Training of the American Actor

INTRODUCTION

The actor’s art cannot be taught. He must be born with ability; but the technique, through which his talent can find expression—that can and must be taught.

—RICHARD BOLESLAVSKY

ACTING IN AMERICA

No historical evidence exists to pinpoint when the first professional actors appeared in America. We know there were amateur theatricals as early as 1598 in the territories that were to become America, and records exist of a strolling player arriving from England in 1703. A theater, probably the first, was built in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1716. It housed a resident company of actors headed by Charles and Mary Stagg, about whom little is known. Walter Murray and Thomas Kean headed a company of comedians that performed in Philadelphia in 1749, in New York in 1750, and in Williamsburg in 1751. They continued performing for twenty years without distinction. For the most part, early settlers were too preoccupied with their practical needs for shelter, food, worship and safety to make culture a major concern. What cultural references they knew had been brought with them from their mother countries. Colonized America had not yet developed its own social history.

The first professional company of comedians to arrive in the colonies was led by Lewis Hallam (1714-1756), the brother of British theatrical manager William Hallam (1712-1758). William Hallam’s theatrical enterprise had run into bankruptcy in London, but the generosity of his creditors allowed him to retain his costumes, properties and moveable scenery. Looking for new ways to revive his fortunes, he struck on sending a repertory of twenty-four plays and farces to the uncivilized colonial Americans. Lewis led a group of ten actors from London to America in 1752, but William remained in London and never saw his colonial American company perform. The company’s strategy was to land in Royalist Williamsburg, which they considered more congenial to theater than Puritan New England. They performed in Williamsburg for eleven months, establishing a solid reputation, and by 1753, the company was given permission to perform in the northern colonies. They proceeded to build the first American theater in New York City. Rumblings from religious leaders suggesting that the troupe was in league with the devil limited their audiences and made it obligatory for them to spend much of their time touring to other cities. It was a politically arduous task to overcome the religious objections of the local fathers and gain permission to perform in the few cities large enough to provide sufficient patrons.

Theater, with its royal, seventeenth-century hierarchical organization, had a difficult time taking root in a country that was actively throwing off any suggestion of aristocracy. Even more threatening was the notion of outside groups siphoning off money that local leaders considered essential to keep in the community. Cities were small and the populations not so prosperous, so it was necessary for touring companies to rotate their repertoires from night to night in order to maximize income. This pattern of traveling companies, rather than resident companies, prevailed until the colonial war for independence, when it became hazardous for actors to be identified as British. During the war, Hallam’s company kept a low profile by temporarily residing in the West Indies.

During the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, the United States expanded its boundaries while its population doubled every ten years. Major cities established resident theaters, and when certain actors gained in popularity over others, the star system developed. These entrepreneurial stars could divide their time among several companies, creating financial success for all. Although the number of actors increased, training remained informal, a combination of practical experience onstage and mentoring by older, established company actors.

After the Civil War, America’s second industrial revolution vastly transformed the way the country functioned. The assembly line, with workers endlessly repeating a single task, introduced cost-efficiency to manufacturing. Such notions of efficiency also affected the theater: stars began to limit their repertories while moving from city to city with their own groups of featured players, engaging local actors (ringers) to fill small roles. But the disastrous economic depression of the 1870s eliminated most local companies, so the traveling star and his retinue were required to be self-sufficient. As a result, companies began presenting single plays that moved from theater to theater, with the star becoming a specialist in a single role. With cities in the expanded country now easily reachable by rail, a star could perform the same role for years. One such actor was James O’Neill (1849-1920), the father of playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), who became rich repeating the role of Edmund Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo for over thirty years.

By the 1880s, New York City was becoming America’s primary theater center. It was the country’s chief commercial city and the entry point for immigrants, who brought with them a rich cultural history that often included a love of theater and live entertainment. There was a boom in the construction of playhouses, including such technical innovations as electric lighting and movable stages that accommodated the use of newly introduced three-dimensional scenery. Broadway productions were replicated and sent on road tours by rail. Sometimes multiple touring companies were created for popular plays. The sets were ponderous to move and costly to produce, so shows needed longer runs in order to recoup their investment. In these companies, actors were instructed to replicate the mannerisms and stage business of the original stars in order to provide an authentic New York experience for theater patrons across the country.

