The method, p.38
The Method, page 38
This was Strasberg’s ideal process. But while directing his dream project under enormous pressure, he became more and more concerned with the real world, much to the frustration of his collaborators. “There was this terrible clash,” said Estelle Parsons, “when the Studio devoted itself briefly to doing productions. Some very gifted people got disgusted with Lee because they said, ‘He inspires with all this talk, and yet when he puts his foot into the American theater, he just forgets about it.’ ” Lacking the luxurious three-month rehearsal time of Men in White, Strasberg cut short the exploratory processes he encouraged within the Studio itself and imposed his will on his headstrong stars. At one rehearsal, he brought in his audio recording of the Moscow Art Theatre production and played it over and over for Kim Stanley and Kevin McCarthy as a way of demonstrating how their parts should be played. Rehearsals became so heated that Barbara Baxley threatened to quit the show unless Strasberg stopped yelling at her. Geraldine Page, who was both on the Studio’s board and a frequent target of Strasberg’s wrath, felt that he was trying “to act like a Broadway director” instead of being a Broadway director.
But the end results worked, finishing out the Studio’s season on a note of widespread acclaim and prestige. In the New York Post, Jerry Thalmer captured the predominant mood about The Three Sisters by positioning it as a final exam the Studio had passed. “The Actors Studio talks a good deal about the truth,” he wrote. “Last night at the Morosco it nailed for our lifetime the right to do so.” Not everyone was so enthused. Marshall Mason recalled that “the first act was just impeccable. It was impeccable! It was brilliant, brilliant, brilliant theater. The second act, a little less so. The third act, a little less so, and by the fourth act, it was just a mess … It was one of those situations in which you just felt like he didn’t have time enough to mold the play.”
By the end of its season, the Actors Studio Theatre appeared to be thriving, particularly compared to their rivals at Lincoln Center. At first, everything had started out well for Kazan. He turned on the charm, reconciled with Arthur Miller, and got down to work, navigating a tense rehearsal atmosphere made more complex by the divide between the company’s Method actors and actors from other backgrounds. After the Fall, a roman à clef about Arthur Miller’s doomed marriage to Marilyn Monroe, received mixed reviews, but the New York Times gave it a rave, and that’s all the show needed to be a hit. Soon after, José Quintero’s production of Marco Millions, a minor Eugene O’Neill play, received warm, respectful praise and ran on alternating nights with the Miller. But the next two productions—a boulevard comedy called But for Whom, Charlie and the Jacobean tragedy The Changeling—were critically reviled disasters. The haymakers in the press staggered Kazan and Whitehead, leaving them with few defenses from Lincoln Center’s board. They needed time, and a chance to develop and learn from their mistakes, but they had no way to secure either. Kazan and Whitehead were too conventional for the cognoscenti to take up their cause, and they lost too much money to curry favor with Lincoln Center’s board or its new president, William Schuman. By the end of the year, they were both out.
Strasberg had every reason to feel victorious. Many companies would kill for a season that had three critical successes and one bona fide box office hit. As Arthur Penn put it, by the end of 1964 “the logical place for the Studio to end up would be as a national theatre.” But it was not to be. The Three Sisters would turn out to be the Actors Studio Theatre’s final production.
The early 1960s were a time of public reevaluation of and opposition to the Method, fueled in part by a mini-boom in books about Stanislavski. Creating a Role, the master’s final, posthumously assembled book on acting, came out in 1961. Lewis Funke and John E. Booth’s Actors Talk About Acting, also published in 1961, contained interviews with everyone from Morris Carnovsky to Sidney Poitier. New York University Press published The Stanislavsky Heritage, which detailed the evolution of the “system” and its impact on the West, in 1965.
All of this activity created opportunities to litigate the Strasberg/Adler rift anew. Was the key to Stanislavski’s “system” affective memory or imagination?
Adler hoped to lay the matter to rest in November 1964 with a visit to the United States by representatives of the Moscow Art Theatre, who led a three-day seminar on Stanislavski at the Institute of International Education. Harold Clurman, Bobby Lewis, Cheryl Crawford, Uta Hagen, Rip Torn, Paula Strasberg, and Shelley Winters all attended.
