IdleTymes Blog

[I want to get this online because I keep referencing people to it. It’s a essay I wrote not a interesting part of my life.]

This paper intends to examine the Strasbergian technique of method acting. The aim is to highlight it weaknesses in its portrayal of the original script. I will be examining tools of the method showing where I believe there to be the flaws and how they may not be the most practical method of achieving the desired impression. I will also look at how it is not applicable to different styles of theatre.

In 1931 when the Group Theatre was first started Strasberg one of it’s three original directors, sort to teach the company according to the theories of Stanislavsky. When Stella Adler journeyed to Paris to study along side Stanislavsky she returned with news that much of his method had radically changed. However even with Stanislavsky’s new revision, Strasberg still insisted on continuing to teach the method based on the earlier works of Stanislavsky, while Adler went on to teach his later revised work.

The main part of Stanislavsky work that Strasberg kept that set him apart is the point that he still relies upon the actor to use their own personal experience to produce believable emotions on demand. Where as Adler started to use the actor imagination to achieve the same goal. In practicality reliving different past experiences on stage has quite a few problem with the psychology of the actor and the flow of the action.

The most obvious problem with the Strasbergian approach is that too take on a role in a production the actor needs to have had relevant memories for that character. For a actor to play Constantine in Chekhov’s ‘The Sea Gull’ the actor would needed to have had a experience of unrequited love that drove him half mad so that he could really understand the character. The requirement to be a good method actor would be quite strongly based on how dramatic your own personal life had been, with each different role requiring a very specific set of personal life experiences.

The use of emotional memory can be psychologically damaging, asking an actor to relive very emotionally charged parts of their life on demand can be traumatising.
Say for example for a run of a play you are asked to relive the memory of your parent untimely death to generate the impression of a certain emotion, every day for month, I would be surprised if you didn’t have a nervous breakdown.

”Aspiring Method actors were suffering nervous breakdowns at the hands of the demon Strasberg, who perversely exorcised then of their deepest fears with private moment and emotional memory exercises.” (Method Acting Reconsidered, pp 47)

I imagine another problem with the use of emotional memory would be with the continuous use you would grow desensitised. Say you had one fear wolves if again you did a run for a play where everyday you needed to remember a scary incident where your family pet was attacked by a wolf, after a while your body would learn not to associate the memory of the wolf with immediate danger. It would work along the same lines as treating a phobia where patients are asked to confront their fear within a safe environment. As Dr Hunters approach has a impressive similarity to the aforementioned acting technique : “Most phobics … receive exposure therapy or “desensitization”. Using visualization you face the spider , feel the fear…then relax, until the spider is no longer scary. To confront your fear, goes the theory, is to control your fear, and thereby lose it.” (http://www.virtualgalen.com/virtualhealing/phobia.htm)

In method acting you are always striving to achieve a certain state, he is trying to live through the character and completely lose himself within the character body and mind. QUOTE about becoming the character END QUOTE However I find this aim unrealistic for a start within the physical action of trying to achieve this state you are unable to lose the level of self-consciousness. For example you spend most of your time thinking I have not yet reached the required state and then when you do reach the state as soon as you become aware that you have, the distraction of the realisation is enough to lose it again. To be aware that you have a certain state of being to achieve means that you are too observant and detached too ever really achieve it!
To quote David Mamet “The very act of striving to create an emotional state in oneself takes one out of the play. It is the ultimate self-consciousness” (True and False, pp 11)

How realistic is it to ask a actor to lose himself in the character anyway when his action have all been predefined and the show itself flip from scene to scene out of the correct flow of time.

Trying to achieve the state has other problems, for a start the setting isn’t conducive to losing your self in a role, the stage offers up many problems. Firstly there is a huge audience watching you and bright lights glaring in your face, but focusing on your role against distractions isn’t what I would consider the greatest problem with achieving the state. It not the elements you have to ignore that is the problem, it is the ones you have to deal with for example say you have built up 28 years of a characters life visualised your wedding day and killed both your own parent so you could store the emotion heartbreak involved and regurgitate it on stage , what if something goes wrong what if the pen you where suppose to pick up rolled off the table and your forced to look for it. Could you just jump back into character on the spot, could you deal with it.
Over the course of a performance an actor could be faces with hundred of tiny problem that will require him to engage the mind set of an actor to solve and step out of the character, the kind of problem I am talking about are timing of character being slightly off or having to adjust your blocking to compensate for others miscalculations.