THE FIRST DIRECTORS, THEN THE FIRST ACTING SCHOOL

After 2,000 years of theater built around the playwright and the actor/ manager, a new figure, the producer-director, arose. It was the responsibility of the producer-director to unify and integrate all production details. By the end of the nineteenth century, the director, or regisseur, had become the dominant force in the theater. The star actor continued to be important, but for the most part, actors became only one element of the production. Augustin Daly (1838-1899) was America’s first regisseur, with David Belasco (1853-1931) and Steele MacKaye (born James Morrison MacKaye, 1842-1894) following his example.

Steele MacKaye was a director, playwright, actor, theater manager, inventor and visionary who wanted American theater to become an important art form. An erratic genius, he began by studying art and was influenced by the French Barbizon school, which emphasized naturalistic painting. As an actor, he was the first American to play Hamlet on the London stage, in 1873. He penned thirty plays, nineteen of which were produced in New York. Several of the plays were durable enough to continue being performed into the twentieth century. He was one of the most important innovators of playhouse design, with over one hundred inventions to his name, including folding theater seats, overhead lighting, fireproof scenery and the first double stage elevator, created for rapid scene changes. His emergence as one of America’s first professional directors coincided with theater becoming big business in New York.

MacKaye wanted to establish a consistent acting company with the ability to perform exciting work, such as he had seen in the court theater established by director Duke George II of Saxe-Meiningen (1826-1914). Duke George’s company was also a source of inspiration for André Antoine (1858-1943), who founded Théâtre-Libre in Paris in 1887, and Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky (1863- 1938), who cofounded the Moscow Art Theatre with Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko (1859-1943) in 1898. MacKaye was searching for ways to emulate the new European sense of theatrical realism. But to create a company of actors, he needed a process for obtaining uniform results, a way of creating a common artistic language. In 1884, MacKaye established the first school for American actor training, the Lyceum Theatre School.

The Lyceum Theatre School for Acting was modeled after the Paris Conservatoire and centered on the techniques of François Delsarte (1811-1871), with whom MacKaye had studied in Paris. Delsarte was a French teacher of dramatic and musical expression who promoted naturalistic acting by devising and charting a complex vocabulary of face and body positions that communicate theatrical meaning. MacKaye added his own ideas of gymnastics to Delsarte’s training vocabulary. (The system was a forerunner of modern kinesics, which designates various aspects of body motions and gestures as communicative behavior.) Delsarte was evidently searching for an external pathway to access the actor’s inner life. His search presaged the psychodynamic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856- 1939), which influenced Stanislavsky’s subsequent experiments to find ways for the conscious to draw upon the emotional repository of the subconscious. Unfortunately, from what we know of its results, the Delsarte training did nothing to connect American actors to techniques more truthful than those in vogue since the days of actor Edwin Forrest (1806-1872). Forrest’s acting was described by a contemporary critic as the muscular school; the brawny art; the biceps aesthetics; the tragic calves; the bovine drama; rant, roar, and rigmarole.¹ Forrest’s stage image embodied the emerging American character; his bravura style of acting was more about scoring points than bringing truth to the stage. Forrest was best known for playing rebels—two of his most popular roles were the gladiator Spartacus and the Native American Metamora, a role he played for forty years. This is not to say that more subtle acting didn’t exist in America—the restrained acting of Edwin Booth (1833-1893), a generation after Forrest, was highly admired, but his genius was not easily emulated.

Although the Lyceum School failed to establish a lasting legacy of physical acting, it played a significant role in the beginnings of actor training, as it transitioned later into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. The AADA replaced the Delsarte curriculum with a theoretical system similar to that developed by Stanislavsky. That school exists today, predominantly teaching the Meisner technique.

Acting departments were slowly introduced into university systems, beginning with the University of Michigan in 1906. Playwriting as a scholarly discipline had established itself two years earlier, notably with the course given by George Pierce Baker (1866-1935) at Radcliffe in 1904, which in 1905 moved to Harvard and drew students who would become America’s first group of distinguished playwrights. While Baker’s Harvard course was instrumental in developing first-class writers, there is no evidence that the establishment of the early university schools for the study of theater had any influence whatsoever on the acting profession. They were conduits for introducing foreign plays and new theatrical ideas on a community level, but it was not until conservatory-style preparation was introduced into universities in the 1960s that such programs became major training grounds for professional actors.