The seminars began with an acknowledgment by the Russians that they had “been told that the Method here has given rise to tendencies that are opposed to [Stanislavski]’s ideas,” followed by a lecture and demonstration. But the three days dashed any hopes of clarifying what Stanislavski believed on the subject of emotion and action. Angelina Stepanova, who trained with Stanislavski, declared that “Stanislavsky rejected … this path of approaching the character from the standpoint of emotions … We cannot force emotion to appear by a conscious effort of the will.” But Victor Manyukov, a director with the Moscow Art Theatre, said that Stanislavski’s “system” was based on emotion memory and that he was mystified by the confusion in the United States over all of this. “If it isn’t clear now,” Adler said, “it never will be.” Her prediction turned out to be correct; the conference left those in attendance as baffled as when they arrived.
A month later, the Tulane Drama Review, a pugnacious academic journal that served as the theater world’s answer to the Village Voice, published the second of its two-part series dedicated to “Stanislavski and America.” The next year, TDR collected the two issues into a book of the same name. In “Exit Thirties, Enter Sixties,” his introduction to the volume, editor Richard Schechner made clear that he felt the book’s project was elegiac. The Stanislavski period in American theater was—or perhaps should have been—ending. The Group Theatre’s venerable alumni “are still active in our theatre,” he wrote, “but they represent an aesthetic that is no longer representative. Their impress, so important and formative, is fading as another generation assumes leadership. Our theatre is undergoing basic reevaluation.”
That reevaluation had many sources. Schechner wrote during a mini-boom in American theater. During the 1960s, the Off-Broadway and regional theater movements emerged, flush with cash from the Ford Foundation and the promise—never truly fulfilled—of future money to come from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Ford Foundation spent $9 million seeding twenty-six new theaters across the country in 1961. By 2005, not-for-profit theaters in America would number over twelve hundred. Many believed that the regional theater movement would decentralize American theater, allowing new companies to approach the art form in different ways. The movement’s rapid growth required a new labor force of actors, directors, and designers. Universities—sometimes in partnership with local theaters—rushed in to train them. Some schools created new theater majors while others took their existing programs and shifted their emphasis toward the practical, hiring artists to teach alongside academics. This expansion of college level theater education coincided with a revival in the progressive education movement, which emphasized pluralism and the individual, encouraging students to question the dogmas of earlier generations and, as the cliché went, “find your voice.”
If you ventured Off-Broadway, you would see that directorial concepts and experimentation were in, psychological realism and naturalistic aesthetics were out. Experimental directors drew from theorists like Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski, and Antonin Artaud, all of whom wanted to tear down the fourth wall that Stanislavski had erected. Some companies looked to more external, non-Western, acting traditions like those found in Noh, Kabuki, Beijing opera, and Sanskrit drama. After all, visual art had moved on from abstract expressionism’s internal focus into the postmodern era, shouldn’t theater follow suit? Joseph Chaiken, whose Open Theatre became one of the most celebrated experimental companies of the 1960s and 1970s, wrote that “traditional acting in America has become a blend of that same kind of synthetic ‘feeling’ and sentimentality which characterizes the Fourth of July parade, Muzak, church services and political campaigns.” His own work experimented with many different styles and approaches, including mime and dance. Even the Lincoln Center Theater embraced this changing of the guard, replacing Kazan and Whitehead with Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, two San Francisco impresarios with highbrow European taste whose choices at Lincoln Center leaned heavily on playwrights like Georg Büchner and Bertolt Brecht.
But the combatants in this war for control over the American theater overdramatized their struggle, and overestimated the popularity of anti-naturalistic work. Herbert Blau lasted less than two years at Lincoln Center; under Irving’s sole leadership, the theater juggled larger-scale conservative fare with experimental productions in a smaller second stage space, but it eventually ran aground financially in 1973. In a way, Irving’s arrangement at Lincoln Center mirrored that of American theater writ large—the experimentalists never quite took over; their work was relegated instead to smaller audiences in smaller spaces, their innovations percolating up into a mainstream that rarely credited them.
