METHOD ACTING IS A FORM OF EMBODIMENT

In undergrad classes (1957-1961) I was on scholarship and had to maintain a B average, which I did.  Luckily, I had enough A’s to offset my two lowest grades: a C in acting and a C in philosophy of religion.  These are probably the two courses that have been most meaningful in my life during the half-century since.  Part of the reason I got low grades is that I was thinking about the issues too much to focus on tests of content.  Both professors were exceptional: Alvina Krause and Paul Schilpp.  I want to talk about Stanislavski’s Method acting as AK taught it.

Basically, this approach to acting was very similar to Mark Johnson’s understanding of embodied meaning, using sense memories to manage the actor’s inner life in a way that communicated the meaning of the character in a play.  We worked on our bodies as instruments — doing exercises of posture, voice and movements — but also increasing awareness of each other and building empathy.  A big component was studying cultures and how they pattern emotion and reaction, what the embodiment people might call “framing”.

Alvina Krause

But always the base of operations was the senses, including internal body feedback.  It is now a pretty well-confirmed premise that the brain’s index to what it knows, particularly memory, is filed according to senses associated with the content so that it is not frivolous to think of grasping a concept in terms of the sense-ambiance of the moment, for the senses interact to create a sort of globe that contains knowledge.  This is why Johnson speaks of “the aesthetics of human understanding.”  The director of a play aims to create just such a “globe” of sight and sound in a way that will illuminate the meaning of the presentation by being both vivid and coherent.  It should offer feeling, not just evidence.  The same is true of religious ceremonies.

When intensity is high and the actors have properly entered the inner lives of their roles, something palpable happens that is fabulous but also a little frightening until the actors have a bit of experience: the boundaries melt, onstage becomes realer than real, and somehow the audience is able to participate in that.  Even actors working for film find this to be true, though it’s more difficult for a number of reasons.

Paula Ragusa and Dick Benjamin

my classmates

Still, it isn’t necessary to have an audience or at least not a big one.  These moments happened in acting class with only a few observers or even when working in practice halls.  The most powerful idea coming out of embodiment theory is the ability to “merge” or attune with other people.  In terms of music, it’s being perfectly in tune, and in that context it’s also very powerful.  Bob Scriver, who was famous for the quality of his high school orchestras in the Fifties, used to say that if junior high musicians learned to play perfectly in tune, they could sound as good as professionals.  Witnessing true engagement between actors is much like hearing music perfectly in tune.

A friend who expected to become a psychiatrist used to observe AK’s acting classes with me, a practice that was neither encouraged or discouraged so long as observers were quiet.  I met him when he was my assigned biology lab partner.  Much of our discussion after these acting classes was about rationality versus emotionality.  He was from that kind of student (usually male) full of introspection, trying to reason out the meaning of life instead of experiencing it.  I was the other way around, skipping in and out of logic, which was why we were friends — one of those opposite relationships, which can be very intimate, but maybe not physically.  He was not a “cold” philosopher: his close cohort called him “Hume.”  I loved him dearly and we remained friends after I left for Montana and he went on to a Ph.D. and teaching.

I’ve repeatedly sketched out my current understanding of how persons grow through life, beginning from conception, continuing through the school years, on into adulthood and through until death.  After one drastic pruning of brain cells in toddlerhood, there are several points of brain expansion — actual neuron development and connectome thickening — as at the adrenarche, puberty, and a crucial reconfiguring in early twenties that has no name except maybe maturity.  By this time a person is no longer confined to what’s inside one’s skin, but through empathy can extend awareness into all living beings and the world that sustains them.  Interaction, attunement, attachment, concatenation, and other subtle things with multi-syllabic names have embedded mere embodiment into a system of understanding and action.  It happens all by itself and may not be conscious at all.