In Europe, the search for a new art of the stage led to experiments in naturalistic realism beginning around 1887. Almost immediately, this sparked a counterrevolution in nonrealistic theater, represented variously by productions created in 1890 by the French symbolist poet Paul Fort (1872-1960), in 1896 by the surrealist writer Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), and through the design theories of Swiss-born Adolphe Appia (1862-1928) and Englishman Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966). America followed slowly, with some admirable experiments in expressionism in the 1920s by playwrights Eugene O’Neill and Elmer Rice (1892-1967). But American public taste could never quite adjust to nonrealism. Even in stylized dramas, American audiences prefer to be tethered to acting behavior they perceive as real. For Americans, perceived reality equals truthfulness. That perception of realism has changed through the decades: in the nineteenth century, the most popular form of realism was melodrama, a style that we would consider hammy and insincere. Initially, America’s embrace of realism came not through acting style but through surprisingly realistic stage effects. Producer David Belasco gained a reputation for highly detailed settings, sometimes created by transporting actual interiors from their sites to the stage, and amazed audiences with motorized special effects like realistic rain storms, water flowing from stage faucets and bacon sizzling on the stove. However, the plays remained third-rate romantic melodramas without subtle acting, except for the occasional star with a genius for moving audiences.

Americans were exposed to examples of splendid, disciplined ensemble acting during a visit from Dublin’s Abbey Players in November of 1911, followed closely by the famous German director Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), whose company performed the expressionistic play Sumurun in January 1912. Then, in 1923, the Moscow Art Theatre—the acting ensemble whose theories, in practice, would become the basis for all American acting—arrived to galvanize the New York theater community .

STANISLAVSKY AND THE FOUNDATION OF AMERICAN ACTOR TRAINING

By 1923, Konstantin Stanislavsky, cofounder and director of the Moscow Art Theatre, had synthesized the early phase of his theories about acting, based on his own considerable acting experience and his observations of the results of the great actors of his time. This labor of creating a repeatable technique consumed his attention for the balance of his life. In total, Stanislavsky devoted some forty years to his study of the actor’s way of working. As he reduced his ever-evolving theory to a system, the Art Theatre became his living laboratory of trial and error.

By 1906, at age forty-three, Stanislavsky had gathered a great deal of experience about the craft of acting, and he intuitively knew that there was more to acting than the artificial patterns into which the actor could easily fall. During his early years in the theater, Stanislavsky had haphazardly collected ideas on the art of acting that lacked coherence and were, therefore, useless for application in training his company. He began to research the laws that governed acting in order to create a useful system. He studied the work of the Italians Tommaso Salvini (1829-1915) and Eleonora Duse (1858-1924), held to be the greatest realistic actors of their time. He wanted to analyze and catalogue the elements of their genius.

It was the age of the modern scientific method and the early beginnings of psychology. Stanislavsky believed that feeling and truth were strategic to opening the door of creative intuition. He also believed that the pathway to the command of truthful performing lay through the subconscious. The subconscious automatically harmonizes the thousands of moment-to-moment decisions and actions of everyday life. But in the imaginary world of the stage, the subconscious knows it is not encountering reality, and therefore cannot perform its customary function. Onstage the subconscious loses its ability to serve as an automatic pilot. Stanislavsky wished to find a pathway from the conscious to the subconscious and back, to reinstate an imaginary belief that would summon lifelike behavior. His was the first effort to develop a psycho-technical system for training the actor. This approach was in sync with his times and, as we shall see, all art parallels and progresses at the same rate as the society around it. Art does not improve from one period to the next; it simply changes according to the belief needs of the times.

