The method, p.37
The Method, page 37
The career of Directors Unit member Marshall Mason was a Stanislavski feedback loop typical of the times. He studied a version of the “system” with Alvina Krause, who trained a generation of actors and directors at Northwestern, before moving to New York and joining up with the Unit. Krause didn’t consider herself Method, nor did she care much for Strasberg. “[The Method] was what it was called in New York,” Mason said. “Ms. Krause used to joke that she would create actors and then she’d send them to New York and Strasberg would ruin them.” After the Unit, Mason co-founded Circle Rep, which became one of the most important Off-Broadway theater companies of the 1970s and 1980s, and embarked on a long career as a teacher, further planting the “system” in the soil of the American theater. Mason had mixed feelings about his time in the Directors Unit. While sometimes “Strasberg was just terrific,” helping Mason solve problems that he couldn’t navigate on his own, there was another side to Lee. “He would really blisteringly tear everybody apart. His source of bitterness was not immediately understandable until you realized that he had been overlooked when they started Lincoln Center.”
For Michael Kahn, the most useful part of the Directors Unit was the access it gave him to the Studio proper. He already had some background in the Method. In high school, his acting teacher had been Michael Howard, an alum of both the Studio and Meisner’s classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Kahn maintains that he “learned good things from Lee,” but that he also learned from Strasberg’s bad habits what to avoid when he became an acting teacher himself. “When it was clear that Lee didn’t have the answer to whatever question had come up, he would end up talking about Duse and Beethoven. It was always very interesting but I could see his ego was on the line when he was teaching, and I realized that that’s not helpful.”
He also learned to reinforce the boundaries that Strasberg sometimes failed to maintain. Once while teaching at the Circle in the Square Theatre School, he said to his students, “Look, I’m a teacher. I’m your teacher. I’m not your father. I’m not your boyfriend. I’m not your shrink. That’s not my job.” One actress in the class burst into tears and ran out of the room, never to return.
In June 1962, the Studio publicly announced that it was forming the Actors Studio Theatre, thanks in part to seed funding from the Ford Foundation. At the helm were Lee Strasberg, its artistic director, and Cheryl Crawford, its executive producer. The production board included Edward Albee, Anne Bancroft, Frank Corsaro, Paul Newman, and Arthur Penn.
Strasberg and Crawford approached Kazan, wanting him to sign a letter of agreement that he would direct for the Studio. Instead, Gadge resigned. He could not run a Broadway theater at Lincoln Center with a rep company and mixed season of new plays and classics while sitting on the board of a rival company with the same structure and mission. Besides, he saw that the Actors Studio Theatre would be “run by a committee,” he said. “I wouldn’t sit on a committee with Jesus Christ, never mind Stanislavski, and you can quote me!” When he resigned, Kazan wrote an open letter, posted on the Studio’s callboard, to explain his actions:
To All: I resigned as a director—only. That was necessary. But I’m still with you. And very much for any and all efforts you make. I’m sure that whatever you do will bring credit to our years of work and to Lee’s Teaching.
—The First Member.
The theater press smelled blood, and their response was giddy. “Studio ‘Divorce’: Will Kazan Get the Kids?” read one typical headline. Kazan did himself few favors over the summer of 1962, when he wrote a long article for the New York Times criticizing the Studio and its membership.
“The Actors Studio … is now no longer a young group of insurgents,” he wrote. “It is itself an orthodoxy.” While he claimed he was talking about his own shortcomings as much as anyone else’s, the article reads like a pointed rebuke of Lee and the Method itself. “Too much of the ‘Method’ talk about actors today is a defense against new artistic challenges, rationalizations for their own ineptitudes. We have a swarm of actors who are ideologues and theorists. There have been days when I felt I would swap them all for a gang of wandering players, who could dance and sing, and who were, above all else, entertainers.” In order for his work at Lincoln Center to find success, “it is clear we will need a different kind of actor.”
