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  • The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
  • David Krasner
THE METHOD: HOW THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LEARNED TO ACT. By Isaac Butler. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022; pp. 512.

Isaac Butler’s engaging book aims to examine Method Acting as a significant cultural event during the twentieth century. According to Butler, the Method challenged previously accepted norms and techniques of performing, defining the Method “as a transformative, revolutionary, modernist art movement” that “brought forth a new way of conceiving of the human experience, one that changed how we look at the world, and at ourselves” (xx). Tracing the development of the Method from its birth at the Moscow Art Theatre, Butler spends the first quarter of the book on Stanislavsky and his epigones (Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, Boleslavsky, Vera Soloviova, Maria Ouspenskaya, Sulerzhitsky)—the founders of the System that became the fixture of this new acting style. Butler emphasizes two key components of the Stanislavsky System: the actor’s personal life experience, creating a state of “I am” (ya yesm) the character in performance, and perezhivanie (living through or experiencing the role viscerally), all of which coalesce through the required exercises that train the actor in relaxation, concentration, imagination, naivete, bits (later mis-translated as beats), sense and affective memory, the supertask (translated as super-objective), magic if, and the given circumstances of the play.

Butler then takes the reader across the Atlantic, as Stanislavsky’s ideas took root in America, first in the American Lab Theatre in the 1920s and later in the Group Theatre in the ’30s. In the latter, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford formed the style of American Method acting, versions of which were then promulgated by Strasberg as well as two other Group members, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner. Butler traverses the well-known feuds between Strasberg and Adler, as well as highlighting [End Page 409] other important instructors (especially Bobby Lewis). One of the book’s strength is not in acting, but script analysis. Butler’s description of Clifford Odets’s dialogue, for instance, is spot-on: Odets’s voice, Butler says, “is slang-drunk, slinging street elocutions with such density and fire that they become poetry. It’s the sound of New York in the 1930s, the sound of polyglot immigrant tongues wrapping their rhythms around an English language that is stretching to accommodate them,” fostering a voice that “is urban, Jewish, neurotic, furious, explosive, and full of yearning” (182). Butler goes on to analyze several films that represent Method acting, notably Rod Steiger in Marty and The Pawnbroker, with precision and insightful commentary.

Elia Kazan emerges in the book as the director who carried the baton and guided the great Method actors Montgomery Cliff, James Dean, and, of course the standard bearer, Marlon Brando. Rather than being ordinarily quotidian in performance, Brando, Butler opines, “was so good because he was an actor, because he was able to both imagine himself in the given circumstances and bring a piece of himself to it” (218). The author covers the well-trodden ground of the Method versus the British (Brando versus Olivier), and the criticism of the Actors Studio as promoting self-indulgence and that it failed to produce plays (it was not originally intended to be a place of production, but rather a safe place for actors to train and improve). Butler also insightfully articulates the shift in Method emphasis from the inner process of bringing the role into the self, to morphing into Method actors like Dustin Hoffman, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Robert De Niro, who transformed their bodies into the character, literally losing or gaining weight and going through rigorous physical training to become the characters.

Despite its lively prose and engaging narrative, the book has several shortcomings. The author claims to delve into the zeitgeist of cultural history, yet avoids two key mid-twentieth-century events running concurrently with the rise of the Method: Freudian psychoanalysis and jazz improvisation, both of which influenced the Method directly. Bran-do, for example, wanted to be a jazz drummer, and although the book mentions that Strasberg “read Freud” (135), it fails to analyze how these two ideas impacted...

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