The Moscow Art Theatre actors were serving up realism at a time when some American playwrights were departing from it. O’Neill and Rice were experimenting with expressionism and symbolism, but the popular staples in American playhouses continued to be romantic melodramas, poetic dramas, comedies, and an ever-diminishing number of Shakespearean productions. Stanislavsky’s actors impressed New York with their depth and technical perfection, their innovative ensemble work and their versatility in playing character and age. The Moscow actors appeared able to play any role, even those for which they were perhaps too old, as they transformed from character to character each night in rotating repertory. The Moscow Art Theatre planted the seed of desire for deeper American acting and set the stage for experiments that would eventually define the American acting style.

Richard Boleslavsky (1889-1937), a former member of the Moscow Art Theatre who was exiled as a result of the Russian Revolution, had made his way to New York in the early 1920s and was present to welcome his old friends when they arrived in 1923. During the run of their performances (which were spoken in Russian), Boleslavsky delivered some English-language lectures translating Stanislavsky’s methods. Interest in these lectures generated the financial backing that enabled Boleslavsky to found the American Laboratory Theatre for actors and directors. He prevailed upon Moscow Art Theatre actress Maria Ouspenskaya (1876-1949) to teach in the Lab. When the Moscow Art Theatre returned to Russia in 1924, Ouspenskaya resigned in order to remain with the school and teach Stanislavsky’s system, which included psychological investment and ensemble playing. Among the Lab’s early students were Lee Strasberg (born Israel Strassberg, 1901-1982) and Stella Adler (1901-1992), both of whom became key figures in the development of American acting.

Lee Strasberg remained in the Lab classes only long enough to absorb Stanislavsky’s basic principles as laid out by Ouspenskaya. Boleslavsky himself had stated that Americans must find an American way of using these techniques, and Strasberg took that to heart, preferring to experiment on his own. This was consistent with his lifelong pattern of learning—he had dropped out of school early and educated himself through the passionate pursuit of reading.

While acting in some of the sketches in the Theatre Guild’s 1925 production of Rodgers and Hart’s Garrick Gaieties, Strasberg became friends with Harold Clurman (1901-1980), who was stage-managing. In spite of their differences in temperament, the two were drawn together for a period of five years, engaging in passionate conversations about creating an important new theater that would embed genuine meaning for American audiences. They wanted a company of actors capable of ensemble work, such as they had observed during the Moscow Art Theatre visit, not a group of commercially trained actors without a common technique. Ultimately, Clurman became the evangelistic theorist for the founding of the Group Theatre, and Strasberg became the man with ideas for turning these theories into unified practice.

In 1931, Lee Strasberg was working for the Theatre Guild along with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford (1902-1986). The Guild was the Broadway producing organization that operated in the manner of a noncommercial art theater. Of all Broadway theater producing institutions, it was the most dynamic and risk-taking. Even so, Strasberg, Clurman and Crawford felt that the Guild was too commercial, that it offered no real opportunity for them to grow as working actors and that it was time for a true ensemble of actors to emerge, one that would present plays that conveyed the life of their times. Strasberg had been experimenting as a director and teacher, expanding on what he had learned at the American Lab. Together, the three formed the Group Theatre (with a band of twenty-eight actors, most of whom would become legends in the history of American acting) and began a turbulent nine-year odyssey that to this date identifies them as America’s greatest acting ensemble. Lee Strasberg acted as the Group’s director. In his book The Fervent Years, Harold Clurman described the Group’s work under Strasberg’s guidance as never stagy. Its roots are clearly in the intimate experience of a complex psychology, an acute awareness of human contradiction and suffering, a distinguished though perhaps a too specialized sensibility.²

The Theatre Guild generously helped the fledgling Group by giving it the rights to Paul Green’s play The House of Connelly and $2,500 toward production, and then presenting the production under its auspices as a nonsubscription offering.³ This first Group Theatre production was exultantly launched and enthusiastically received. Strasberg unified the company by exercising his beliefs in actor training. As Clurman recalled, Strasberg was a fanatic on the subject of true emotion. Everything was secondary to it. He sought it with the patience of an inquisitor, he was outraged by trick substitutes . . . Here was something new to most of the actors, something basic, something almost holy. It was revelation in the theater; and Strasberg was its prophet.⁴

Group actor Bobby Lewis organized a Group Theatre school, with the intention of training the next generation of Group actors and making money for the company. It lasted only one year because of the company’s extensive touring schedule, but it inspired the creation of other schools, and Bobby Lewis would eventually become a major director and teacher and the cofounder of the Actors Studio.