Kazan’s departure changed the Studio. Strasberg closed down the Directors Unit, ostensibly because of the poor quality of the work it presented, and then relaunched it as a solo endeavor in 1963. Though Strasberg’s day-to-day authority over the organization was near absolute, Kazan’s contributions had been felt when the two men evaluated final auditions and chose new members together. “Without Kazan there, Lee’s choices of who should be Studio members were different,” Estelle Parsons said, “because Gadge, of course, had a commercial head as well as an artistic one. When he was gone, I sometimes thought that Lee did not really know the difference between neurotic behavior and talent.”
Strasberg and Kazan had begun as mentor and intern, became partners, and then friends. Now they would be bitter rivals, both running repertory companies, both trying to prove they knew how to make their adaptation of the “system” work on a grand scale. Both of their efforts would suffer spectacular—and public—failure. By the time the dust had settled, neither man would direct on Broadway again.
If Kazan’s critique of the Studio sounded more than a little like Bobby Lewis’s, it was likely because the two men had reconciled. Lewis had nursed his grudge against Kazan since leaving the Studio, feeding it on bitterness and contempt over Gadge’s HUAC testimony. But when the two men ran into each other one day in the late 1950s, all of Lewis’s anger vanished. Both men had shared the nickname Juicy in the Group Theatre, and on the streets of Manhattan, they screamed the word at each other and embraced, all resentments evaporating in an instant. At Lincoln Center, Kazan brought Lewis on to train a company of newcomers that included Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lloyd, Austin Pendleton, Frank Langella, and Barbara Loden. Only a handful of these trainees made it into the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, and only Barbara Loden—Kazan’s future second wife—received any major roles. Lewis wasn’t the only Group alum brought in to the Lincoln Center project. Kazan also hired Harold Clurman to “prepare future program[s], guide its educational and training program and develop the acting company,” on a consulting basis. Clurman and Adler had divorced in 1960, and perhaps Kazan felt he could finally get his old friend’s expertise without Stella’s meddling.
While Lewis trained a new generation of actors, Kazan tried to find some established ones to fill out the leads in the company. He tried to raid the Studio, but most of the actors refused to double-cross Strasberg, particularly when offered a union minimum contract that tied them up for an entire season. Geraldine Page was particularly offended by Kazan’s assertion that he had to direct movies while offering her a contract that would prohibit her from acting in them.
For his part, Kazan could no more abandon filmmaking than he could stop breathing. Directing movies was his passion now, not running a middlebrow theater for rich people while under the massive thumb and ever watchful eye of John D. Rockefeller III. He had come to realize that he was a bad fit for the Lincoln Center job and that Robert Whitehead should have picked someone else. Kazan’s “training had been entirely in the psychological realism of the Group Theatre. That is all I’d learned, all I truly understood, and, until then, all I really cared about.” Yes, he could parlay that approach into the more lyrical dialogue of Tennessee Williams, or the stage poetry of Archibald MacLeish, but he had no experience with classics, or with running a large company. Whitehead and Kazan had different backgrounds, and different visions for the theater, but they agreed with each other more than they did with the conservative financial forces behind Lincoln Center. Strasberg had predicted all of this years earlier when he warned Kazan about Lincoln Center, telling him in Clurmanesque terms that “a true theatre has to have a unified approach set by its artistic leaders—clear goals and a basic theme.”
This was good advice, and Strasberg should have heeded it himself. The Actors Studio Theatre was, if anything, even more incoherent. As Kazan had feared, it was run by committee. The chaos of clashing egos, priorities, and tastes bogged down the process of choosing their season, turning it into a grueling ordeal. The Production Unit first explored programming something by Williams, the closest person the Studio had to a resident playwright. But they couldn’t agree on which of his many plays to do and soon moved on. They toyed with a series of other projects, including two plays by Brecht: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui—which Strasberg hoped would star Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn—and Galileo with Rod Steiger. In June 1962, the Actors Studio Theatre announced they were producing the world premiere of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In a sign of how much the insurgents had indeed become the old guard, and of the chaos of their leadership, they soon withdrew the play. Cheryl Crawford objected to Albee’s script because she was “scared of its bitterness and brutality.” Roger Stevens, a seasoned producer and the Studio’s general administrator, said he would “never be party to subsidizing the speaking of those dirty words on stage.” Within a year it became the essential American play of the decade.
