Download Lee Strasberg - Public Schools of Robeson County

Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg an American actor, director, and one of the best-known acting teachers in
American theater and film.[1] He cofounded, with director Harold Clurman, the Group Theatre in
1931, which was "America’s first true theatrical collective".[2] In 1951, he became director of the
non-profit Actors Studio, in New York City, considered "the nation's most prestigious acting
school".[3] He was the chief proponent of "Method acting" from the 1920s until his death in
1982.[4]
Acting historian Jeremy Butler wrote, "The one man most responsible for 'the Method' becoming
the dominant technique of screen acting in the United States was Lee Strasberg: popularizer of
the term 'the Method'." He refined, synthesized, and eventually disseminated the teachings of
Stanislavski to his Actors Studio students. [5] From his base in New York, he trained several
generations of theatre and film's most illustrious talents, including Anne Bancroft, Dustin
Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Patricia
Neal, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Franchot Tone, Gene Wilder, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, Al
Pacino and director Elia Kazan[citation needed].
Strasberg explained his "Method" through his class lectures and writings: "The two areas of
discovery that were of primary importance in my work at the Actors Studio and in my private
classes where improvisation and 'affective memory,'... the process of contacting one’s memories
of emotions in order to channel them into a role... It is finally by using these techniques that the
actor can express the appropriate emotions demanded of the character" [5] Although Marlon
Brando also studied "Method" acting, but under Stella Adler, Elia Kazan directed him in A
Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954,) where he came to epitomize
"Method" acting in the public’s mind. Kazan also directed another student, James Dean, in East
of Eden (1955), for which Kazan and Dean were nominated for Academy Awards. Dean once
wrote that Actors Studio was "the greatest school of the theater [and] the best thing that can
happen to an actor." [6] In more recent years, directors like Sidney Lumet have intentionally used
actors skilled in Strasberg's "Method", such as Al Pacino, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman and
Anne Bancroft.
"As a teacher and acting theorist, Strasberg revolutionized American actor training," writes author
Milly Barranger. "Strasberg demanded great discipline of his actors as well as great depths of
psychological truthfulness."[7] Elia Kazan, in his autobiography, wrote, "He carried with him the
aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish
home. . . He was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, and made
them 'permanent.'" [8] :61 Today, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel lead this nonprofit
studio dedicated to the development of actors, playwrights, and directors.
Acting director and teacher
Group Theater
He gained a reputation with the Theater Guild of New York and helped form the Group Theater
in New York in 1931.[12] There, he created a technique which became known as "the Method" or
"method acting." His teaching style owed much to the Russian director, Stanislavsky, whose
book, An Actor Prepares, dealt with the psychology of interpretation in acting. He began by
directing, but his time was gradually taken up by the training of actors. Called "America’s first
true theatrical collective," the Lab immediately offered a few tuition-free scholarships for its
three-year program to "promising students." [13]
Widely considered America's finest acting ensemble during the 1930s, "the Group Theatre,"
wrote Publishers Weekly, "with its self-defined mission to reconnect theater to the world of ideas
and actions, staged plays that confronted social and moral issues... with members Harold
Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Stella and Luther Adler, Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan and an ill-assorted
band of idealistic actors living hand to mouth are seen welded in a collective of creativity that
was also a tangle of jealousies, love affairs and explosive feuds." [9] Playwright Arthur Miller said
"the Group Theatre was unique and probably will never be repeated. For awhile it was literally
the voice of Depression America."[9]
Actors Studio
In 1947, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford, also members of the Group Theatre,
started the Actors Studio as a non-profit workshop for professional and aspiring actors to
concentrate on their craft away from the pressures of the commercial theatre. [12] Strasberg
assumed leadership of the studio in 1951 as its artistic director. "As a teacher and acting theorist,
he revolutionized American actor training and engaged such remarkable performers as Kim
Hunter, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, and Al
Pacino." [7] Since its inception the Studio has been a nonprofit educational corporation chartered
by the state of New York, and has been supported entirely by contributions and benefits."[3]
Strasberg stated in 1959, "We have here the possibility of creating a kind of theatre that would be