Russians have not been so confined by the Platonic roots of thought that have made an obsession of what was once Enlightenment, which actively rejected emotion as a distortion, some kind of reversion to animal life, not as real as what Johnson calls “propositional” thought.  This elevation of math-driven and introspection-developed rationality, as free from emotion as possible, has become demonic in its ability to enforce dogma and justify domination.  It is the engine of terrorism and the enablement of crime.

And it’s stuck.  Even the UU’s with their list of principles that are supposed to be bulletproof, can’t get past them in order to join the universe and act with effectiveness.  Few can grasp that insisting on a list of principles is what the principles were supposed to oppose, a path to arrogance.  Once a person has arrived at a totally logical and convincing “proof” of something without awareness of the emotional structure of their own brain and the frame of their own family and culture, it is very hard to give up.  Efforts to enforce a rigid conviction of “rightness” is at the base of many a malignant family.

Of course, the Russians, for all their inquiry into the physical dynamics of emotional life, have not learned how to manage their rage and romanticism into a viable government.  Maybe it is the anguish of always slipping back into scarcity and brutality that drives their interest in operant conditioning, inherited mind, and the sharing of melancholy.  Or maybe their environment is so harsh that it limits them somehow.  Humans can never entirely overcome the planet.

"The Cherry Orchard"

Making oneself transparent is not always easy and is sometimes painful.  Sustaining empathy for other people takes energy and courage.  They don’t always want to be understood, particularly if they are victims of stigma that has taught them that the only safety is secrecy and deception.   For them, to be detected and understood is to be targeted.  Therapists and playwrights investigate under very specific and guarded circumstances and even then some inner dynamics are explosive when exposed to “oxygen.”  Actors and writers use various personas to buffer and reinvent, but the strategy doesn’t always work.

Community, if it is trustworthy, sustains individuals, keeps track of who they are so they can explore.  Therapy circles have never gone out of fashion, though some have turned toxic.  Others have devised a protocol, a system that guides discipline, that guarantees integrity, until it as well becomes corroded and worn.   Something like that has happened to both Freud and Stanislavski.

ALVINA KRAUSE EXPLAINS MORE ABOUT ACTING

There’s nothing in this radio interview that would shock anyone or surprise anyone who has heard AK speak before.

https://vimeo.com/92083672  A Krause KUSD 1971 on Vimeo.

She takes her usual shot at the star system that distorts the craft of acting by so celebrating one person that it amounts to congratulating the piano for a gorgeous concerto.  I mean, there are a lot of elements involved in theatre and not all of them are garlands around the neck of the player.  But I also think that she falls into something like the same trap by speaking of people with “gifts.”  It’s certainly true that some people have capacities that others don’t have and that capacities are more easily developed in some people than others and even that some people have no capacity to learn acting in the hard, long-term, sometimes painful ways that are necessary for "high" standards.  But maybe it’s as much a matter of desire as of giftedness and AK has always had a firm grip on that.  Is desire a gift?  It can drive you crazy.

Following her thought, I’ve gone ahead into other art forms and the contemporary research on brain function (which is more properly seen as a function of the whole body, which is another thing she fully grasps) to define any art as the management of consciousness.  First one learns one’s own “connectome,” which is the system of nodes of understanding and interpretation connected to each other in the brain in something like the way chords can be played on a piano keyboard.  These are composed of neurons “who” play memories together to create empathy and evocation, first in the artist and then in the audience.

Some people learn this urgently and early.  Consider the abused child who must first protect him or her self enough to record what happens and then try to find the pattern in it.  When is dad beginning to move towards a drinking binge?  When is mom about to run away again, only to return bruised and exhausted?  By googling one can find lists of ways to control a child about to have or beginning a tantrum.  Some of the same strategies work on adults when practiced by kids or other adults.  Check it out.  Children don't have to google to find out how to control adults: it is instinctive and learning combined.