Fed up, the actor Rip Torn stepped into the void left by the Studio’s lack of leadership and stole the rights to two plays that had been promised to Lincoln Center. The first was Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, which opened the Actors Studio Theatre’s season on March 11, 1963. The play, five hours long and filled with stream-of-consciousness soliloquies in which the characters explain their subtext, managed to be an unlikely hit thanks to a starry cast that included Franchot Tone, Ben Gazzara, and Jane Fonda. The Times raved that the production was “brilliant … the Actors Studio has taken a step forward. It may turn out to be a giant step forward for the good of the theater in America.” But other critics found it underrehearsed and lacking the “subtlety expected of the Actors Studio method.”
The most pointed criticism of the production came from the Village Voice, the bête noire of establishments everywhere. The Voice, the only paper that regularly reviewed Off-Off-Broadway and the avant-garde, railed against the conservatism on display, not only in the choice of material, but in the choice of celebrities to front it. “If the Actors Studio is attempting to advance the art of the theatre, this is a poor beginning … the rediscovery of L. B. Mayer and the star system suggests a new failure of nerve.” Many members of the Studio shared in these complaints, particularly as neither director José Quintero nor star Franchot Tone was a Studio member.
For his next trick, Torn snatched away James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, even though Kazan had given Baldwin the idea for the play. Baldwin, wary of interference from a theater industry that he mostly held in contempt, agreed to give the play to the Studio after Torn promised him complete freedom from rewrite pressure. This freedom turned out to be necessary. The Studio remained conflicted about Charlie—an incandescent response to the Emmett Till lynching—throughout the process of mounting it. Arthur Penn recalled that, due to the whiteness of the American theater, “we all felt we should get a Black playwright up there,” and that Baldwin had been floating around the Playwrights Unit. But the Studio, as a predominantly white, mostly liberal institution, appears to have been terrified of the play itself. The board split over whether to program Charlie, and both Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg attempted to smooth out its rougher, more controversial edges to make it more palatable to a white Broadway audience. Frank Corsaro was originally supposed to direct Blues, but the collaboration ran aground when he asked that the play be rewritten to soften the depiction of its white characters. Corsaro wanted a more fair-minded, sensitive, psychologically realistic play in the Method mold, but Blues for Mister Charlie’s power comes from its mix of explicit politics and meta-theatricality. Beginning with civil rights activists role-playing encounters with racist whites, and ending with a trial, Blues is obsessed with performance and how it shapes our approach to race, gender, and sex, challenging the very notions of authenticity on which the Method rests. Burgess Meredith took over directing duties while Baldwin whittled the script down from its initial running time of over five hours.
While rewrites for Mister Charlie continued, the Studio mounted its next play, June Havoc’s Marathon ’33, and once again confronted a clash between old and new. In its original form, the play was an autobiographical, impressionistic series of vignettes set within the brief dance marathon craze of the 1930s. “I loved that period of the marathons, despite its horrors,” Havoc said. Part of the play’s heat was generated by the fact that Havoc’s family story had received a Broadway airing in 1959: Her sister was Rose Louise Hovick, alias Gypsy Rose Lee. Rose “wanted money and fame,” Havoc said, “and our family story as told in Gypsy is not the truth … In Marathon ’33, I told the truth.”
