“Stella challenged Lee openly,” actor Phoebe Brand later said.
Gruesome? Sure, but as The Method re-minds us at almost every turn, theater can be a bloody business. The method was the child of the Group, but as the parents bickered, they each left the artistic home of the Group behind, taking with them, à la the Judgment of Solomon, whatever chunk they found most useful. The indoctrination into the Adler technique, as it was always called-not “Method,” we turned our noses up at any mention of “Method” before gleefully telling stories about all the deliciously acid things Stella had said about Strasberg-included reading Adler ’s The Art of Acting, which begins with a preface from Marlon Brando commending Adler for not lending herself to “vulgar exploitations, as some other well-known so-called ‘methods’ of acting have done.” Yes, a Shyamalanian twist: Brando vehemently opposed Strasberg’s Method, despite being one of the actors most commonly associated with it, due to a lack of clarity surrounding the factions into which the lowercase-method’s early practitioners split. If there is someone who a book chronicling the rise and fall of “The Method” is specifically for, it is me. A “wore all black every day and writhed around on the floor pretending to be various animals whilst a grinning four-foot-eleven tyrant banged a djembe drum and shouted about the flagrant unprofessionalism of the fashionably face-framing strands of hair that had somehow once again liberated themselves from my workmanlike low bun” Acting. In the interest of potential-bias disclosure, I must admit I studied at the Stella Adler Studio for four years and was a capital-A, capital-S Acting Student.
STELLA ADLER STUDIO OF ACTING HOW MUCH LICENSE
All were convinced they were the true artistic successors to the work Russian theater practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski had begun with the Moscow Art Theatre at the turn of the century-what he called his “system.” The young “system,” in the care of Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, emigrated to the States, where it was adopted by the founding members of the Group, who gave it a new American name: the method (at first lowercase Strasberg would give it its capital-M marquee name, taking much of the credit and “riding in a Mercedes with a license plate that read METHOD”). Thank God, then, that Isaac Butler has arrived just in time with The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, a history styled as biography treating the Method as a living, breathing thing with “parents, obscure beginnings, fumblings toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline.” The onslaught of Strong/ Succession talk wound up being a felicitous aperitif for the book, as much of it deals with infighting and power-jockeying amid the dysfunctional family members of the Group Theatre: Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, Elia Kazan, Robert “Bobby” Lewis, Stella Adler, and her on-and-off partner Harold Clurman. (Never mind, of course, that Strong stresses in the article that he does not practice the Method it’s the only passage that didn’t get screenshotted and quote-tweeted into oblivion.) Everyone was talking about the Method and no one knew what it meant. Gaga’s (self-)mythologizing press tour coincided with Michael Schulman’s New Yorker profile of Succession star Jeremy Strong, and those wildly disparate elements created a perfect storm of frenzy around “Method acting.” It had long been a catchall phrase for actor-behavior people found pretentious, overly intense, or just old-fashioned annoying, but social media and the rewards it bestows on outlandish pull quotes had divorced “the Method” almost completely from the classification of an actor’s process or training. The public didn’t hear about the firearm discharge until promotion of the film began. he makes me miss school.” Sometimes Chekhov’s gun is a tweet, and this one finally went off more than a decade later when Gaga took on the role of jilted murderess Patrizia Reggiani in House of Gucci and stayed in character for nine months. ON JULY 18, 2009, to little fanfare, posted: “I love lee strasberg.