The difference is that a child cannot consciously control her or his own connectome: not until there's enough brain power to connect.  Otherwise a neuron filament reaches out for a skill or interpretation that’s not there yet or that meets a contradiction.  An adult, particularly one teaching acting methods that influence the connectome of others, supplies or evokes what’s missing from one's own brain connects -- maybe by supplying information, maybe by expressing confidence that makes enough space and time to figure it out, maybe by being a role model.  AK did all those things.  She had a powerful need to shift your consciousness into effectiveness.

If everything she tried met a stone wall, for whatever reason, she told you to get out -- that there was nothing she could do for you, and that was true, though most people took it as an insult and the thought didn’t get to them for a while that maybe someone else COULD shift their consciousness to a new place.  Or maybe over the passage of time, the needed node would grow in, the nerve axon would reach out and find AHA!!  If the desire was there, the person would find a way to learn somewhere somehow.

When AK failed, her attempts to "wake an actor" could be cruel out of her frustration with her own limits.  She was conscious enough of herself to know it and probably repented quietly alone at night, but she was a very self-disciplined person who could not easily be governed by others.  She knew it was collateral damage but felt it had to be done to get to the goal.  I'm deducing this -- she never said it.

The interviewer and AK agree that some people have a desire so strong that it amounts to a constant driving need to create forms.  Schilpp’s “expression of the relationship between a person and the universe.”  But then AK goes on to the necessity of knowing where that desire, that need, comes from in the first place.  Look at the character.  Is it because of trying to avert attacks, feeling that is a way of evading danger?   Is it a conviction that it will confer status and that status is a kind of safety?  Is it trying to fill an emptiness?  Is it trying to justify oneself to a harsh judge remembered from early in life?  Is it boredom?  This is the playwright level of need.  The level of need on the actor's part had better be invested in the needs of the character portrayed.  “How can I show what drives this character?”

The two women agree that the need to touch other people’s lives and make them complete propels art forms, but particularly the art form of teaching.  AK uses a phrase, “touching off,” which is like lighting a flame, touching off a fire, somehow kindling the person’s ability to operate their own feeling system.  She speaks of blindfolding people to get them to understand what it is to be unable to see.  In class and rehearsals we watched her as she experimented, maybe going onto the stage in the middle of the play, prowling around the actors, whispering in their ears, slapping them on the shoulder, tugging at them, all to get them to shift out of being stuck playing chopsticks instead of the melody.

The interviewer mentions the work of group therapy and recalls interviewing Virginia Satir.  She feels this work, which is just beginning in this time period, is very much the same sort of thing -- working at “touching off” the right awareness to free a person’s stuck brain.  These groups often use movement.  Satir’s speciality was family dynamics (nodes and connections) and the paradoxical impact of clumsy efforts at “helping” (secrecy, forcing behavior) becoming greater damage.  I think that AK was very much in tune with this sort of work and that her teaching and acting Method were as much informed by it as Stanislavsky’s sense memory.  There was a secret, closed, advanced class for only a few invited people.  Even now no one will tell me, but I think it was for the exploration of the actor's own inner life.  

Hedda Gabler

But the interviewer focuses on acting and not on how this applies to the play as literature performed to demonstrate something about human beings.  AK asserts,  “no man [sic] is alien to me” but her examples are nationalities, cultures.  As always she goes back to Hedda Gabler.  These are well-trodden paths.  One wonders what would “touch off” a post-Edwardian consciousness, knock her out of her comfort zone.  One had the feeling that it had happened to her at least once when she was young.

I suspect the sudden realization of danger as in her last years at NU "touched off" insecurity and a desire to go underground.  She was always circumspect, diplomatic, with authority figures, but I don’t think she had ever really felt vulnerable even after various challenges.  Her life had been a continuum of considerable depth and reward but she had mostly played it safe.  Even at forced retirement she had a second house, a reliable partner, a body of defenders and other resources, and soon she found her feet again.  But just as we are tempted to speculate on the inner life of actors, we are curious about the inner life of teachers.