Looking back on their efforts, today’s actors can only draw admiration and inspiration from the nine-year struggle of the Group Theatre (which lasted from 1931-1940). It developed some of America’s greatest actors and produced a number of landmark productions, notably those of playwright Clifford Odets, who began as an actor in the company. The work of the company also formed a crucible to test what would become the major branches of American acting techniques. The Group realized its ideal of reconnecting the theater of ideas to the American society, but it was not able to sustain that success by Broadway’s standards—the company’s actors were admired, but Broadway is about making money. The Group could survive only as long as it could satisfy this insatiable need, and few of the plays it produced by other playwrights had the success rate enjoyed by Odets.

Although the Group’s financial woes were the major reason for its ultimate demise, it was also rocked with personality clashes and internal controversy over its processes. After a few years, some company members felt that they were stagnating. Even though they were considered some of the best actors in America, they knew that they had to continue experimenting and growing. Company actress Stella Adler, daughter of the preeminent Yiddish actor Jacob P. Adler (1855-1926), led a contingent that was uncomfortable with Strasberg’s ironhanded control over the company’s acting method. In 1934, she worked with Stanislavsky in Paris for a few weeks and returned to the company to announce that Strasberg’s use of the Stanislavsky system, with his emphasis on emotion as the guiding force for actors, had been incorrect. Stanislavsky was now working on the actor’s use of his imagination to create the play’s action. She lectured the company about the revelations she had experienced in Paris. This was the first challenge to Strasberg’s hold on Stanislavsky-based training. Adler’s classes on Stanislavsky’s latest work led to the eventual establishment of her own conservatory in 1949. Another acclaimed Group Theatre actor, Sanford Meisner (1905-1997), began his own teaching experiments in 1935 based on what he had learned from Strasberg and Adler as well as his experiences as an actor in the company.

The acting techniques that arose in America as the twentieth century progressed were designed either to emphasize certain aspects of Stanislavsky’s work or to react against it. Together, Strasberg, Adler and Meisner came to represent the troika of Stanislavsky-based approaches to American acting—each focused on a different facet of his forty-year process. Simplistically, the work of these three can be described as dominated respectively by emotion, imagination and spontaneity. Each teacher would have passionate adherents. Each would produce successful actors.

Despite widespread admiration for the Group Theatre actors, their process for acting did not filter into mainstream American culture until the confluence of events following World War II.

In the first chapter, Louis Scheeder takes up the story of how American acting suddenly became internationally prominent post- World War II. He sets the scene for this cultural phenomenon in his analysis of Lee Strasberg as the right man in the right place at the right time.

But first, a chronological context for the acting techniques in this book . . .

THE TRAINERS AND THE TRAINING

It takes twenty years to become an actor.

—SANFORD MEISNER

Actor training in America has transitioned from on-the-job apprenticeships, when techniques were handed down within a theatrical company from one generation of actors to the next; to being taught by master teachers running their own professional studios; to largely being the responsibility of universities, as is currently the case. In this latest shift from professional studios to the academy, it must be admitted that some of the ferocity of teaching has been lost. The previous system of apprentice-style teaching by older actors, who had been raised in a get it right or get out way of life, has given way to the academy’s more nurturing sense of responsibility toward the emotional health of younger, less mature students.

Why are so many young people interested in studying acting today? NYU’s drama program alone receives nearly 3,000 applications annually. This desire to perform cannot be based solely on insubstantial dreams of stardom and the American preoccupation with the foibles of tabloid personalities. It is explained best by Vicki Hart’s summation within her chapter on Meisner training: Our feelings signify what the world means to us . . . Students must learn what these feelings are, how to gain access to them and what to do with them. During this process they must be dedicated to finding their own truth. Living in a society that demands conformity, where emotions and opinions are withheld to avoid public scrutiny and criticism, what better way to practice being human than in imaginary circumstances where young people are permitted, even required, to experience the full range of themselves in the service of speaking truthfully?

