The method, p.23
The Method, page 23
A reproduction of the chart Stella Adler showed the Group.
“You could feel the fog lifting as she went from one technical point to another,” Bobby Lewis said. Sanford Meisner later claimed that this was the first time the Group had even heard the term “given circumstances.” As it turned out, the company that Adler felt so estranged from had grown suspicious of Strasberg’s use of affective memory. Phoebe Brand said that it was “playing with your subconscious. You were digging into your subconscious life and not with a trained psychiatrist.”
Beany Barker went even further, echoing Stanislavski’s critique of Vakhtangov’s Festival of Peace as being so obsessed with emotion that it risked illness and hysteria. “It was awful with Strasberg,” she remembered decades later. “You felt that once you cried and had a full emotional thing, you weren’t acting if that didn’t happen every time. You didn’t know quite what else to do.” Morris Carnovsky felt that Men in White’s long run demonstrated that affective memories lose their potency over time, like a tea bag too often reused, “until the net result is zero.”
But Adler wasn’t simply correcting the record. She was also rebelling against their supreme leader. “Stella challenged Lee openly,” Phoebe Brand remembered. “It was not done, you know. Lee was really an authority and we all thought he was God.” Despite the success of Strasberg’s productions, the actors—many now teachers themselves—wearied of authority figures telling them what to do. “It was a time of doubt and self-questioning for many middle-class intellectuals,” Elia Kazan later wrote. “Our rebellions were, as much as anything, against who we were, and I supposed the saturating color was guilt.” By the summer of 1934, there was a Communist cell in the Group. Its members were Kazan, Louis Leverett, Joe Bromberg, Paula Miller, Phoebe Brand, Morris Carnovsky, Tony Kraber, and Art Smith. Odets would soon join. They were the proletariat. They did most of the work. But management—Clurman, Crawford, and especially Strasberg—called all the shots.
Acting theory, the Group’s power dynamics, and leftist politics had intermingled to such an extent that at the conclusion of Adler’s remarks, several Group members rose to their feet and broke into the Internationale:
Arise ye workers from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We’ll change henceforth the old tradition
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
The moment of schism had officially arrived for both the Group and the method. The fight between Adler and Strasberg over Stanislavski’s teachings and their implications would continue to be litigated even after their deaths. As a result, accounts of this moment become unreliable. Some people, including Strasberg, remember Lee being present at Adler’s talk on August 7. Others say he skipped it. Harold Clurman claimed the Group immediately abandoned Strasberg’s affective-memory-based approach after Stella’s return from Paris. Strasberg said “the difficulty was with Stella Adler, not with the actors … our method of working did not change after Stella worked with Stanislavski in Paris in 1934.” A 1935 outline for a course on acting co-written by Kazan, J. Edward Bromberg, and Strasberg, however, never mentions emotion or affective memory at all, and places primary emphasis on action.
Strasberg also says that he didn’t respond to Adler’s presentation, and instead “couldn’t speak. I had a great feeling of being insulted.” According to others, however, he spoke the next day, defending his emphasis on emotion. Bobby Lewis remembered Strasberg declaring “to the startled actors that he taught the Strasberg Method, not the Stanislavski System. He also stated that we used the practice of Affective Memory in our own way, for our own results.” But he didn’t stop there. The Group was a better company than the Moscow Art Theatre, Strasberg said. It “went beyond Stanislavski’s verisimilitude,” and their “productions had more intensity than the Moscow Art Theatre’s at any time.” Lewis was taken aback by Strasberg’s heated rejoinder to Adler’s talk, which had rejuvenated the company’s belief in Stanislavski and acting technique. Lee’s response, so obviously rooted in his own wounded pride, permanently damaged his reputation. He was their god no more.
While to the Group, Strasberg’s abrupt disavowal of Stanislavski reeked of insecurity, to Lee himself it was perfectly consistent with his working style. He had always synthesized ideas from different directors and teachers of acting. To Strasberg, Stanislavski was the foundation, but after the disappointing trip to the Moscow Art Theatre, he was poised to cast him off.
And why shouldn’t he? Strasberg was now a director of renown. He had taken a play none of the actors in the Group believed in and turned it into a Pulitzer Prize–winning smash hit. The New York Sun had written that “all the methods and theories of acting technique as practiced by this company have their roots in Strasberg’s own philosophy and dramatic convictions.” Men in White worked as well as it did because of Strasberg—because he had, over a series of furiously creative, difficult summers with several dozen neurotics of uneven gifts, birthed a finely tuned ensemble.
Years later, after Strasberg found his way back to Stanislavski, he would argue that Adler misunderstood what the master was telling her. He hadn’t disavowed affective memory. Instead, according to Lee, what Stanislavski really believed was that “if the actor has done his work well, all he needs to remember is the line of psycho-physical actions,” that is, the memories of emotion, the lines, and the physical action, all intermingling, each reminding the actor of each. Boleslavsky had said much the same thing: By the end of the rehearsal process, if everything else had been done right, all an actor should have to do is recall their preparation and utterly commit to their first task. The rest would unfold in due course. Strasberg maintained that he had always agreed with this, “except that we made sure that all the other work was done.”