Alvina Krause was a small woman who stood tall, the youngest of sibs, trained as a speaker more than as an actor, and at first protected by powerful people, particularly Dean Dennis of the School of Speech.  I think there was always a little edge where she was not that confident of what she might call her “gifts,” (I would call “capacities”), where some things could touch off core vulnerability.  Lack of control, for instance.  The effects of modernity and surrealism, existentialism.  She was essentially American, thus rejected despair and could not get her mind around concentration camps or African heart of darkness --horrific things that are not censored these days.  But she doesn’t SAY “nothing human is alien to me.”  She says (I'm paraphrasing), “An actor must always work on the premise that nothing human SHOULD be alien to me.”  In short, she was a universalist, a progressive, a person of her time and place.

"THE ACTING LESSON": fiction

The old woman writer sat at her keyboard sipping her steaming coffee, grateful for it since she was up so early that even in August the air was cool.  She had set the sprinkler and would try to remember to change its location in a half hour.  Her self-assigned task for the morning was to make a moment in the life of a “Method” acting coach come alive.  The “Method” was a way designed by a Russian named Stanislavsky who somehow knew -- before modern research had proved it -- that memories are stored in humans by sensory information and that properly managed memory will cause the body to signal emotion that other people can recognize, which is what acting is all about.  Well, some kinds of acting.  She began.

The phone rang.  It was a director who was working on a play -- still early days but no one ever had enough rehearsal time.  “This woman looks perfect for the part and she auditioned pretty well, but as we work it becomes clear that somehow she is guarding emotion.  She seems willing, but she doesn’t appear to know how to get in touch with herself.  Will you see if you can break through that glass shell?”  She agreed and met the young woman mid-morning at the theatre. Carrying take-out coffee, she glanced around to make sure no one else was there in the dark auditorium.

The girl stood on the lighted stage, not knowing where to put her hands, just like all the rest of them.  The coach slung her bag onto a seat, then went to sit in a row against the back wall to force the girl to project.  She asked the usual questions:  where did you grow up?  What is your favorite play?  All were answered in a clear, projected voice.  

“What makes you feel like shit?”   The girl froze.  “Oh, nothing.  That would be terrible!”  She was very poised, very Miss America.

“Maybe you are shit as an actress?”  Rigid, appalled, but no sign of resistance.  No answer.  “Walk upstage left.  NO, that’s upstage right!  All right, return.  Your walk is stiff.  Have you had dance lessons?”

Small voice.  “Yes.”

“Show me some steps.”  Ballet first position, graceful port d’bras, some turns.  Irreproachable.  Uninspired.  The door creaked and the director slid into the seat next to hers.  “You see?  She’s supposed to be a captive in a war-torn city but she poses -- there’s no reality to it.  She signals compliance when she ought to be projecting resistance.  She’s too damned NICE.  She’s all presentation.”

“I’ll see what I can do.  No guarantees.”  The door creaked again as he left.

The young woman looked uncertain now.  She didn’t know what the director’s visit meant.

“Do you see the mover’s packing quilt on that grand piano over to the side?”

“Yes.”

“Go get it.”  She did.  

“Now wrap yourself in it.”  The girl put it on over her shoulders as though she were an Indian chief wearing a blanket.  “Wrap your WHOLE self in it! Over your head, over your face.”  She did.  It was stiff but big, almost like wearing a yurt.

“How do you feel?”

From inside: “Safe.”  The coach thought that over.  Maybe the glass plate across access to her emotions was the product of fear.  What would she be afraid of?

“Are you afraid of being replaced in this part?”   Movement.  A bit of a wait.  Then, “No.”

“As a child, what were you afraid of?”  

“Nothing.”

“Liar.”

Long wait.  “Why are you being so mean to me?  You are supposed to help me.”

