The American Quarrel

In 1931 three young theatre people in New York, Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, founded a company called the Group Theatre. They had seen the Moscow Art Theatre on its American tour, and some of them had studied with its emigrant actors. They wanted an American ensemble working the Russian way: long rehearsals, plays about the present, actors who lived the part rather than displayed it.

Strasberg ran the actor training, and he had settled on what he took to be the heart of Stanislavski: affective memory. An actor who needed grief or fear would sit quietly and recall a real moment from their own life, not the emotion itself but the sensory details around it, the texture of a chair, the smell of a room, the light, until the feeling returned. Done well, the results could be startling. Done badly or too often, they could be draining and self-absorbed. Several members of the company found the exercises painful.

One of them was Stella Adler, who came from a famous family of Yiddish theatre actors and was already an experienced performer. In 1934, in Paris, she met Stanislavski himself, and worked with him for several weeks. As she told it afterwards, she confessed that his system had made her miserable on stage, and he told her that if it was not helping, she should not use it. More to the point, he explained that he had moved away from emotion memory. The actor should work from the given circumstances of the play and from imagination, and through action.

Adler returned to New York and reported this to the Group. In the usual account Strasberg was unmoved, and is said to have replied that he was teaching his own method, not Stanislavski's. The exact words come from people who took sides, and should be read that way. What is not in doubt is the split. Adler went on to teach that the actor's own life was too small a source for great parts, and that the imagination, fed by the text and by research, was larger. Sanford Meisner, another Group actor, sided with her and developed a third approach entirely.

Meisner's best known tool is the repetition exercise. Two actors face each other. One says something simple about the other: "You're looking at the floor." The other repeats it: "I'm looking at the floor." They keep going, back and forth, changing the words only when something real changes between them. It sounds absurd and is surprisingly hard. The point is to take the actor's attention off themselves and put it on their partner, so that responses are provoked rather than planned. He summed up the goal in a line his students still quote: acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

The Group broke up in 1941. Six years later Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis founded the Actors Studio, a workshop for professional actors, and in the early 1950s Strasberg became its artistic director. His approach acquired the name the Method, and the Studio acquired famous members: James Dean, Paul Newman, and many others who passed through its sessions.

The name most often attached to the Method, though, is Marlon Brando's, and he spent years objecting. He had trained with Stella Adler in the early 1940s, and he credited her. He visited the Studio, but resented Strasberg being treated as the source of his acting. Strasberg, for his part, went on to give a fine screen performance himself, as Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II.

All three teachers were working from different readings of the same Russian books, and all three wanted roughly the same result: behaviour on stage and screen that looked unforced and true. What none of them taught was the thing the phrase Method acting has come to mean in magazines, an actor refusing to drop the character between takes and demanding that the crew play along. That is a habit some actors adopt, for their own reasons. It is not a doctrine of the Group, the Studio, or anyone who taught in either. The quarrel was real. It was a quarrel about where feeling comes from, not about whether to stay in costume at lunch.