a shining medal for our country."[3]
UCLA acting teacher Robert Hethmon writes, "The Actors Studio is a refuge. Its privacy is
guarded ferociously against the casual intruder, the seeker of curiousities, and the exploiter...The
Studio helps actors to meet the enemy within....and contributes greatly to Strasberg's utterly
pragmatic views on training the actor and solving his problems.... and is kept deliberately modest
in its circumstances, its essence being the private room where Lee Strasberg and some talented
actors can work." [3]:Intro
Admission to the Actors Studio was usually by audition with more than a thousand actors
auditioning each year and the directors usually conferring membership on only five or six each
year.[3] "The Studio was, and is sui generis," said Elia Kazan, proudly. Beginning in a small,
private way,with a strictly off-limits-to-outsiders policy, the Studio quickly earned a high
reputation in theatre cricles. "It became the place to be, the forum where all the most promising
and unconventional young actors were being cultivated by sharp young directors..."[14]
Teaching methods and philosophy
In describing his teaching philosophy, Strasberg wrote, "The two areas of discovery that were of
primary importance in my work at the Actors Studio and in my private classes where
improvisation and affective memory. It is finally by using these techniques that the actor can
express the appropriate emotions demanded of the character" [5]
Improvisation and "affective memory"
Strasberg explained the importance of improvisation and the central concept of "affective
memory:" the "process of contacting one’s memories of emotions in order to channel them into a
role." Affective memory originated with Stanislavski, was nurtured by Richard Boleslavski,
Strasberg’s teacher at the American Laboratory Theatre in the 1920s, and was further refined by
Strasberg. Acting historian Jeremy Butler writes, "Strasberg divides "affective memory" into the
recall of sensations (sights, sounds, smells, and so on) and that of feelings (horror, sadness,
pleasure, and so on.) The actor, he explains, uses the former, his or her sense memory, to
stimulate the latter, his or her emotional memory, which can then be used in the context of a
particular character." The Method, Strasberg states, is "the procedure by which the actor can use
his "affective memory" to create a reality on stage." [5]
According to Don Bigsby, in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, "Strasberg was a
scientist of acting, fascinated by the mysteries of the actor’s quest for true emotion. And in a
technique called affective memory, … Strasberg believed he had found a reliable aid for
achieving it. … What Strasberg prized about the technique was that the actor would be using true
emotion – his own reawakened real-life feelings – to color and deepen his performance. . .
Maintaining that the technique was the surest way of achieving the style of psychological realism
the Group was searching for, Strasberg placed it as the foundation of his work."[19]
The purpose of "affective memory" is to release emotions on stage. Strasberg states:
"The basic idea of affective memory is not emotional recall but that the actor’s emotion
on the stage should never be really real. It always should be only remembered emotion.
An emotion that happens right now spontaneously is out of control – you don’t know
what’s going to happen from it, and the actor can’t always maintain and repeat it.
Remembered emotion is something that the actor can create and repeat: without that the
thing is hectic." [20]
For Strasberg, affective memory is the basic element of the actor’s reality. In particular, it draws
out the emotions from the past that are ingrained in one’s mind and body:
"The emotional value of the experience may have changed. However, by attempting a lot
of affective memories, the actor gradually obtains a stock of memories that are permanent
and become easier to invoke as he continues to use them. … The significance lies in the
fact that the actor becomes emotionally available, prepared to respond instantly and
expressively with feelings and passions."[20]
Private moments
Strasberg’s also devised the teaching concept of "private moment," where the actor lives out their
private moments before a classroom audience. Private moment is the literal performance of an
activity that one does in private. According to Doug Moston, it was developed by Strasberg in
1956 and 1957 "to aid actors in creating the ability to behave in a truly private fashion while
being observed by an audience." … Working from private experience, the actor is free, as
Strasberg put it, ‘to sit before us, to smell an aroma, and not to do anything physical, but to focus
only on what you’re doing with your concentration..’" [20]
Methods of teaching
Strasberg demanded great discipline of his actors as well as great depths of psychological
truthfulness. He once explained his approach in this way:
"The human being who acts is the human being who lives. That is a terrifying
circumstance. Essentially the actor acts a fiction, a dream; in life the stimuli to which we
respond are always real. The actor must constantly respond to stimuli that are imaginary.