“Go on.  Say more.”  There was no body language or facial expression to hide behind and now her voice began to sound more real, even muffled as it was.  The coach went soundlessly up to the stage and stood behind the girl where, even if she weren’t wrapped up, she couldn’t be seen.  In a soft voice she hissed,  “You’re safe in your cocoon.  No one can get you in there.  You can be anyone, you can say anything, you can reveal who you really are because we can’t see you anyway.  We can’t even throw things that will hit you, because you are completely padded.  What do you want to do?”

Long pause.  “Did you see ‘The Black Swan’?”

“That’s a movie.  I don’t give a damn about movies.  I want to know who YOU really are.”  Activity under the quilt.  What the hell was going on in there?  “Are you sure you really WANT this part?  Are you sure you want to be an actor at all?”

“Why can’t you just help me.  Just tell me what to do.”

“The character you are playing tells you want to do.  This is a woman resisting a force that could destroy her, kill her, torture her.  We need to believe that you could face that.”

. . . . . 

Oh, shit, thought the old woman writer.  The sprinkler had overflowed onto the driveway and was running into the street.  Someone was bound to report her for wasting water.  This little ditty of a story wasn’t working.  It takes YEARS to get really guarded people to find out they can reveal themselves without being specific.  And these days everything goes to the sexual.  All moral courage is reduced to finding some sexual partner who will have the power to transform them. 

The short trip outside helped her think.  “Just jump,” she thought.

. . . . . .

The young woman suddenly threw off the packing quilt.  She had removed her clothes and stood there nude and defiant.  She wasn’t that attractive nude.   Needed work: toning, build some muscle. The defiance was useful. Then the coach saw the scars on her thighs and knew what the secret was.

“A cutter, eh?”

“Torture doesn’t scare me.  I can stand pain.  In fact, it feels good.  I do it to myself.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it.  I’m not impressed.  What good does it do you or anyone else?”

“I’m an evil person.  It’s my punishment.”

Suddenly the acting coach changed.  She was impressive even at rest with her high-bridged nose and dead-black hair, raccoon eye makeup, long-fingered hands with one big ring -- not a diamond, a citrine.  She charged straight into the girl’s face:  “You aren’t capable of anything worth punishing!  Your sin is not what you think it is, it’s that you don’t fight back!  You just accept what happens to you!  You’re a lump.  You’re ordinary.  You refuse to grow up.  You’re SMALL.”

“My mother says I’m evil.”

“Your mother knows nothing.  She is manipulating you.  She knows you hurt yourself and she is glad.”

Now the girl was weeping.  “She doesn’t know.  I hide it.”

“You hide everything.  It’s easier.  You’re taking the smooth way, pleasing everyone.”

“You’re not a therapist.”  A weak little voice.

“No, I am not.  So what are you going to do about it?”

There was a long pause, the girl standing in the middle of the fallen gray quilt so stiff that it stood up around her in peaks and ramparts.  The coach gave her a few feet of breathing room and waited for her to process.  It was a big thing to grasp so she waited a long time.  The girl’s body began to change, straighten, grow taut and strong.  Now she knew what to do with her hands.  Her face gathered light from the scoop-floods clamped to the batten overhead.

“NOW say your lines!”

“. . .all that you can do, for all your crown and your trappings, and your guards—all that you can do is to have me killed.”

“NOW you are Antigone.”

. . . . . . .

The writer stood and stretched.  Time to shut off the hose and get dressed.  Where’s that cat?

WATCHING ALVINA KRAUSE TEACH ACTING

Over the past few days I’ve watched a set of DVD translations of videos made years ago in Yankton, SD, of Alvina Krause teaching acting.  Fewer than a dozen students are present, mostly aspiring young men.  They distract me -- they are "fullavit."  I mean, they are posing for the camera, thinking about themselves, for they are good-looking, smart, etc.  Presenting themselves as poetic, attentive, and strong -- worthy.  So is AK.  She was a remarkable woman and a crackerjack acting teacher, but now she is old and the path is worn.  Still, her posture is erect, her voice oratorical.   She is dramatic.

