneath the rising tide of cliché engulfing Russia’s stages. Actors mostly declaimed their lines, trying to impress the audience with oratorical displays instead of playing their parts. When trying to be naturalistic, they imitated better actors from the previous generation. Theatrical convention had so taken root that even outstanding artists suffered when they tried to resist it. No one had been a greater victim of this cultural stagnation than Nemirovich’s close friend Anton Chekhov, whom Vladimir revered above all other writers. Chekhov had written a play a few years prior that was so poorly received, he swore never to write for the stage again even if he lived to be seven hundred years old. Chekhov thought the problem was his own ineptitude, but Nemirovich knew the fault lay with the Russian stage. Only great reforms, he felt, would lead to the kind of theater that was worthy of a writer of Chekhov’s genius.

The problems were vast, but the paths forward were clear: Either he could reform the Maly—if they’d agree to let him—or he could start his own company dedicated to burning away the old with the sunlight of the new. Neither path was easy, however. The Maly was unlikely to be receptive to a jeremiad about its declining standards, and there was no way he could start a company by himself. Nemirovich knew how to run a theatrical administration, and he had vast practical and theoretical knowledge of playwriting, but he had little directing experience. The management of spectacle, the transformation of the inner life of a play into design and performance—these aspects of the art did not come easily to him.

But he knew of one man to whom they came readily: Konstantin Sergeievich Alekseiev, the addressee of his letter. Alekseiev was younger, and an amateur, but he was no dilettante. He had proved himself the peer of any professional with several productions mounted by the Society of Art and Literature, a company he had founded in Moscow. Although they had never worked together, Alekseiev had staged one of Nemirovich’s plays in a production that blended professional actors with his regular troupe of amateurs. Nemirovich respected Alekseiev as both an actor and a director, and he recognized that the man’s heart beat with the pulse of a true artist.

Nemirovich was not alone. The press openly speculated about Alekseiev’s future. He was too talented, too dedicated, to remain outside the industry with his intrepid gang of nonprofessionals forever. Although he was only thirty-four, Alekseiev was already something of a serial impresario, founding organizations left and right. Just a few months earlier, the newspaper Russkaia misl (Russian Thought) had reported on a conversation between Alekseiev and Chekhov about creating a new theater. Perhaps, Nemirovich thought, Alekseiev was the partner he was looking for. And perhaps, given his extraordinary wealth, Alekseiev could underwrite their venture himself.

Ten days passed. Nemirovich heard nothing. He sent a visiting card with a second invitation to meet scrawled on the back. Finally Nemirovich received a telegram. Yes, they could meet. A date was set: June 22, 1897. They would dine at the Slavic Bazaar.

Now all that remained was to wait for his meeting with Konstantin Sergeievich Alekseiev, better known by his stage name, Konstantin Stanislavski.

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In his memoir My Life in Art, written nearly thirty years after he received Nemirovich’s letters, Stanislavski would portray his life as a series of epiphanies about art and truth, punctuated by false starts and failures, stretching back to his childhood, when he first fell in love with the stage. He discovered theater the way many children do, by acting in playlets he put on with his siblings, reveling in the possibilities of make-believe and in the attention it garnered from grownups. But as a young boy on his family’s estate in Lyubimovka, Konstantin could never have dreamed of making a life on the stage or starting a professional theater company.

For one thing, there were no privately run professional theater companies in Moscow during his childhood. The State exercised a near total monopoly on public performances in Moscow and St. Petersburg until 1882 in order to control what a mostly illiterate public was allowed to learn. But even if a theater career had been possible, Konstantin’s family expected him to fulfill his duty and take over the Alekseievs’ business concerns upon his father’s death. No one seems certain where the family money originally came from, but by the time of Konstantin’s birth in 1863, the Alekseievs were powerful manufacturers of gold and silver thread, part of a new ascendant merchant-industrialist class in Moscow.

The advent of the railroads transformed Moscow over the course of the nineteenth century. Moscow’s location within Russia made it an ideal hub for the rail lines spiderwebbing across the land, and a sleepy city that had doubled as cold storage for out-of-favor nobles became the heart of Russian commerce. Moscow’s industrialists—the Alekseievs among them—eclipsed the nobility in wealth, but they imitated the cultural habits of their social betters. Konstantin’s parents were no exception, funding charities and educating their children in painting, theater, and opera.