What Stanislavski said to Adler and what he believed at the time are, even decades later, a matter of unresolvable dispute. There are no surviving notes from Adler and Stanislavski’s meeting. Stanislavski tailored his instruction to the pupil and may have seen immediately that emotion wasn’t what Adler needed help with. He also had a habit of disavowing his own statements. Once, when watching one of his own exercises conducted by someone else, he asked, “What idiot thought that one up?”
For decades, the widely accepted story of the “system” was that Stanislavski began with a heavy emphasis on emotion and affective memory, then over time came to focus more and more on the exterior reality, leading him to a form of the “system” that, after his death, was called the Method of Physical Action. The inklings of this shift in his process can be seen in a director’s score he wrote for Othello in 1929, in which he advised that “when playing a role, especially a tragic role, you should think as little as possible about tragedy and as much as possible about simple physical tasks.” According to this theory, Boleslavsky learned the early form of the “system” and passed it on to Strasberg, while Stella learned the later form of the “system” from the master himself.
While it’s true that Stanislavski’s working methods shifted toward the physical during the final decades of his life, the story of a great artist evolving away from bourgeois psychology toward a materialist acting technique aligns a little too neatly with the interests of the Soviet Union to be accepted on its face. Stanislavski may also have felt enormous pressure not to talk about psychology anymore. Clurman’s account makes clear that Stanislavski was cautious about saying anything politically out of bounds while in Paris. The “system” had been attacked publicly already, and it was only about to get worse. In August 1934, the same month that Stella Adler delivered her report to the Group, the All Union Congress of Soviet Writers declared socialist realism the official artistic policy of the USSR, and the State began its assault on all art deemed too bourgeois. Stanislavski’s change in emphasis protected his theater. His theories were woven into the very fabric of the Soviet State, and the “system” became the basis for all acting instruction in Russia.
Ultimately, in the debate over whether Stanislavski privileged emotion or action as the motor of an actor’s performance, the truth is almost certainly somewhere in the middle. Stanislavski began his career focused entirely on externalities; it was only while developing the “system” that he explored the internal mechanisms of acting. His renewed interest in the vocal and physical means by which an actor communicates experiencing to an audience began in 1915 well before he and Boleslavsky parted ways. He devoted an entire chapter in his late-career book-in-progress on the “system” to “Emotion Memory,” an odd choice if he was planning on disavowing it. In correspondence about that chapter with his editor and translator Lyubov Gurevich, Stanislavski wrote that “on stage the performer lives by a feeling that is authentic but of affective origin, that is, prompted by Affective Memory.”
Adlerites and Strasbergians remain invested in this debate because Stanislavski is a potent legitimizing force. But he was still just a man. He was not given the “system” engraved on stone tablets at the top of Mount Sinai, and his theories matter only to the extent that they get results. Strasberg could point to The House of Connelly, Success Story, and Men in White and say that it didn’t matter what Stanislavski told Stella Adler. He could additionally claim, as he often did, that her problems with Gentlewoman had nothing to do with his method. “We didn’t do any kind of emotional work with her” on the play, Strasberg said in one of many interviews on the subject. “Stella gave a reading in the play that was perfect. That’s all that I wanted … I don’t know what the hell I told her; I just wanted to get her not to do the things that she wanted to do to fill in her characterization.”
Meanwhile, Adler could point to the growing discontent of the company and say that taking an exercise had both outlived its usefulness and proved psychologically damaging. Many members of the company agreed with her, and absent Stanislavski’s borrowed authority, Strasberg couldn’t convince them otherwise. They were ready to come into their own without his insistence that he was the arbiter of theatrical and emotional truth. And so, later that same month, as yet another Group retreat slid into the dog days of summer, the company became Stella’s students. Out of her anger with Strasberg, her desire for independence, and her own deeply held beliefs about theater, Stella had begun what would turn out to be a new life as an acting teacher.
CHAPTER 13
A New Inner Man
In her early classes, Stella Adler took Stanislavski’s ideas and reorganized them around the zadacha, the task/problem. She gave Bobby Lewis, Elia Kazan, and a few others very basic activities: looking for their glasses, looking for a lost lens that had fallen out of their glasses, or looking for a small diamond that had fallen out of Stella’s ring. “In a problem,” Adler said, “there is always action, an object, adjustment, and connection.” Zadacha requires actors to do something (action) to something (the object) in a way that takes into account the given circumstances (adjustment) and their scene partner (connection). This was true even during a soliloquy. When Hamlet says “To be or not to be,” he must have an object. Perhaps it is himself, perhaps it is God, or the mind, or the entire state of Denmark. Any of these could be the object of an action.
Actions must contain a feeling of truth; this element is most noticeable in its absence. Think of how often we see actors on television drink out of clearly empty coffee mugs. The solution lay in repetition. Stanislavski had told Adler, “You must repeat the small physical problems until you feel they are completely true. You must feel this truth yourself.” As for psychology, which the Group had obsessed over for years, “all physical problems will be psychological,” she said. Stanislavski had taught her that “the mind, the will, and the feeling— these are always together … They are the motor of our psychic life.”