None of us really knew her personal lives.  She gives us clues:  the ring she has moved from the ring finger of her left hand and is now wearing on her index finger, same hand.  We knew then and know now that she had a lifelong relationship with Lucy.  Was this a wedding ring?  Does moving it mean they are differing, out of sync?  She tells us about the ring twice, at different sessions and says that if the students were portraying her, they would have to understand that ring.  

The same is true of a twicetold story about a young man’s mother, icy and commanding, who comes to her to demand that AK “make her son an actor.”  She compares this to Lady Macbeth trying to make her husband a king.  She fails and the boy leaves.  She is afraid of that mother.  Who are those sons?  I know nothing about any mothers who made demands, but I can think of many a son who tried to make a mother of AK.  So what is she displacing here?  She tells the story twice.  The details vary, but she claims this is true.

At one point she repeats and repeats,  “This means everything: that I am a MAN.”  Of course, at the period it was conventional that “man” was supposed to subsume both genders.  (We thought there were only two then.)  And that they were the pinnacle of evolution.  (Now we wonder what comes next.)  She seems to be saying that we as humans should stand up valiantly with erect spines and not accept anything less from life than full value.  But is there something more?  She could have said “HUman.”  It was a point in culture when Skinner was trying to reduce us all to stimulus/response, make lab rats of us.  Is this what she meant?  That being a man meant being more than being a mammal?   

At one point she made a strong point about an actor having to include ALL humanity and twice talks about the great value of being “astonished” (her trademark mantra) by the sight of entirely different human beings.  She twice uses the example of an Elizabethan seeing a Chinaman for the first time: pigtail, silk jacket, jade.  No mention of yellow skin or slanted eyes, but an eloquent demand to understand that person’s world:  what makes him what he is?  “If you are going to be an actor, no human experience can be foreign to you!”

As was conventional at the time (my high school teachers were the same age as AK, maybe a half-dozen of them in “Boston marriages”), certain Great Ages were considered to be determiners of character and style, a kind of cultural ecology.  (How they loved Edith Hamilton!)  So the Greeks, of course, were all about the gods;  the Elizabethans were all about the explosion of discovery, including books; and the modern plays considered (Pinter, Albee, Becket) were about the death of God and the ensuing emptiness and lack of meaning.  That last didn’t appeal to her much.  She talks about how the study of Chekhov opened the door to the culture of Russia -- a little risky given the times, but a way of sidestepping the Cold War to get to Stanislavsky with his humanistic version of stimulus and response.

In these lessons on video AK soon has the student actors striding around flaunting capes, gripping the floor with their feet, chests thrown up and open to receive life itself.  There are real capes and rapiers and when the men fence, it’s clear they’ve had lessons.  The girls have it tougher: she takes their hands, smacks them in the shoulder, pulls back their hair.  The girls are A-students who have gotten good marks because of verbal skills and she wants them to drop those -- go to the sensory world under the talk.  Use their own inner life because that’s where they will find the responses that explain what is happening inside them BETWEEN stimulus and response, that which “justifies” words and actions.  When the brain is processing, the body stops momentarily.  SLAP.  STOP.

There’s an oddly Victorian quality implicit in AK, declare as she might that she stands with Hedda Gabler and Shaw.  She may be rebellious and struggle against the current, but twice she tells about receiving a package in the mail.  Eagerly she tears it open and finds that it is a newly published book of poetry by a former student.  “He’s made it!” she cries.  “He’s published!!”   Well, she never did like the idea that God was dead.  Even less would she like realizing that publishing also died, but she didn’t live to see that.