Art filled young Konstantin’s days. His cousin by marriage was a Muscovite railway baron named Savva Mamontov, one of the most important arts patrons in the country. In Moscow, Konstantin Sergeievich would make costumes at Mamontov’s house; in the country, he would travel from the Alekseiev estate at Lyubimovka to Abramtsevo, Mamontov’s commune and arts colony. Abramtsevo included artists of all stripes, and it was there that Konstantin first witnessed tableaux vivants—living pictures in which actors and models re-created paintings—at the age of fifteen. Famous artists routinely dined at the Alekseievs’ table, and Konstantin’s parents nurtured his passion for drama, taking him to the theater in Moscow and (when they traveled for business) in Europe. They even converted a crumbling wing of their vast estate into a theater for him and his siblings to use. Within that private theater the Alekseiev Circle, an amateur theatrical group largely dedicated to performing operettas, was born. Konstantin directed and acted in productions featuring family, friends, and professional actors. In his off hours, he worked to correct what he saw as his physical and vocal shortcomings, honing his instrument, making it versatile and obedient to his will.

Konstantin taught himself to act the way most artists first learn their craft: through imitation. He saw as much theater as he could, reproducing the mannerisms and effects of his favorite actors in front of a mirror. In 1888, he appeared in a production of The Gamblers, directed by Aleksandr Fedotov, an actor from the Maly. Fedotov impressed upon Konstantin the importance of professional ethics in the rehearsal room and onstage while drilling him in a different style of acting, one based on observable human behavior instead of declamation. Konstantin ate it up, bringing Fedotov’s ideas back to the Alekseiev Circle.

The young man loved the stage and worried, not without cause, that he might be forced to give it up. Even though his parents were cultured—and even though his mother was herself the illegitimate daughter of an actress—it would bring shame to the family to have an actor as a son. There was something distasteful, even sinful, about the stage. Theaters had to remain closed for Lent, and religious authorities had the right to censor scripts, or even prohibit performances of works they disliked.

But young Konstantin had caught the theater bug. As his siblings grew up and the Alekseiev Circle withered from neglect, Konstantin began moonlighting in vaudevilles. To keep his family from learning the truth of how he was spending his nights, he adopted the surname Stanislavski, but the ruse swiftly failed. One night, he came onstage to see his family sitting in the audience. He stared, dumbfounded, barely making it through the show. Afterward, his father gave him his blessing, of sorts, telling him, "If you really want to act in your free time, stop appearing in muck with God knows who."

Now free to act in the open, Stanislavski helped run the family business while producing, directing, and acting in plays. In one of these shows, 1888’s Spoiled Darling, he performed opposite his future wife, Maria Petrovna Perevostchikova, who acted under the name Lilina. He appears to have been gifted at running the family business and indifferent to it in equal measure, confiding to his diary in 1890 that I put little value on the gifts God has given me and I would honestly not be afraid to lose my money … I would go hungry, it’s true, but I would be able to act to my heart’s content. Yet he felt a duty beyond himself. It wasn’t his money; it belonged to the family. Many people depended on his stewardship of the Alekseiev textile empire.

In 1888, he founded the Society of Art and Literature, a social organization that brought together artists of all disciplines, and he made Aleksandr Fedotov the representative for the Society of Writers and Actors within the group. The seed money came from a windfall in the Alekseiev family fortune, but Konstantin hoped that club dues and donations could keep the Society afloat. This was a pipe dream, and it never came to pass. Still, as Stanislavski put it in My Life in Art, when you want something very badly, it seems to you that your desire is both simple and realizable.

At the Society, Stanislavski reached the limits of imitation when Fedotov directed him as the title character in Alexander Pushkin’s The Miserly Knight. Stanislavski wanted to play the role as a dashing romantic hero, but Fedotov demanded the character be portrayed as a fading old man. Konstantin was immediately lost; having never seen anyone play the role, he didn’t know how to do it. Fedotov was by then an old man himself. His spine was bent, his face danced with nervous tics. He invited Konstantin to observe him overnight in order to study his physicality. Konstantin tried this, but when he brought the results in to rehearsal, Fedotov eviscerated him, openly mocking the cruft of accumulated mannerisms and gimmicks that characterized his acting. Something seemed to give way in me, Stanislavski wrote of the experience. They had not convinced me of the new, but they had certainly made me distrust the old.

Konstantin spent the summer practicing the movements of old men in front of his mirror, finding the way they resembled his own movements when exhausted. Once again, he brought the results in to rehearsal, and once again Fedotov mocked him. This wasn’t acting, his director told him, this was a child’s idea of an old man. It’s too much, too big. Realistic acting required restraint. They repeated the scene again and again until Stanislavski got it right. But he did not understand how he got it right. It seemed that when he tried, he failed, and when he did nothing, he succeeded.

Perhaps the trick was to do nothing? He tried doing nothing.

Louder! Fedotov shouted. We can’t hear you!

Whenever Stanislavski felt lost, he researched his way forward. Perhaps, he thought, he could understand the Miserly Knight’s solitude by experiencing it himself. So he tried a kind of research that, a century later, would become standard practice in the long line of actors who claimed to follow in his footsteps: He tried to live as his character lived. He traveled to a castle and had the staff lock him in its basement, but all he picked up was a bad cold and despair … Apparently, to become a tragedian it was not enough to lock myself in a cellar with rats. Something else was necessary. But what?