And yet this must happen not only just as it happens in life, but actually more fully and
more expressively. Although the actor can do things in life quite easily, when he has to
do the same thing on the stage under fictitious conditions he has difficulty because he is
not equipped as a human being merely to playact at imitating life. He must somehow
believe. He must somehow be able to convince himself of the rightness of what he is
doing in order to do things fully on the stage." [7]
Classroom settings
Kazan also described his classes:
"At his classes in the technique of acting, Lee laid down the rules, supervised the first
exercises. These were largely concerned with the actor’s arousing his inner temperament.
The essential and rather simple technique, which has since then been complicated by
teachers of acting who seek to make the Method more recondite for their commercial
advantage, consists of recalling the circumstances, physical and personal, surrounding an
intensely emotional experience in the actor’s past. It is the same as when we accidentally
hear a tune we may have heard at a stormy or an ecstatic moment in our lives, and find, to
our surprise, that we are reexperiencing the emotion we felt then, feeling ecstasy again or
rage and the impulse to kill. The actor becomes aware that he has emotional resources;
that he can awaken, by this self-stimulation, a great number of very intense feelings; and
that these emotions are the materials of his art.
"Lee taught his actors to launch their work on every scene by taking a minute to
remember the details surrounding the emotional experience in their lives that would
correspond to the emotion of the scene they were about to play. 'Take a minute!' became
the watchword of that summer, the phrase heard most often, just as this particular kind of
inner concentration became the trademark of Lee’s own work when he directed a
production. His actors often appeared to be in a state of self-hypnosis." [8]:61
Legacy
Influence on American films
"Whether directly influenced by Strasberg or not," wrote acting author Pamela Wojcik, "the new
male stars all to some degree or other adapted Method techniques to support their identification as
rebels. . . He recreates romance as a drama of male neuroticism and also invests his
characterization “with an unprecedented aura of verisimilitude." [17]
Acting teacher and author Alison Hodge explains: "Seemingly spontaneous, intuitive, brooding,
'private,' lit with potent vibrations from an inner life of conflict and contradiction, their work
exemplified the style of heightened naturalism which (whether Brando agrees or not) Lee
Strasberg devoted his life to exploring and promoting." [20] Pamela Wojcik adds, "Because of their
tendency to substitute their personal feelings for those of the characters they were playing, Actors
Studio performers were well suited to become Hollywood stars. . . In short, Lee Strasberg
transformed a socialistic, egalitarian theory of acting into a celebrity-making machine."[17]
"It does not matter who 'invented' Marlon Brando," writes Hodge, "or how regularly or
faithfully he, Dean, or Clift attended the Studio or studied the Method at the feet of Lee
Strasberg. In their signature roles – the most influential performances in the history of
American films – these three performers revealed new kinds of body language and new
ways of delivering dialogue. In the pauses between words, in the language 'spoken' by
their eyes and faces, they gave psychological realism an unprecedented charge. Verbally
inarticulate, they were eloquent 'speakers' of emotion. Far less protective of their
masculinity than earlier film actors, they enacted emotionally wounded and vulnerable
outsiders struggling for self-understanding, and their work shimmered with a mercurial
neuroticism. . . . The Method-trained performers in films of the fifties added an enhanced
verbal and gesture naturalism and a more vivid inner life." [20]
In 1966, Strasberg established the "Actors Studio West" in Los Angeles and in 1969, he began the
Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York and Los Angeles.[23] Today, co-presidents
Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel lead this nonprofit studio dedicated to the
development of actors, playwrights, and directors. In 1974, at the suggestion of his former student
Al Pacino, Strasberg acted in a key supporting role alongside Pacino in Godfather II and again in
the 1979 film, And Justice for All.[24]