She was aware that at in her time there was a great cry that Broadway was dead and Times Square was only a cesspool of porno and drugs.  And she was part of the push-back of repertory theatres like the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, who accepted the risks of defying the culture, and made a stand practically in her front yard where she gardened to keep her sanity.  She probably had not read about the Great Vegetative Principle, which is that if you tear a living thing -- for instance, a god -- into pieces and scatter it, the bits will spring up in a whole new version of the original force.  But if Joe Campbell had dropped by to explain, she would have grinned with glee.  In a sense, she herself has been cut up into potato eyes (to use a midwestern metaphor since she was from rural Wisconsin) and planted all over the planet.

All the articles talk about AK’s genius for making stars by teaching them the Method, but that’s the usual media distortion and the usual institutional greed for marketing by boasting about alumni and begging them for money -- all the time refusing the testimony and recommendations of alumni.  The bourgeois culture of curiosity, airs and graces (the silver comb), and the conviction that their world-view is true, was dying at the end of AK’s life, along with God.  “Good riddance”, she ought to say.  But she is aging, has just survived the attempted destruction of her work -- which had originally been evoked and sheltered by the same institution that now swept her away.  She is a “man” and she stands like Antigone against the carnage of greed-based culture, commodified fun, enforced mediocrity.

The limitation of these videos, valuable as they are, is that they are not the live presence of a human being with all the richness that “real” can provide.  AK’s methods (as many versions as there were students) worked very well for film, but the real heart pulsed on a stage.  Until she slapped you into responding, you were not breathing.  You had to STOP!   THINK!  WHAT IN TIME ARE YOU DOING?

THE ACTING REVOLUTION

My core collection of books about acting starts with my high school “The Stage and the School” which is illustrated with photos taken at Jefferson High School in Portland, OR., in the years I was a kid in Melba Day Sparks’ dramatics program (Class of ’57).  The shelf continues with the texts acquired in Alvina Krause’s acting classes. (Class of ’61).  Now I own textbooks Marshall Mason (classmate), Robert Benedetti (near classmate), David Downs (later AK student) and two theorists, Peter Brook and Richard Hornby.  I’m excluding from this book roundup some arcane stuff about performance and so on that more properly belong to philosophy.

I include the years because in those decades a Great Shift in theatre was underway, driven by a Great Shift in technology and society as a whole, both triggered by the one-two punch of world war and economic reconfiguration as much as anything else -- unless you think maybe the shift came first and triggered the war.  Be that as it may, Richard Hornby in his book “The End of Acting: a Radical View” (1992) describes something I witnessed without comprehending.  It wasn’t the end of acting: it was the end of one way of looking at acting.  And the world.

Realistic, proscenium-framed, script-based, repertory/ensemble, audience theatre was just ending as the dominant medium of theatre.  Rising in replacement was film and valuing of highly emotional, often improvised, acting controlled by editing as much or more than by directing; often a critical (oppositional) witness against authorities and often cross-cultural; watched by individuals in homes; possibly staged in the round or with audience and actors mixing; possibly unexpected street performance.  This coincided with a shift from emphasis on groups of actors to individuals, often with a concentration on personal success -- Big Names.

Swept up in this was the end-career of Alvina Krause and her last generation of academic students.  The juggernaut of the university, reframed in terms of the Big Money Corporation that values athletics as an essential and research as pursuit of profit, simply eliminated her world, snuffing all objections.  AK’s career, which had begun in the semi-religious oratorical world of Cumnock, was now thrown up against the psychoanalytical émigre mystique of Lee Strasberg.  To her admirers she was the truer teacher of the “Method” theories of Stanislavsky.  Her name still appears on CV’s as a mark of quality and achievement.  Privately she disavowed Strasberg whom she felt pushed people towards madness, an accusation sometimes leveled against her!  As far as Stanislavsky was concerned, she said that every good actor develops a unique personal method.  

Hornby describes Strasberg’s version of Stanislavsky with these points.