Beginning in the 1950s and burgeoning during the 1960s, professional not-for-profit theaters proliferated across the nation. The creation of these theaters coincided with shrinking Broadway activity, and Broadway producers blamed not-for-profit theaters for their diminishing commercial revenues. But it was the escalating costs of production, lack of opportunity for new playwrights and actors, and paucity of good theater on Broadway that fueled the regional theater movement. These new theaters expected to maintain resident companies and needed trained actors capable of playing a broad range of styles. No longer would it be sufficient for an actor to be proficient in a narrow range of personality roles and styles, as rewarded in films and television and by Broadway producers. Schools that already had established academic acting departments revised them in favor of developing new curricula that would meet the needs of company actors. These actors were expected to be proficient in performing the classics and contemporary plays in realistic and nonrealistic styles, demands that triggered the establishment of conservatory-style programs at universities.

The chapters in this book represent ten frequently studied approaches to actor training. Most of these approaches, or variations on them, are widely taught throughout the United States. The chapters roughly follow the chronological order in which the approaches came to full prominence. Each, to some extent, borrows or reacts to what has come before. All these approaches, in one way or another, sprang from Stanislavsky’s investigation of the actor’s process, surely the most complete exploration ever undertaken. Some of these techniques focus on a specific portion of his system, some were developed in opposition to his methods, but all use Stanislavsky’s vocabulary as a foundation from which to work. There are other theories of acting not covered here with which the well-educated actor will be familiar; for example, the writings of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the biomechanics of Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold (1874-1940) and the philosophy and exercises of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). Frequently, these can be part of the American actor’s study, but they seldom serve as the primary focus in his development.

Successful acting must reflect a society’s current beliefs. The men and women who developed each new technique were convinced that previous methods were not equal to the full challenges of their time and place, and the techniques in this book have been adapted to current needs in order to continue to be successful methods for training actors. The actor’s journey is an individual one, and the actor seeks a form, or a variety of forms, of training that will assist in unlocking his own creative gifts of expression.

Many of these techniques include exercises designed to access the inner life of the actor. But in order to effectively evoke the inner life, it is vital that actors spend an equal amount of time developing the vehicle for this expression, the physical skills of a flexible and evenly produced voice, a supple and strong body, musical rhythm and controlled, relaxed movement. Equally important is an inquiring mind for history, politics, psychology and culture. It is easy to see why most teachers refer to the acting profession as a lifetime of learning.

Among the techniques described in these chapters there are conflicting ideas about what kind of training will make an actor, as well as much that overlaps or is complementary. But the goal in all cases is to develop an actor with range, power and depth. If every human organism reacted in the same way to the same information, we would need only one technique, we would all be the same, and the world would be a boring place.

So we begin this investigation of technique with the training espoused by Lee Strasberg. Significantly, he was the first and, therefore, perhaps the most important person to develop and popularize an American acting method. Like Stanislavsky, Strasberg’s investigation took place through decades of thought and experimentation. However, it was not until the 1950s that his ideas caught fire in American culture. His work finally corresponded to his time.

LEE STRASBERG’S METHOD FROM ANNA STRASBERG

In acting everything is done unconsciously as a process of memory.

—LEE STRASBERG

Although he had seen and appreciated the ensemble work of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre, it was through classes at the American Theatre Lab, led by Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, that Lee Strasberg was introduced to the techniques employed by the Russian master. Boleslavsky had been an actor in the Moscow Art Theatre’s company from 1906 to 1919, the period in which Stanislavsky had begun his investigations. Boleslavsky had graduated from acting to directing in the MAT Studio. He introduced Stanislavsky’s principles to Americans and, later, he successfully directed on Broadway and in the film industry.

Boleslavsky published a small book in 1933 that described six lessons for the actor—concentration, memory of emotion, dramatic action, characterization, observation, and rhythm. At the American Theatre Lab, Lee Strasberg found these lessons to be a revelation, but he left the Lab as soon as he had absorbed their significance. He felt that he could better apply these principles to American realism through his own experimentation than through classes with the Russian Boleslavsky. The American Theatre Lab classes, particularly in concentration and affective memory, formed the foundation for Strasberg’s lifelong work. He called this his method and, at some point, Strasberg’s work became known as the Method, a term implying that Strasberg’s technique and Stanislavsky’s work were synonymous.

