Method Acting or “The Method”: What Is It All About?
Method Acting, known informally as The Method, is a range of training and rehearsal techniques, as formulated by several different theatre practitioners. Based on Konstantin Stanislavski’s system and further developed by Lee Strasberg, Method Acting seeks to encourage sincere and expressive performances through identifying with, understanding, and experiencing a character’s inner motivation and emotions.
You might have heard of these acting techniques since many of the all-time greats like Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, etc. in the acting world have dedicated themselves to performing by the rules and techniques of The Method. The techniques are built on Stanislavski’s System, developed by the Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski. They are captured in his books An Actor Prepares (I), Building a Character (II), and Creating a Role (III).
I remember being mesmerized by this particular way of performing when I was a teenager. I bought all three books and practically inhaled them. Even if, back then, much of the lingo went way over my head. I dreamed of becoming a Method Actor myself, and even sent off an application to the Royal Academy of Performing Arts in London when I was eighteen. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of it. Yet, my fascination with The Method remained.
Among those who have contributed to the development of The Method, three teachers are associated with “having set the standard of its success.” Each emphasizing different aspects of the approach:
- Lee Strasberg (the psychological aspects),
- Stella Adler (the sociological aspects),
- Sanford Meisner (the behavioural aspects).
The approach was first developed when they worked together at the Group Theatre in New York and later at the now famous and legendary Actors Studio. Here a beautiful short description of what Method Acting is all about from the website of the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute:
“Lee Strasberg often described Method Acting as what all actors have always done whenever they acted well. What Lee Strasberg meant was not that The Method™ had always been around, but rather, The Method came into being as a way of giving an actor the means to achieve the type of results that had moved and captivated audiences across time. Lee was in pursuit of a way of training that would consistently produce the moving results of these great performances – performances where it appeared the actor was authentically re-experiencing the life implied by the given circumstances of the story.”
As a young actor, Lee Strasberg became enamored with great performances and curious about the source of their inspiration. He set upon understanding the core and origin of what makes a most authentic and great performance. In both Lee Strasberg and Stanislavsky, this inquiry inspired a lifelong passion for training actors and demystifying what had, until then, been superficially explained simply as “divine inspiration.”
When the Moscow Art Theatre, under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky, visited New York City on a tour in 1923, Lee Strasberg was astonished by the acting of the company.
Their performances were alive, their behavior real and effortless, the company’s vision deeply human. It was as though they were experiencing real thoughts, desires, sensations and emotions on stage.
For Americans, it achieved a degree of creative reality unlike anything they’d ever seen. For Lee Strasberg it was the revelation he had been looking for.
Two actors from the Moscow Art Theatre, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, opened The American Laboratory Theatre in New York City. And, for the first time brought to the United States the pioneering work of what Stanislavsky called “The System.”
It was in their classes that Lee Strasberg grasped the seminal contribution of Stanislavsky and began his own investigation into solving the central problems of the actor. Then, in 1931, Lee Strasberg, along with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, started the Group Theatre. With the Group Theatre, Lee Strasberg implemented the type of systematic training of the actor he had learned with Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya.
This included sensory exercises that developed an actor’s imagination and emotional life, relaxation exercises that liberated an actor’s mental and physical tension, script analysis to understand the character’s motivations, actions and logic, and improvisation to discover natural behavior and the subtextual objectives of characters.
At the heart of Lee Strasberg’s work and his training of the company was the use of “affective memory.” This meant actors needed to recapture and relive a singular “once in a lifetime” type of event from their past. To use those truthful feelings to rise to an explosive moment, at will, in a scene.
The affective memory exercise, along with others Lee Strasberg developed over the course of his life, challenged actors to use experiences from his or her own life to motivate a character’s emotional or physical behavior. For Strasberg, it was never enough to recreate emotion on stage – one had to relive it.
So, what is Method Acting precisely?
To quote directly from the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute again: “At its core, Method Acting is therefore a systematic approach to training the living material that is the actor’s ‘instrument,’ as well as a means for preparing a role. The use of Lee Strasberg’s exercises both develop the content of the actor’s talent and provide a roadmap to the individual’s creation of a character. The use of one’s own life experiences in the creative imagination infuses each choice with genuine thought, desire, sensation, action, and feeling resulting in psychologically in-depth behavior. Method Acting builds upon the work of Stanislavsky, and as Lee Strasberg believed, accomplished what Stanislavsky set out to achieve.”
Links On YouTube: Top Interview | Mr Rogers Interviews Lee Strasberg Official website of the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute (Main source of our article. Thank you!) Method Acting on Wikipedia “Hollywood has got method acting all wrong, here’s what the process is really about” on The Conversation “Method Acting, Explained” by Allison Bigelow
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