1. Strasberg never studied with Stanislavsky, never met him, nor read him in Russian.
2. What he learned was from the American Laboratory Theatre in New York where Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, emigrés from the Moscow Art Theatre, were the teachers.  This was in the Twenties.
3. Strasberg was not an actor.  Stanislavsky was.
4. Strasberg directed very little.  He was a classroom theorist.  Stanislavsky was a stage man.
5. Neither Strasberg nor Stanislavsky was good at  dramatic literature, but the latter had a strong partner, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was an excellent advisor at the Moscow Art Theatre.  Strasberg had no such partner.  The closest he came was Harold Clurman at the Group Theatre, who pushed Strasberg to appreciate Clifford Odets.  When Clurman left, Strasberg developed an opposition to literature and pursued the personal reality of the actors, more like a therapist.
6. Stella Adler actually went to Moscow and interviewed Stanislavsky, whose theories and methods had gone on developing.  When she came back and tried to tell Strasberg, he denied her version.  The Strasberg Method did not evolve.
7. However, the Strasberg Method is more subtle than it is usually portrayed, and for actors who understand it, the results are remarkable.
8. Hornby feels that one Strasberg concept that DOES jibe with Stanislavsky is the necessity of relaxation.  (Krause often asserted this.)
9. Stanislavsky does not go beyond the idea of imitating reality, enlivened by remembered personal details of the actor.  Strasberg accepts the entering of personal reality, which is, of course, possible to do on film but not during a stage performance.
10. In sum, Strasberg’s method is NOT based on stage work.  It is classroom exercises, much glamorized by the American star system, the great emphasis on individuals and their daring to be extreme.  But it was an energizer for an active theatre scene and served experienced actors, who already had their stage techniques (esp. voice and movement) internalized enough to be automatic.

Something parallel was happening throughout the humanities:  writing, painting, music, dance, and even religion -- a movement towards individual experience and away from technique or tradition; a valuing of emotion over reason but at the same time a great leap in technology and science that exploded the powers of human beings.  Stage theatre was confrontive, experimental, jesting, cruel, and spectacular.

That’s a far cry from the original roots of universities in the teaching of medical and religious dogma.  Academia was thrown for a loop until they hit upon the idea of an Master of Fine Arts, a separated stream of learning with its own credentials and ability to generate tuition. The high theatre idealism of the first half of the century -- the valuing of the whole company, the respect for traditional humanities canons and criteria -- was replaced by personal ambition.  The NU School of Speech was completely re-organized and re-named the NU School of Communication.

I often think that the most accurate description of the sequence of events we sometimes call “history” is the cautionary tale of Simple Simon who always knew what to do for the LAST thing that had happened though it always turned out to be a disaster for the PRESENT thing happening.  You remember?  He worked as a farm hand for barter. When paid off with butter, he put it under his hat to keep it safe on his head, but it was a warm day and it melted down his neck and face.  So his parents told him next time he should put his barter in a bucket of cold water, but the next time he was paid off with a puppy, which drowned in the bucket.  So the next time -- told he should have tied the puppy to a string and led it behind him -- he was paid with a sack of flour which he dragged behind him on a string until a hole wore in the sack and all the flour leaked out.  For a relatively short time -- though it included WWI, the Roaring Twenties, the Big Depression, WWII, and the Cold War -- AK’s methods of teaching acting were in sync with stage theatre.  Strasberg was (maybe without quite realizing it) dealing with actors for film.  It was a kinder revolution than the one Stanislavsky suffered in Russia.

So what is the present and the near future?  A bucket of cold water or being dragged on a string?  It looks to me like a mix.  For those who are still “middle-class”, theatre is spectacle and escape, the Broadway musical.  In some places repertory/ensemble lives on.  But I see the world turning back in a chilling reality loop to the theatre of protest-surrealism.  IPhone witnessing to the return of oppression and violence.  The minority people I know are participating in non-threatening high school dramatics and cowboy movies.  But that’s good preparation for something far more intense that they can’t see from here.  No script yet. Prepare to improvise.