The Actors Studio, Method Acting, and Cold War Culture

Introduction: Celebrity and the Method

David Garfield's glossy coffee-table history of the Actors Studio is a tribute to the number of film celebrities who have studied there — ranging from those who became famous as early exponents of the method, such as Marlon Brando, to more recent alumni who continue to work regularly and whose artistic achievements have been celebrated with awards, such as Susan Sarandon. Yet the method's insistence upon total immersion in the role, combined with heavy research in order to bolster the sense of lived reality within the script, seems like the polar opposite of the celebrity culture of acting that we currently endure. How did an actorly training method designed to efface the personality completely result in the nonstop glorification of the actorly personality that is modern American — and Western — celebrity culture?

Cold War Context and the Group Theatre's Origins

Although we do not normally think of the Actors Studio, and the emergence of method acting in New York and Hollywood, as a product of the Cold War, historically speaking it emerged in that very time period. Invoking the Cold War is a useful way to approach the historical context of the Actors Studio itself — the long standoff between the United States and Soviet Russia, which by the 1950s had begun to erupt in a series of proxy wars and public incidents. These spanned the decade from the Korean War to the public confrontations between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon in their "kitchen debate," and the Soviet discovery of the U-2 spy plane over their territory, leading to the capture of U.S. Captain Francis Gary Powers at the end of the decade and with it the close of Eisenhower's presidency.

It is curious, then, that the original American adoption of Stanislavski — and the origins of the Actors Studio itself — had, in fact, predated World War II, with the foundation of the Group Theatre in 1931 by critic Harold Clurman, producer Cheryl Crawford, and actor Lee Strasberg. Gordon calls the Group Theatre "a breeding ground for left-wing directors, actors and writers who constituted the first generation of recognizably American theater and film artists" (73–4). It is true that in this period many actors were involved in political causes and were aligned with the Communist Party: a good number of the writers associated with the Group Theatre (like Clifford Odets) would be avowedly Communist in the 1930s as well, until the gradual emergence of the truth of Stalin's regime would necessitate the formation of an anti-Stalinist left.

Collectivism, Hollywood, and the Politics of Style

To a certain degree the artistic ideology of the Group Theatre — as indicated by its name — was collectivist. Their emphasis on the "group" was intended as a distancing from the star system as practiced in Hollywood and was also, to a certain extent, aligned with larger leftist political ideas (Frome 22). The influence of leftist politics on New York theatre of this period is well attested elsewhere, and reached a culmination in the Federal Theatre Project, a government-funded scheme for the employment of theater artists affected by the Depression. The project produced the "Living Newspaper" for "proletarian" audiences and eventually culminated in Hallie Flanagan's production of The Cradle Will Rock, a Marxist allegory that prompted such political controversy that the Roosevelt administration shut down the Federal Theatre Project entirely. The Group Theatre belonged to the same period, but it represented a sort of Americanization of the not-particularly-political ethos of the Moscow Art Theatre under Stanislavski and even under later Soviet influence: the work they produced was inspired by Maksim Gorky, among others, and thus bore more influence on large-scale depictions of social misery in a realistic fashion than on any specific state ideology.

To a certain extent the early development of the method under the Group Theatre also reflected the shift of an artistic center — from New York City to Hollywood — in twentieth-century American life, and in its resistance to Hollywood's star culture. Hollywood's opulence, and its focus on central performances by stars who were often not particularly well-acted, represented a direct transfer from the late-nineteenth-century theater. The growing revolt against the overpowering trompe l'œil realism of Victorian dramaturgy had been registered variously in the drama of Symbolists like Maeterlinck, whose Blue Bird Stanislavski would direct in an attempt to prove that his methods were not merely suited to drawing-room or kitchen-sink realism. As Gordon notes, Stanislavski "himself was often at pains to demonstrate that his system was not limited to naturalistic plays; Stanislavski's theory and practice clearly articulated a response to the development of naturalism as a major movement in Western drama" (Gordon 37).

Works Cited

Beguiristain, Mario E. The Actors Studio and Hollywood in the 1950s: A History of Theatrical Realism. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. Print.

Frome, Shelly. The Actors Studio: A History. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005. Print.

Garfield, David. A Player's Place: The Story of the Actors Studio. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Print.

Gordon, Robert. The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Print.

Hirsch, Foster. A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2002. Print.

Strasberg, Lee, and Robert H. Hethmon. Strasberg at the Actors Studio: Tape-recorded Sessions. New York: Theater Communications Group, 1991. Print.