But many people involved with the production agree that whatever truth she was striving for was lost by the time the Actors Studio was done with the play. Havoc wanted to direct it herself, while Strasberg wanted an established hand at the helm, and he relented only after several failed meetings with experienced candidates. Still, he couldn’t leave the show alone and soon started interfering, to the play’s detriment. “Broad comedy after all was not exactly the Studio’s forte,” Havoc said. “I didn’t want to make the piece too heavy, but Lee’s work made it seem like Dostoyevsky.” As Corsaro had with Baldwin, Strasberg pressured Havoc to make the play more conventional, telling her that reviewers would dislike it unless she fixed its “literary deficiencies.” Although she was stung, Havoc acquiesced. The revised Marathon ’33 gained a straightforward plot, and a new strain of sentimentality. When it opened, reviewers praised its atmosphere, but found the script thin. Within the Studio, it was regarded as a failure.
The confusion over the Studio’s mission and taste continued with Dynamite Tonight, a kooky “opera for actors” that closed after one performance. Baby Want a Kiss, a flimsy star vehicle for Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, salvaged the season’s finances, if not its artistic reputation. The show made money, but it also violated everything for which the Studio was supposed to stand.
It was up to the next two plays to rescue the Actors Studio Theatre’s reputation, and for the most part, they did. While Blues for Mister Charlie’s rehearsal process had been stormy—at one point, Baldwin climbed a ladder in the middle of a rehearsal to berate Lee and the Studio’s actors for their lack of feel for the material—when it opened, the play received warm reviews and an enthusiastic audience response. But with a large budget, and ticket prices purposely set low, it bled money. Blues might have closed soon after opening had it not been for a concerted public relations effort on Baldwin’s part. Two of Nelson Rockefeller’s daughters contributed a total of ten thousand dollars to keep the play running, and an ad supporting the play, signed by Lorraine Hansberry, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Studs Terkel, Tennessee Williams, Miles Davis, and more than a dozen other luminaries, ran in the papers. Blues stayed alive and found a predominantly Black audience that kept it running from April all the way through the summer. When Cheryl Crawford finally closed the play in August for what she insisted were purely financial reasons, Baldwin was so incensed he contemplated suing the Studio.
The final show of the season, the jewel in their crown, was Lee Strasberg’s production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Lee’s career had come full circle. It was with The Three Sisters that the Moscow Art Theatre had first bewitched him, setting the course for his life. He could remember entire scenes from it vividly, and even owned an album of the Moscow Art Theatre performance of the show. Casting The Three Sisters proved challenging, but Strasberg settled on Geraldine Page as Olga, Kim Stanley as Masha, and Barbara Baxley as Natasha. Shirley Knight played the youngest sister, Irina. Strasberg wanted Marlon Brando to return to the stage as Masha’s lover Vershinin, but Brando declined. The role was filled by Kevin McCarthy, an Actors Studio veteran and former confidant of Montgomery Clift. Kim Stanley, who hated McCarthy for reasons unknown, tried to talk Strasberg out of it but failed.
In his lectures before the Directors Unit, Strasberg had described his standard directing process at length. First, he began with readings and table work. During this period, Strasberg felt the director’s main job was breaking the play down into the major units of action and defining with the actors the major task/problems for their characters. The director should not, however, tell them how to accomplish anything. Instead, he must “be willing, partially, to pay the price for a creative performance.” The price is giving the actors freedom to find their way, and being open to the results, which might be “a little different from what he had in mind. That is the value of creative work.”
After this, Strasberg moved on to staging. He did not plan in detail, but rather began with “open movement,” in which the actors moved in response to what was happening with their characters. Then he worked out the basics of who entered where, or sat down when, or looked out a window. This was a mechanical part of the process, taking a day per act, and was done with scripts in hand. As they rehearsed, he would try to bring the actors closer to the given circumstances using improvisation, or, when that failed, affective memory exercises. Once the staging was done, Strasberg worked with actors to refine the scenes in psychological and physical detail, working moment to moment, beat by beat. The final stage of the process involved using run-throughs to find the right details “that can contribute to cementing a scene, to heightening a scene.” It was only during this period, he felt, that the director should concern herself with her actors’ diction and projection, because actors could get too focused on the technical side of things and neglect the necessary inner work to make the character come to life.