Memory had a place in this process, but it was sense memory that she emphasized. When you picked up a coffee cup, you had to recall how it felt to hold a cup full of hot coffee, the particular warmth and how it spread to your palm, the slight shifts you made to keep it balanced so none of the coffee would slosh out and burn you. The actor needed to observe the world, to live in it with all five of their senses, and to bring those sensations back into the rehearsal room.
Although her view of it would change as the years went on, Adler was not totally dismissive of affective memory that summer. Her hostility was limited to the affective memory exercise. Affective memory lived in everything the actor did onstage. It entered through the five senses, through recollecting the feeling itself, or “through the circumstances under which you received it.” To Adler, it was important for the actor’s emotional memory to “be so trained that it comes as immediately as your common memory of … phone numbers.” That way, you did not have to take an exercise every couple of minutes while performing.
For the rest of August, while Stella taught the Group, she and Strasberg bickered about Stanislavski. For this and many other reasons, the summer in Ellenville was the most miserable of all the Group’s retreats. The hotel slumped in a soggy state of disrepair. Cheryl Crawford insisted it was haunted. People kept getting sick. On top of that, the play they rehearsed, Gold Eagle Guy, was best summed up by Luther Adler’s rehearsal room quip, “Boys, I think we’re working on a stiff.” Strasberg seemed more interested in making large visual statements influenced by Meyerhold’s and Vakhtangov’s productions than in fixing the problems of the play, and the company’s faith in “General Lee” declined alongside their willingness to tolerate his rages. During one dress rehearsal, Strasberg drilled a scene in which Beany Barker had to pour tea for a group of visitors. Over the course of the scene, one of the visitors faints, and Barker’s character continues about her business as if nothing had happened. In one run-through, however, Barker accidentally responded as a normal person would, getting off her seat to help her fainting guest. She realized what she had done wrong and immediately corrected it.
“What were you doing?” Lee asked her.
“I’m sorry Lee, it was a mistake,” she said. “May we go on?”
“What were you doing?” he repeated.
“Nothing,” Beany said. “I made a mistake. That’s all. May we go on?”
But Strasberg hammered at her again and again. What was she doing? Why had she made that mistake? Why wouldn’t she answer his questions? According to Bobby Lewis, this was less about Gold Eagle Guy than it was about Srulke Strasberg, the immigrant son of a pants presser, wanting to show that he was still in charge by taking it to the daughter of the chief physician of Johns Hopkins University Hospital.
As Beany burst into tears, Ruth Nelson, widely felt to be one of the kindest members of the Group, calmly turned to one of the other actors. “Now,” she said, “I’m going to kill him.” She charged toward the front of the stage, her arms outstretched, curving her hands as if anticipating wrapping them around Strasberg’s throat. Several of the actors held her back—in her rage, she hadn’t realized an orchestra pit lay between her and her target—and Lee fled the theater. He opted not to return. When Harold Clurman took over the final week of rehearsals, it became his first directing job within the company he had founded.
As the actors grew disillusioned with General Lee, Clifford Odets grew disillusioned with the company, and he told Harold Clurman he was quitting. Harold tried to persuade him to stay. Clifford told him he’d never had a decent role and never been taken seriously. No vision of America’s new theatrical hope could justify throwing away his prime years playing crap walk-on parts. Wait, Clurman implored him, a good part will come for you later this year. “You’re behind time, Harold,” Odets responded. He didn’t even think of himself as an actor anymore. He was a writer. Ever since audiences greeted I Got the Blues’s second act warmly at Green Mansions, he had kept working away at it, and he was also drafting a new play, to be called Paradise Lost. He was sick of the Group’s never producing his work. Harold again begged him to stay, and Odets finally relented. Odets needed to feel important, but he could not foresee how important he was about to become.
As Gold Eagle Guy lumbered through its somnolent tryout in Boston, Clifford Odets told Clurman he yearned to “belong to the largest possible group of humble, struggling men.” His hunger took him to union meetings and Faneuil Hall, where he watched the fiery oratory of Joe Kelleher, a union organizer trying to persuade boat workers to strike. Odets struck up a friendship with Kelleher, who told him he needed a play they could put on at meetings. After a failed attempt to collaboratively write the play with some of his Groupmates, Odets sat down, inspired by a recent taxi driver strike, to write the play himself. Three days later, he stood up, clutching the pages of a new work titled Waiting for Lefty, its opening cantankerous jumble of lines announcing the arrival of a new American voice:
You’re so wrong I ain’t laughing. Any guy with eyes to read knows it. Look at the textile strike—out like lions and in like lambs. Take the San Francisco tie-up—starvation and broken heads.
That voice, Odets’s voice, is slang-drunk, slinging street elocutions with such density and fire that they become poetry. It’s the sound of New York in the 1930s, the sound of polyglot immigrant tongues wrapping their rhythms around an English language that is stretching to accommodate them. This voice, which echoes through his plays both great (Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Paradise Lost, Golden Boy) and not so great (all the others), is urban, Jewish, neurotic, furious, explosive, and full of yearning.