The experimenters and the old guard at the Actors Studio also had more in common than they wanted to admit. Many directors wanted to claim the mantle of Brecht. Strasberg had actually worked with him. He was intrigued by Kabuki theater and invited visiting artists to conduct workshops in its techniques at the Studio. Actors steeped in Stanislavski may have struggled with the classics, but they often grounded experimental work in real humanity. The first new play produced at Caffe Cino, the venue that birthed Off-Off-Broadway, was written and produced by Actors Studio members. The membership of the Playwrights and Directors units of the Studio made work that extended far beyond the limits of psychological realism. María Irene Fornés, one of the most important experimental playwrights of the twentieth century, studied with Lee Strasberg. Her writing classes, which exerted enormous influence on generations of playwrights, drew heavily from Lee’s teachings, including his affective memory exercises.
But in 1964, the Method was fighting a two-front war. The first was between psychological realism and the avant-garde. The second, which had been raging ever since Stella Adler returned from Paris in the mid-1930s, was between Strasberg’s method and everyone else’s. The editors of Stanislavski and America knew which side they were on, and it wasn’t Lee’s. This was made clear by the series’ final essay, “Lee Strasberg: Burning Ice,” written by none other than Gordon Rogoff.
By then, Rogoff had been pushed out of the Studio for the crime of letting Arthur Penn moderate a session when Lee was sick. “I took on authority,” Rogoff explained. “I was supposed to take direction, not authority, but I didn’t know that! It was all downhill from there.” After leaving the Studio, he became a critic. In “Burning Ice,” he wrote that he felt “a fixed wish … that power, talent, and impulse serve well the cause of art.” The essay made it clear that on all three fronts, Strasberg had failed. Launching off a quote from Robert Brustein—“Strasberg has been the interior decorator of a crumbling structure whose foundations he has done nothing to change”—Rogoff delivered an extended jeremiad against his former boss, whose papal authority over his actors was only matched by his ineffectual pomposity. “If Strasberg sounds like a huckster,” Rogoff wrote, “it may be that no other language is available to him … when, as at one of his classes, he calls himself ‘the most important person in American theatre,’ it is possible that he is exaggerating … to make the point. Such exaggeration may be necessary: it is one matter to have disciples, quite another to win an audience.” His true gift, Rogoff summarized, was not in the teaching of acting but in “the fine art of inspiring insecurity.”
Strasberg, who had given an extensive interview to Schechner for the series, was incensed. When he wrote to the Tulane Drama Review a year later, he accused the publication and its editors of libel. The editors laughed off the accusation in their response. By then they had something new to throw in his face: the debacle of The Three Sisters’ tour to London, which one critic had called “the suicide of the Actors Studio.”
In 1965, the future of the Actors Studio Theatre remained uncertain. The Ford Foundation decided to stop funding the company, and there wasn’t enough money for a new season. Within the Studio, the failures, the hesitant decision making, and what many saw as a betrayal of their shared values loomed larger than its successes. As Arthur Penn put it, they “needed an entrepreneurial genius like Joe Papp.” Papp, who seemed to have his finger on the pulse of American audiences, was running a sprawling operation at the Public Theatre through sheer force of will and brio. For all his genius, Strasberg was in his midsixties, and often unable to make up his mind. Frank Corsaro felt that the real problem was that they had started too late. “The actors would have been willing to start a real ensemble in the fifties and the star aspect would have happened by itself then.” But by 1965, some of the thrill was gone. Many of the best actors and directors had left. As Estelle Parsons described it, “People didn’t care about going [to the Studio] anymore because they weren’t getting jobs out of there.”
But Strasberg couldn’t shake the dream of running a national theater. When the World Theatre Festival invited the Studio to send their work to London, Strasberg hoped that international acclaim would help rekindle the Ford Foundation’s interest and raise attention and money back home. The Studio decided to send Blues for Mister Charlie and The Three Sisters to London, but the problems began almost immediately. The State Department refused to help fund the trip. Blues, they said, was “controversial, badly written, and noisy—more cartoon and sermon than play,” while The Three Sisters had “little kinship to America.” The Studio had to privately raise the money to send the two shows—and their forty-seven actors—abroad.