Over the next few years, his search for the what led him to the work of several influential thinkers. The first was the Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky. Belinsky called for a kind of holy purpose among artists, whom he saw as illuminating the real world in all its truth and nakedness. Theater, by bringing the audience into empathetic communion with the characters onstage, purged our egoism … and we become better persons, better citizens.

These ideas would guide Stanislavski for the rest of his life. Actors, he felt, had a holy purpose rooted in the poetry of the real. The artist, Stanislavski wrote in a letter in the spring of 1889, "is a prophet who appears on earth to bear witness to purity and truth." Actors could join this rank of prophets, rather than remaining mere craftsmen, so long as they obeyed an ethical duty to give truthful performances. But unlike other kinds of artists, actors are their own material. They are the painter and the paint, cursed to never see the results of their work in real time. How, then, could actors consistently deliver great performances worthy of their moral purpose?

Attempting to answer that question, Stanislavski sought inspiration in an aphorism from Pushkin, the father of Russian literature: The truth concerning the passions, verisimilitude in the feelings, experienced in the given circumstances, that is what our intelligence demands of a dramatist. Stanislavski adapted these ideas to acting, following the teaching of Mikhail Shchepkin, an actor whose trailblazing naturalism at the Maly a generation before had influenced Fedotov and many others. Shchepkin urged the actor to crawl … into the skin of the character and study carefully his particular ideas, basing their performances on the text and real life instead of stage convention.

Another breakthrough came in April 1890 when one of the first director’s companies in the world, the Meiningen Ensemble, toured Russia. In most of Europe, actor-managers ran theater troupes, overseeing productions while performing in them. It had been this way for centuries. In the actor-manager model, plays were often thrown together with few rehearsals, leaving interpretation up to the individual performers. The Meiningen Ensemble, by contrast, drilled its actors relentlessly, and their productions were unified under the vision of their director, Ludwig Chronegk, who wove performances together with design into one coherent whole. Their tours through Europe helped give birth to the profession of directing, and they had a particular impact on Stanislavski, who sat in on the Ensemble’s rehearsals, marveling at the absolute control Chronegk wielded. What Konstantin would jokingly call Chronegk’s despotism extended to every aspect of the production. The sets, costumes, lighting, and performances all served the same goal. Rehearsals were run with an iron fist, everything repeated until it was right, without long breaks or tolerance for lateness.

Stanislavski had never seen anything like this discipline. He had directed in the past, but now he understood the possibilities of the job. The Meiningen Ensemble, which he would be accused of copying for years afterward, gave him a kind of permission, a reassurance that the path he walked was the right one. He now knew there was an alternative to the infuriating clichés of theaters like the Maly. At the Society of Art and Literature, Stanislavski embraced the director’s role. He prepared elaborate scores for each production, outlining groundbreaking design concepts and staging in minute detail. He drilled his actors again and again until they got each moment right. And he began needling the Maly, staging multiple plays that were in his rival’s repertoire, snatching imperial glory for himself.

Stanislavski’s productions rejected Russian theatrical tradition, which mandated both how plays should be staged and how actors should interpret them. He became known for his unrelenting attention to detail and his use of pauses, little moments when the world onstage existed without—or perhaps beyond—language. A shaft of light, a cough or sniffle, a piece of paper dropped and then picked up: Out of these Stanislavski created a visual and auditory poetry, glimmering like the reflection of light on snow. The accumulation of everyday microdramas was an invitation to the audience, beckoning them to watch more closely, discover more, feel more; it seduced them into the world of the play. As an actor, Stanislavski continued to follow in Shchepkin’s footsteps, even as his departure from convention made him a target for critics.

"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." But Stanislavski’s quest to save art was complicated by the collapse of the Society of Art and Literature. Its ticket sales simply could not replenish the coffers emptied by his directorial ambition. His Othello required clothes from Paris, props from Venice, and a canal on which actors could row gondolas. Stanislavski had reached an impasse. The only way to see a professional theater that eschewed what he called hokum was to make it himself, but he was too responsible a steward of the Alekseiev fortune to fund a new organization out of pocket. Like Nemirovich, he had grand ideas for the future, but no way to accomplish them on his own.

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On the morning of June 22, 1897, Nemirovich met with Pavel Pchelnikov, the manager of the Imperial Theatres. As expected, the meeting went poorly. On his desk lay my memorandum report, marked in red pencil with exclamation and question marks, Nemirovich remembered. Pchelnikov saw no need to reform the Maly. Nemirovich’s position—the respect he commanded, his prominence in the field—couldn’t shake the confidence of a bureaucrat who had found a winning formula. Stanislavski remained Vladimir’s last, best chance. Nemirovich knew they shared similar complaints, but would Stanislavski really go professional, as he hinted at wanting to do? And could they work together, or would they be, as Nemirovich later characterized it, two bears in a den?