Especially with emotional memory as the Lee Strasberg group website says “If it’s hot, I create heat. Then it’s cold, I see something cold, and so on.” (http://www.actors-studio.com/strasberg/index5.html) It can detach from the performance because it breaks the actor out of the flow of the play, forcing him to remember past memory in list style not as if it was actually triggered by the events on stage. I concur Brecht view on this matter “Brecht feared that if a actor truly experiences, he is unable to deal with other facts demanded by the work on the character and the intention of the scene.”(The Other way, pp 110)

Probably what really would limit an actor trained in the Strasbergian technique is not the questionable characterisation techniques that he taught but what they haven’t been taught. Strasberg was considered to have excluded the actor basics physical work and vocal training in aid of concentrating on the his more internal approach. Sanjay Shelat a profession actor view on this is “No matter how intense your internal emotions are, if they don’t come across externally they are no use to an actor.” (Interview with Sanjay Shelat, Appendix 1)

Strasbergian trained actors have been criticised when working on anything other than gritty realism, they are out of their depth. The skills that they have homed combined with the lack of practical acting skills had forced them into becoming quite specialised.
I will look into how Strasberg technique deal with the works of Shakespeare and Brecht.

Brecht theories and practice had been designed in opposition to the romanticism movement that was going on around him, he considered it over-emotional and self-indulgent. His objections carried over into Stanislavskian naturalism even to the point where he scorns Stanislavsky’s ideas in unfinished play The Messingkauf Dialogues, in it he ridiculed the idea that an actor can convince an audience that they really are the character on stage.

One of Strasbergs method actors would need to readjust and reconsider a great deal of their basic teachings to give a apt interpretation of one of Brecht works. Brecht asks his actor to maintain a level of objectivity so that they are capable of able to understand the emotion that they where to stimulate in the audience. Strasberg compared this approach to the occasional taking a outside view of your character to see the quality of his own performance. However the comparison doesn’t stand Strasberg wanted them to view themselves from the outside so that observe their if characterisation for faults. Brecht was asking them to look at themselves from the audience point of view to make sure they creating the correct emotions in them. Strasberg wanted the audience to empathise with the character and share his emotions while Brecht wanted the audience to intellectually analyse the emotion, for example to see some one in pain and rather than feel their pain, feel anger for the cause of the pain or glad because the character deservers the pain.

Brecht wanted people to recognize the stereotypes within his plays so that they didn’t lose themselves in it he often tried to prevent his actor identifying with the character.
“To keep [Brecht’s] implications alive, it is essential that the primary motivation comes not from the character, but from what the character represents” (The Other way, pp 110)

If you take the ending of Brechts Threepenny opera where Macheath is granted a pardon by the queen. The Strasbergian approach would have the heart felt relieve on Macheath face as he rejoined his women after escaping his certain death, with the aim maybe to jerk a tear out of the audience.

What has actually happen in the play is they have taken Macheath a rapist , murderer , thief, liar and bigamist and given him everything to a comical exaggerated degree rubbing the unrealistic nature of it with the castle and huge pension. Too make you feel glad and relieved for him would be very morally questionable.

The response I think Brecht was striving for would be to make the audience step back and realise that in society this would not let this happen and take it as a joke. So a more faithful ending might have Macheath appear more smug, cold and unbothered and definitely not remorseful.

A method actor can apply himself to Shakespeare quite well the characters are
Shakespeare lends itself self to method acting very well, it has intricate characters with complicated motivations. However they problems that it causes with Strasberg approach is the other worldliness, Strasberg asks actor to use their personal experiences to bring authenticity. However your standard actor trying to sum up emotions of that a fairy queen may have experienced from their own personal life. When dealing with any type of theatre that is not based in reality this problem occurs the rules that govern the Strasbergian technique can become very limiting.

In conclusion I would like to make the point that the Strasbergian technique does work. Strasberg has manage to train some very successful actors and using his techniques, actors “who could feel truly and cry freely; who, at the touch of an emotional-memory, could summon up the lava of resentment, the cold ice of dread or the tear-splattering recollection of grief.” (The Other Way, Charles Marowitz, pp 15)
However I do believe that his system does have it’s flaws and limitations, the demands on the actor are unreasonable, it’s approach to characterisation is limiting and it is unable to deal with the fantastic and implausible subject matters. So their has too be some truth in Alder final parting shot, when Strasberg death was confirmed she turned to her class and said “It will be a hundred years before the harm that man [Strasberg] has done to the art of acting can be corrected” (Method Acting Reconsidered, pp 48)

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