Several of those forty-seven were new. The same indomitable spirit that led Rip Torn to steal Blues from Kazan had made him impossible to work with, and he had been fired from the very play he made happen. Over on The Three Sisters, Geraldine Page, Torn’s wife, could not make the trip because she was pregnant and was replaced by Nan Martin. Shirley Knight had already committed to another show and was replaced by Sandy Dennis. Kim Stanley told Strasberg she would stay with the show, but only if he fired Kevin McCarthy. Strasberg acquiesced, and Stanley sought a replacement Vershinin in George C. Scott. Robert Loggia, who had a small role in The Three Sisters, believed Scott took the part only because his lover, Ava Gardner, was in London and their relationship was on the skids. Strasberg, who had developed his production for—and at times with—his original cast, had to reconceive it with three new principal actors on short notice.
Then Kim Stanley refused to travel to London by plane. She would take a ship across the Atlantic, she said, which meant she would not be available for most of the rehearsals. The Aldwych Theatre, where the play was set to perform, was unavailable, so the company’s rehearsals took place on tennis courts and other found spaces. When they finally entered the Aldwych, they discovered, in the words of actor Salem Ludwig, “that it was a raked stage, with an eighteen-foot apron.” All the furniture had to be nailed down or it would fall over. Their soundboard operator was a teenager, and, according to Ludwig, “we didn’t get a lighting man until the day before we opened. There was nothing but flat lighting for the third act. And because we had had almost no time to rehearse on the Aldwych stage, we kept falling into the apron, where we were covered by almost total darkness.”
The Three Sisters’ lone dress rehearsal was held on the day of its opening. George C. Scott didn’t know his lines and rehearsed in sagging long johns as the crew pressed his costume. The cast labored through three of the play’s four acts before the dinner break. Sandy Dennis, who by her own admission didn’t know what she was doing, was so consumed by anxiety that she became severely constipated and was unable to defecate for two weeks.
On opening night, the stage manager forgot to call places. The performance began so late that the audience started stamping their feet in impatience. The show ran to almost four hours, largely because of Kim Stanley. In New York, she had been a typhoon onstage, uncontrollable, imbued with an almost biblical intensity. But in London, her gale-force winds abandoned her, and she wandered the poorly lit set as if concussed, pausing after nearly every word. The lugubrious vortex of her performance swallowed the production whole. At one point, Barbara Baxley slammed a door and the set nearly fell down. She had to hold it up until a stagehand came to help her. When Sandy Dennis delivered the line “Oh, it’s been a terrible evening,” someone in the audience hollered back, “It sure has been!”
During the curtain call, the audience seemed divided between those storming the exits and people shouting Yankee, go home! at the stage. Adding to the humiliation, the stage manager kept raising the curtain again and again, forcing the actors out for bow after bow as if it were the premiere of the Moscow Art Theatre’s The Seagull. Afterward, Laurence Olivier himself came backstage to congratulate and console the cast, but the damage was done. Barbara Baxley cornered Strasberg and told him, “You may feel you can direct. You know more about it than anybody in the world, but that does not make you a director. Hopefully, you will never direct anything again after this.” According to Robert Loggia, George C. Scott grabbed “a quart of gin” and proceeded to “chug-a-lug it.”
The next day, the inevitable pans began appearing in the press. Anthony Burgess summed up the critics’ collective mood by declaring that the production was a four-hour demonstration of the Method’s shortcomings. Strasberg shocked the hungover and despairing cast by calling a company meeting and agreeing with the reviews. George C. Scott stood up and advanced on him. “Mr. Strasberg,” he said, “you called us together to tell us the papers were right? That we’re lousy actors? Do you mean to blame the actors for last night’s fiasco?” Strasberg fled the room. Scott, incensed, stormed off and didn’t return to the theater for the second performance. That night another actor, holding a script, played Vershinin. By the end of its run, The Three Sisters settled down, and later press reports were far more favorable, but the damage to Strasberg and the Studio’s reputation was done.