Their meeting place, the Slavic Bazaar, was one of Russia’s most prominent hotels. Established near Moscow’s Red Square, it featured luxury apartments and a concert hall, and was the nation’s first fine dining restaurant that specialized in elevated Russian cuisine. The hotel’s founder was a noted Slavophile, part of an ideological movement that looked backward to a semimythical time before Peter the Great bent the nation toward France and Germany at the turn of the eighteenth century. Slavophiles wanted Russians to stop chasing western Europe’s mores and instead to embrace their Slavic roots. With an emphasis on Russian brotherhood and cultural identity, the Slavic Bazaar had become a gathering place for artists and intellectuals. Leo Tolstoy dined there, and Chekhov’s novella Peasants, published only two months before Nemirovich and Stanislavski met, was about a waiter at the restaurant.

Stanislavski booked them a private room where they could speak freely without distraction. Both men approached the meeting wary and uncertain. Konstantin had no idea why Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko wanted to meet with him, and Nemirovich was unsure of Stanislavski’s character. Perhaps, he worried, this Stanislavski was an egomaniac, or one of those tiresome narcissists who always must be the center of attention. Nemirovich needed to know that Stanislavski could humble himself before the project at hand.

It was thus a welcome surprise that Stanislavski seemed totally unaffected in person. Unlike most actors in Russia—and perhaps everywhere else, throughout time—Stanislavski did not behave as if a spotlight shone on him constantly. He was a serious, concrete sort of man—tall, prematurely gray, restrained in his gestures, and reserved in his bearing. Stanislavski’s lone vanity was a floridly groomed mustache, which he would refuse to shave until 1903, when he played Brutus in Julius Caesar.

Nemirovich was hardly the first to be overwhelmed by Stanislavski’s charm. Many who met Konstantin immediately fell under his spell, and few could stay angry at him for long. Even at his most demanding, there was something beguiling about him, a generosity to his humor, a self-deprecation born not out of false modesty but out of relentlessness. He sought perfection in his art, and drove no one harder than he drove himself. In person, Stanislavski came across as utterly devoid of guile, brilliant yet somehow naïve. One of his nicknames among his admirers was the Big Infant, owing to his childlike fascination with the world, his passion-prone personality, and his aura of innocence. This naïveté was almost certainly an act, but it served him well, and would continue to do so in the tumultuous politics of the next forty years.

Stanislavski was equally impressed by Nemirovich, particularly by his intellect and determination. Nemirovich, older and more respected, with years of professional experience, took charge of the meeting. Stanislavski recorded the minutes. Quickly, Nemirovich launched into the business at hand, pitching his big idea to Stanislavski: The two of them would start a company. They would merge the best of Nemirovich’s students with the best of Stanislavski’s amateurs. Their goal would be nothing less than changing Russian theater for the better.

The two men began outlining the crisis on Russia’s stages to each other in detail. In his memoir My Life in the Russian Theatre, Nemirovich describes this conversation as a "slaughter," as he and Stanislavski shot the pieties of the Russian theater with poisoned arrows. Stanislavski, meanwhile, claimed in My Life in Art that the peace conference of Versailles did not consider the world questions before it with such clarity and exactness. In order to make theater that was art, that respected plays and brought their truth to the fore, everything would need to change.

The Russian theater that Stanislavski and Nemirovich wished to overthrow had its origins in western Europe, particularly in French theater of the eighteenth century. Peter the Great’s turning of Russia toward the West had led to a massive influx of European culture, which Russia adopted as a sign of forward-thinking civilization. The word for theater in Russian is theatr. The word for drama is drama. Both entered the language in the mid-eighteenth

Reviews for The Method

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler is an engrossing history of both the style of acting most of us think of as Method acting as well as of theater and film.I came to this book as someone who loves both theater and film and have studied some history but also as someone with no artistic ability in these areas at all. So my hope was to gain a better idea of what "The Method" is and how it came about. I also expected some anecdotes and interesting stories. Well, this volume exceeded expectations in every facet. The history was much more detailed than I would have thought, the anecdotes and stories were both plentiful and essential to the telling of the history. It is all brought together in a very engaging and readable style that both informed and entertained me.I knew almost from the beginning I was in for a treat by the way Butler told the story of Frances McDormand's early experience in Blood Simple. In addition to those interested in the history of film, theater, and/or acting I think the casual reader who simply enjoys reading about the interactions of celebrities (and near-celebrities) will find a lot to enjoy here. While I am by nature a rereader of books, this isn't the type I often reread just for pleasure. Yet I am actually looking forward to revisiting this one in another year or so.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.