By all reports, Strasberg had a contradictory personality, combining a brute force of will with an almost unapproachable intellectualism. A teacher who could unlock the doors to real emotion, he himself did not voice his own feelings easily. He had an enduring effect on the acting of the Group Theatre, but personality clashes with Clurman and Crawford led to Strasberg’s resignation in 1937.

Without the artistic protection and home base of the Group, Strasberg was thrown back into the vicissitudes of working in commercial theater and film. His work in New York and Hollywood over the next ten years was without distinction, and he might have been relegated to a significant but minor position in theatrical history had events not combined to place him at the center of post-World War II theater training. Against his better judgment, but out of need, director Elia Kazan (1909-2003), the former Group Theatre actor who had become America’s preeminent stage director and who was now in the process of becoming one of Hollywood’s best film directors, asked his old nemesis/mentor, Strasberg, to direct the acting and directing program at the Actors Studio. Kazan, with Bobby Lewis and Cheryl Crawford, had founded the Studio as a place where commercial actors could learn a unified way of acting for the stage and films. After initially declining the invitation, Strasberg finally agreed. Within three years, Kazan acknowledged that Strasberg was the Actors Studio.

Throughout his lifetime, Strasberg, like Stanislavsky , was a lightning rod attracting those who devotedly emulated his work, and driving those who rejected it to create their own oppositional acting techniques. Either way, it can be said that Strasberg fathered American acting.

Anna (Mizrahi) Strasberg, Lee’s former student, second wife and widow, and now the artistic director of the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York and Los Angeles, describes Strasberg’s technique as it is being taught today at the Institute, carefully respectful to every detail of his legacy. Because he taught for such a long period of time, and his principles were so popular and successful at a time when acting and playwriting were ascendant in the culture, Strasberg’s techniques are the most quoted, admired, reviled, beloved, hated and written-about of the American acting techniques.

STELLA ADLER TECHNIQUE FROM TOM OPPENHEIM

Jacob Adler said that unless you give the audience something that makes them bigger—better—do not act.

—STELLA ADLER

Stella Adler was born into theater royalty. Her father, Jacob Adler, the preeminent actor of the Yiddish-American theater, was born in Russia and immigrated to America in 1887. He founded the Independent Yiddish Art Company. His Shylock in The Merchant of Venice was so impressive that it played on Broadway in 1903 and 1905, with Adler performing in Yiddish while his fellow actors performed in English. When he died, 150,000 people gathered at his funeral procession to pay their respects. Stella Adler’s mother, Sara, was a leading actress in her own right, and her brother Luther, sister Julia and niece Pearl were highly admired actors. Her cousin Francine Larrimore (1898-1975) was a Broadway star, with a long career performing such roles as Roxie Hart in Chicago (1926), Kitty Brown in Let Us Be Gay (1929) and Abby Fane in Brief Moment (1931). Sara and Jacob had five children and two stepchildren. All in all, there were sixteen Adler actors working simultaneously. It was said that no curtain went up in New York without an Adler on the stage. Every member of the family, it seems, possessed the acting gene. They did not have to train for the theater; they simply walked onto the stage. Today the Adler gene is lodged in Stella’s grandson, Tom Oppenheim, the artistic director of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York. (Oppenheim’s father, David, is the highly admired clarinetist who performed under Leonard Bernstein and was an influential dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.)

Stella Adler joined the Group Theatre in 1931 and worked under Lee Strasberg’s direction in Paul Green’s The House of Connelly, Maxwell Anderson’s Night over Taos and John Howard Lawson’s Success Story and Gentlewoman. When she joined the company , she was already a professional actress. She was tempestuous by nature, so perhaps it was not surprising that she conflicted with Strasberg and was a ringleader among the actors who revolted against his iron determination that emotion was predominant in all acting. Her sense of revolt crystallized when she journeyed to Paris and told Stanislavsky, I enjoyed acting and the theater until you came along, and now I hate it. Stanislavsky listened to her reading of a scene from Gentlewoman, and asked about her training. When she described Strasberg’s approach, he responded that her training was correct, but by this time he had moved his own study of acting to the actions, or beats, that served the truth of the playwright’s central action of the