Had there never been a Lee Strasberg, we would have had to invent him. Revered and scorned, the charismatic director, teacher, and sometime actor adapted the techniques of revolutionary Russian master Konstantin Stanislavski, and Stanislavski's disciple Evgeni Vakhtangov, into what we call the Method. Because of the on-camera success of so many of Strasberg's students—Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Dustin Hoffman among them—he gained a worldwide reputation as the father of modern film acting.
Surely there's not an actor, teacher, or director alive in the Western world unaffected by the Method, and I say that with all due respect to the amazing Anne Bogart, who told me via e-mail that Strasberg's teachings had had no influence on her physically based work. David Lee Strasberg, one of Lee's sons, put it this way: Anyone who teaches about inner life, intentions, or subtext is under the influence of the Method. Hard taskmaster that he was, Lee Strasberg insisted upon emotional honesty, thus raising the standards of the craft forevermore.
His approach—in which actors learned, among other important lessons, how to use their most personal experiences to fuel their art—matched a burgeoning societal need for emotional expression. Strasberg started experimenting during the pre-self-actualization-movement era, as early as 1923, with various New York groups. Later, as Jerzy Grotowski, in Europe, formulated his own mind-body techniques—and as Strasberg's erstwhile Group Theatre colleagues taught their own interpretations of Stanislavski—Strasberg was gaining prominence, most significantly through the Actors Studio.
To this day, the man and the Method remain controversial. Some believe Strasberg misled stage actors, leaving them unfit to deal with anything other than kitchen-sink dramas. His pet techniques, particularly the affective memory exercise, were—and still are—frowned upon by many.
Nor was he Mr. Congeniality. He could be both volatile and aloof. A former student was quoted as saying he was a cold fish, and that if you weren't acting for him, you didn't exist for him. Another former student told me, "He pushed you to the wall and he'd get emotion out of you, sometimes out of sheer cruelty." On a more positive note Robert H. Hethmon (in Strasberg at the Actors Studio) wrote, "He exhorts, stings, cajoles, excites, denounces, satirizes, worries, advises, praises, encourages, jokes, inspires."
The estimable director/critic Robert Brustein once labeled Strasberg a "highly overrated cultural icon," and in 1998 he wrote and produced an unflattering portrait of the man, Nobody Dies on Friday, at American Repertory Theater, which spoofed Strasberg, the effect of his co-dependent relationship with Marilyn Monroe upon his family, and the cult of personality.
Others point out that Strasberg's teachings were no more important than those of Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and other Group Theatre alumni, and that Strasberg gained disproportionate prominence from his starry pupils, especially Monroe. Meisner even argued that Strasberg claimed as protégés famous stars who had passed only briefly through his orbit, and indeed Marlon Brando wrote that it wasn't Strasberg who taught him to act but Adler and Elia Kazan. Another teacher who knew Strasberg, Adler, and Harold Clurman told me Clurman was the best of the lot and never got the acclaim he deserved.
Some say Strasberg taught actors to become solipsistic. But Strasberg himself said he was a follower of Vakhtangov, who departed from Stanislavski in a key way: Whereas Stanislavski said, "If you were the character, how would you behave?" Vakhtangov amended that to, "If you had to do what your character has to do, what would motivate you to do it?" Thus, said Strasberg, you are bringing yourself up to the character rather than bringing the character down to you.
Most agree on one thing: The Method is the method for film and TV acting. In a published interview Brustein said that's all the Method is good for. I disagree. As Strasberg's widow, Anna Strasberg, commented, "Lee used to say you only need one thing: truth." Surely that dictum applies to all types of acting.
Group Gripes
Born in Poland in 1901, Strasberg immigrated to New York's Lower East Side in 1909. He trained as an actor under Richard Boleslavski and Maria Ouspenskaya, two Moscow Art Theatre actors who had settled in New York. In 1931 he founded the Group Theatre with Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, an ensemble dedicated to producing as well as to formulating a cohesive system of actor training.
The Group lasted only 10 years before it folded, as its headstrong, competitive, visionary artists bickered among themselves. It never achieved the longevity of troupes like the Moscow Art Theatre or the Berliner Ensemble, but it did provide the model of a collaborative company of actors, directors, and playwrights dedicated to the future of the American stage, and this is an important legacy in which Strasberg played a crucial role.
In 1936 Strasberg left the Group to direct independently. His departure had a lot to do with Adler's famous 1934 visit to Paris to work with Stanislavski. An actor with easy access to her emotions, Adler had been having trouble with Strasberg's affective memory exercise, based on Stanislavski's and Vakhtangov's teachings. For Strasberg, affective memory seemed the perfect solution to an age-old acting problem: how to access appropriate, authentic emotion as needed. But Adler found it tedious, and colleagues Robert Lewis, Meisner, and Morris Carnovsky were having trouble with it, too, for various reasons. When Adler discovered that Stanislavski himself no longer used that exercise, preferring instead to concentrate on actions and given circumstances, she triumphantly reported this to the Group—and created a rift that never healed.
Meisner later said that Adler had pronounced Strasberg a "fake" even before the Group started. Meisner himself called Strasberg a "librarian." With temperaments like these, small wonder the company lasted so briefly. Still, as Anna Strasberg commented, "Their roots were so deep and intertwined. Until our generation makes the kind of contribution they did, we have no right to criticize."
In 1947 Kazan, Lewis, and Crawford founded the now-famous Actors Studio. Four years later Strasberg, too, was teaching there, and when we think of the Actors Studio today, we think of Strasberg (that is, if we don't think of James Lipton). There, and later at the Lee Strasberg Institute, he continued to refine the Method.
In 1974, when he appeared as Jewish gangster Hyman Roth in Godfather II, Strasberg became even better known. He hadn't acted for decades when he appeared in this, his first film role, and it shows. His acting seems one-dimensional, and especially next to that master of still-waters-run-deep: his own student, Al Pacino.
Of the Hour
Just as Stanislavski seized the day, inventing a new approach to acting to match the probing, socially conscious theatre of his era, so did Strasberg, in reconfiguring Stanislavski, meet the needs of playwrights like Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets, and even the more lyrical Tennessee Williams, who brought a heartfelt realism to the stage in the 1940s and '50s. His students were also film actors, and you can track the less affected, more truthful acting styles by watching movies from the 1930s to the present. Strasberg can take a large part of the credit for that.
Anna Strasberg noted that when Lee started out in the early 20th century, acting was a disrespected profession; signs said, "No actors allowed." Strasberg helped elevate the actor to artist and made American actors feel they owned their craft. The spontaneity and lack of artifice Americans bring to the work are still admired by British actors, and that too is largely thanks to the pervasiveness of Strasberg's teachings. His adversary Brustein has conceded, "His greatest contribution to American theatre was his intensification of proletarian naturalism."
David Lee Strasberg, who now runs the Group at Strasberg in Los Angeles, has a broad perspective on the era and his father's place in it. He pointed out that in mid-20th century America, science, technology, medicine, and psychology converged to create a cultural shift. There was increasing mass production and entrepreneurial activity. "Then you look at art," said David, "and it's no wonder the art is forced to change and adapt to a new paradigm." Lee, a true renaissance man, had a deep understanding of those cultural shifts. He was greatly influenced, for example, by behaviorist psychology, turning to Pavlov's theories to explain how affective memory works.
A steel-trap mind like Strasberg's, with its vast store of knowledge, is able to spot and respond to cultural trends. Strasberg must have known intuitively, as Bay Area Method teacher (and Strasberg student) Shelley Mitchell suggested to me, that in our scientific era, we are looking for formulas. He dedicated himself to finding those formulas that would make acting work, and work brilliantly, every night, every take.
"Lee was of a time of thinkers trying to quantify invisible things," said Mitchell. "His conversation was way ahead of its time, psychologically, in the sense of finding oneself, speaking the truth, owning who you are."
Just a Memory
Strasberg saw that, unlike writers or painters, actors can't wait for the spirit to move them. We have to cry, or rage, or laugh, on cue, and believably. He developed the affective memory exercise as a way to do that. In it, you re-create all the sensorial details—smells, colors, textures, sounds, etc.—of a real-life incident that evoked a strong, specific emotion when it occurred. That emotion should correspond to the demands of your role. The idea is not to go for the emotion head-on—emotions directly conjured can be elusive and uncontrollable—but to place yourself in the environment in which you had the emotion and let it sneak up on you.
Strasberg was confident that if you practiced enough, eventually the mere conjuring of an associated smell or taste would be enough to trigger, à la Pavlov's salivating dog (or Proust's petite madeleine), the suitable emotional reaction instantaneously. You can actually do an affective memory while onstage, he said, whipping up the sensorial trigger one minute in advance. So the source of the emotion is remembered, but the experience is immediate—and controllable. He noted that the technique was to be used only for especially intense moments as needed. He suggested stockpiling maybe hundreds of such incidents. Using this technique, actors could trust that they would be able to stimulate authentic and appropriate emotion repeatedly.
Affective memory apparently worked well for some Group actors, and for audiences as well, who recognized a new level of passion onstage. Some Actors Studio members, like Shelley Winters, positively raved about it. But critics said it caused some actors to disengage from the scene to dredge up a memory, and I've seen this happen. But Strasberg said it was merely a matter of multi-tasking, which actors do all the time onstage and on screen. Others said it made actors play the emotion rather than the scene—and I've seen that happen, too—and some alleged that it was dangerous for Strasberg, who was not a psychiatrist, to encourage potentially unstable actors to dabble in volatile personal memories. Strasberg, though, was very astute in gauging his students' emotional health and didn't permit the shaky ones to do affective memory.
I learned the technique back in the 1970s from Jean Shelton, herself a student of Strasberg, and I must say it was never productive for me. It was also excruciatingly boring. Shelton has stopped teaching it. "I think there's a shorter way to get there," she said. "The main thing it teaches you to do is concentrate—if you don't go to sleep." I doubt affective memory is emphasized much in general acting classes these days.
Shelton has also stopped teaching another Strasberg tool, sense memory. Strasberg's many sense memory exercises were the first things I ever learned at college in Acting 1A, and I never really understood why I needed to create an imaginary teacup when I'd hopefully be given a real one onstage. Years later, continuing with sense memory exercises, I did understand: Strasberg taught that reliving experiences through the five senses deepens and enriches the imagination, triggers fresh responses, makes you more personally connected and committed and your performance more immediate, alive, and textured. The exercises themselves can be tedious: for example, imagining drinking a cup of coffee in slow, excruciating detail, from the sensation of the steam on your face to the sheen of the overhead light reflected on the liquid. Shelton said, "Sense memory helps your imagination and concentration, but I don't think you have to go through all that. Listening and substitution work better for my students."
Strasberg considered affective memory and improv—in which actors work out by practicing the scene in a variety of non-scripted ways, including vocalizing their subtext—his two most useful rehearsal and teaching tools. But he also emphasized relaxation. Method teacher Lorrie Hull, who taught at the Lee Strasberg Institute for 12 years, wrote that Strasberg considered complete physical relaxation to be one of Stanislavski's most important discoveries. Strasberg was relentless: Students were coached to relax every single muscle in their bodies. Still, as Richard Brestoff clarified in The Great Acting Teachers and Their Methods, Strasberg's goal was to remove unnecessary tension, leaving just enough tension needed to do the job.
Method Misunderstood
Another undeniable fact about Strasberg's teachings—besides that they helped actors work effectively on screen—is that they are universally misunderstood.
A common misconception is that Method actors have this wacky idea they're supposed to be the character. "If that were true, I would have died at 15 when I played Juliet," wrote Lee's daughter Susan Strasberg in the introduction to Lorrie Hull's book Strasberg's Method. If anything, Strasberg's emphasis on remembered emotion should make it clear that he always honored the separation between reality and performance; his goal was to produce truthful expression, not to make actors temporarily psychotic. "The idea that the actor loses himself in the part is wrong," he said.
Others still think Method means incomprehensible mumbling, simply because a few actors once mumbled. Strasberg was a firm believer in all the external technical skills of performance; they simply were not his focus. And some practitioners of physical theatre genres think Method-trained actors are unequipped to play in heightened, non-realistic, epic, or stylized forms. Joan Schirle of the non-psychological, commedia/LeCoq-inspired Dell'Arte Company in Northern California hypothesized that Method-based training has left American actors frightened of "size," of big, universal performance—although she observed that the goals of all acting training are the same: "relaxation, presence, and truth." Strasberg himself never advised actors to be "small."
Robert Ernst, a Bay Area actor and solo writer/performer who works with "large emotions and large gestures," found his own artistic voice through the Grotowski tradition but considers Method essential. "If the gestures are large and the language poetic," he said, "you have to create an emotional logic." Jeffrey Bihr, a director/actor/teacher who has worked with Tadashi Suzuki and with Anne Bogart— gurus of expressionistic, physically based genres—told me, "If you don't bring a kind of humanity or emotional warmth to heightened work like Suzuki or Bogart, then it becomes distant and cold and is only about form."
Agreed Jean Shelton: "You can do very stylized pieces, and you may not call it Method, but if you're present and really doing it, you're acting, and it's what Lee was teaching."
Hull thinks the most persistent misunderstanding about Strasberg is that "he just worked on emotion." Not true, she told me. "He worked on all aspects of creating a role: the relationship to other characters, the given circumstances." The Method is not about being neurotically obsessed with your own personal feelings; it is about listening and reacting and deciding upon objectives and physical actions.
Legacies
The fallacies have not vanished in the more than half a century of Method teaching, and probably never will. When Shelley Mitchell was young she never put on her resumé that she studied with Strasberg, such a stigma was attached to the name. That wouldn't be the case today, especially not with the legitimizing influence of the Bravo TV show Live at the Actors Studio.
But as the plays we see on our stages become increasingly non-realistic—as I believe they will for the foreseeable future as we struggle to offer a viable alternative to film—and as we delight in such offbeat, adventurous playwrights as Charles Mee, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Naomi Iizuka, the Method may in fact come to be seen as useful only in screen acting, as Brustein suggested. That would be a shame, because surely Strasberg's greatest legacy was to provide actors with formulae for conveying emotional truth, a commodity that's every bit as crucial onstage—whether for Medea, Pantelone, or Willy Loman—as it is on NYPD Blue.
I asked David Lee Strasberg how he thought his father would be perceived 100 years from now.
"History has a funny way of shifting around on us," he mused. "Maybe a century from now Strasberg will turn out to have been the forefather of someone else, of the next revolution." He noted that one of Strasberg's greatest accomplishments was to codify an approach to acting. "To codify things in any way is a huge accomplishment in an artistic venture. I think 100 years from now that accomplishment may go well beyond acting, beyond film, TV, the stage, the Internet, beyond entertainment. People may take concepts from the Method and apply them in other areas and disciplines. I don't know specifically what people would take out of it—which exercises or philosophy. Pavlov had a clear impact on psychological thought. Who would imagine Pavlov would be an influence on actors?
"Lee Strasberg may be looked on not just as a great acting coach but as one of the great thinkers as people struggle for self-realization in all fields." Strasberg would have loved that. As devoted as he was to ennobling and uplifting the art of acting, he might have wished above all else that his teachings would have long-lasting application beyond the rarefied realm of the actor. BSW